Language: English
Where do you get your information about the world? How do you know that it is unbiased? What if it is created specifically for you? This talk explores how social media platforms turn user data into personalized streams of persuasive content that blur the line between information and manipulation. In a post-truth world where belief, opinion, and emotion outweigh evidence, targeted messaging doesn’t just spread—it adapts, embedding itself in how we think and feel and influencing how we behave. Moving between theory and real-world cases, this presentation reveals how social media sites shape political and social realities—and asks what happens as AI makes these conditions faster to create and harder to notice.
Main Concept: Social media user data is used to create personalized "bullshit" that spreads rapidly within our current social and political world.
- Introduction (2 mins)
- The current political world: from "post-modern" to post-truth (3 mins)
- Data, information, and knowledge: the knowledge process (3 mins)
- What is "bullshit": the knowledge process in the post-truth world (3 mins)
- Personalized "bullshit": social media user data in the production of "bullshit" (8 mins)
- How "bullshit" spreads: social media algorithms in the post-truth world (5 mins)
- Why does this even matter?: Cambridge Analytica, political interference, and contemporary fascism (9 mins)
- From the contemporary world to a dystopia: How AI makes everything worse (5 mins)
- Conclusion (2 mins)
- Q and A (10 mins)
Bee Mallory is a graduate of the University of King's College. She is passionate about privacy and security. Bee has spoken about living in a privacy-conscious household at BSides Toronto, the Association for Computer Science Educators, and virtually for Hackfest in 2020, as well as facilitating numerous workshops on Sexual Violence Prevention and Bystander Intervention at their alma mater.