What Orwell Got Right About Social Media — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00George Orwell imagined a world where the
2. 0:02government rewrote history and called it
3. 0:05truth. That was 1984.
4. 0:08But today we have built something just
5. 0:11as powerful. Not with dictators but with
6. 0:14algorithms. In 1984 the Ministry of
7. 0:17Truth didn't spread lies. It replaced
8. 0:20facts. Old newspapers were edited.
9. 0:23enemies changed overnight and people
10. 0:27believed it because all the evidence
11. 0:30said it was true. If reality could be
12. 0:32edited, so could memory and that's how
13. 0:36power held control by shaping what
14. 0:39people thought was real. That was George
15. 0:42Orwell. Today we don't need Ministry of
16. 0:46Truth. We have social media. Your feed
17. 0:49doesn't show you the truth. It shows you
18. 0:51what gets clicks.
19. 0:53What's viral? What fits your worldview?
20. 0:56And the scariest part, everyone sees
21. 0:58something different. Different
22. 1:00headlines, different facts, different
23. 1:03realities. When truth becomes
24. 1:05personalized, reality starts to
25. 1:07fracture. You believe your version. I
26. 1:11believe mine. And soon we stop trusting
27. 1:15each other entirely. Orwell warned about
28. 1:18truth being erased. But today it's
29. 1:20worse. truth gets buried under thousand
30. 1:23trending distractions. No one's in
31. 1:26charge. The algorithm does it
32. 1:27automatically. So here's the question.
33. 1:30If everyone sees a different version of
34. 1:32reality, can we still agree on what's
35. 1:35real or what's true? Or will warn us
36. 1:39about censorship. But he didn't see this
37. 1:42coming. A world where truth isn't
38. 1:44deleted, it's just drowned.