Why There’s No News Today About Italy
Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of attending a panel discussion on The Great Hack at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The director of the documentary, Karim Amer, and the writer/producer, Pedro Kos, were joined by journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who broke the Cambridge Analytica story for The Guardian, and Marietje Schaake, International Policy Director at the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford. The panel was moderated by John Markoff of the New York Times. It was a wonderful discussion and I am grateful to the participants and to the Computer History Museum for hosting this event. At the same time, I’m troubled that they left me with the lesson that fixing social media was the essential challenge to democracy in our times. It would be convenient if it were that simple, but what if it’s not? What if the drama around the menace of social media is just a distraction?
Like the documentary, the discussion last night was largely focused on the Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It explored the questionable roles of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook in delivering deceptive advertising and content to a naive and credulous public. Excerpts from the film were interleaved with back-stories from Amer, Kos and Cadwalladr and policy insight from Schaake. The discussion gave even more depth to characters from the film. It seemed perfectly in…
