Hacker Cinema
The Creepy Line
2018 · Film · documentary · 80 min
Directed by M.A. Taylor
An eye-opening documentary, The Creepy Line reveals the stunning degree to which society is manipulated by Google and Facebook and blows the lid off the remarkably subtle - hence powerful - manner in which they do it.
1 positive4 negativefrom 5 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
9 comments on Hacker News
A good documentary that outlines how social media becomes more of a publisher is The Creepy Line. https://www.thecreepyline.com/ The movement to rein in the abuse of Section 230 has been going on for a while, but is finally starting to pick up steam. Odds are, given that this is an election year, they had this ready to go in the background if Twitter tried pulling something like they did yesterday, which is why it only took a day be signed.
Not necessarily, though that's a risk.
As Eric Schmidt famously said, Google's "policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."
http://allthingsd.com/20110120/talking-schmidt-googles-ceo-in-his-own-words/
A quote memorialised in a documentary whose title is take from it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creepy_Line
The problem is that such lines are not static, may move, and particularly in dynamic areas of evolving awareness and policy, do. Much as one can be caught by quickly approaching tides or sneaker waves at a coast, Google and much of the FAANG monopolists (as well as other tech and surveillance capitalists) are finding themselves in unexpectedly deep waters.
Which itself is a real and quantifiable business risk.
The Creepy Line is written and directed by the filmmakers behind conservative documentary Clinton Cash. It takes its title from Google executive Eric Schmidt, who said in 2010 that Google’s job was to “get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” Schmidt has gotten no end of flack for that quote, and it’s easy to point out that Google is, in fact, often very creepy. But The Creepy Line makes a more specific, partisan argument. It claims that Google (and Facebook, which the film refers to almost interchangeably) deliberately manipulates its service to suppress conservative users and ideas, and — more ambitiously — that Google tweaked its search algorithm to swing the 2016 election in Hillary Clinton’s favor.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17878332/creepy-line-anti-google-facebook-conservative-censorship-documentary-review-right-wing
I think the right wing conspiracy groups who made this video couldn't care less if FB and Google respect DNT.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17878332/creepy-line-anti-google-facebook-conservative-censorship-documentary-review-right-wing
Source?
Based on this link [1] posted elsewhere in this thread, if it is true that Amazon funded this, that has the potential to backfire spectacularly.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17878332/creepy-line-anti-google-facebook-conservative-censorship-documentary-review-right-wing
The verge article is detailed and pretty convincing that I don't need to bother with this video. This isn't impeaching the source because of their political opinions, it's impeaching the content because of its political opinions.
> Taylor and the film’s writer Peter Schweizer say that they’re aware of issues affecting non-conservatives and simply wanted to focus on a single thread of the conversation. But that focus completely changes the argument. If conservatives are disproportionately suffering on Google and Facebook, an incident like Peterson getting locked out of Gmail looks like political warfare. If people across the social and political spectra are getting accounts suspended, YouTube videos demonetized, or stories de-ranked, it looks like bad service from a platform with a legitimately disconcerting amount of power.
> This distinction is probably obvious to many people. But The Creepy Line suggests that any seeming technical glitch or bad decision is a coordinated step in the master plan of Silicon Valley’s digital “kingmakers,” even when that’s far from the most obvious conclusion. It does things like insinuate that Google’s lack of a customer support hotline is inexplicable and suspicious, or claim that “very few people in the world have ever seen” an error page for google.com, so spotting one indicates that Google has cut off search access to punish a user for criticizing it. It glosses over the fact that these kingmakers didn’t even get their favored candidate into the White House, although Taylor argues that Google only put “roughly 10 percent effort” into its manipulation efforts because it was confident Clinton was already winning. “That won’t happen again,” he says.
edit: If this actually is funded by Amazon as someone speculated elsewhere in this thread, it's probably going to backfire spectacularly if this catches on.
Did anyone who upvoted this actually watch the documentary or the trailer, or do HNers just automatically upvote anything that's anti-Facebook and Google these days?
The documentary is mostly right-wing conspiracy theories about how liberal tech companies are trying to undermine democracy and favor Hillary Clinton. Watch the trailer if you don't believe me. Or read this: https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17878332/creepy-line-anti-google-facebook-conservative-censorship-documentary-review-right-wing
There is a new documentary called "The Creepy Line", it's on both Amazon Prime and Apple I-Tunes that also talks about this. Well worth watching. This is a big issue today, and makes it far too easy for big tech to have enormous power, and as we've seen with Google etc. it is not being used for good the way the marketeers are trying to portray they are.
This 100000% over. Otherwise they are becoming the new kingmakers, manipulating people often without them even knowing. Incidentally there is a good documentary that is now on Amazon Prime called "The Creepy Line" that is worth watching.