COVID Film: COVID Replaced Facebook

Posted on by Thor

 

The compositing of the whole Santas scene was also simple and straightforward. I am so used to things going horribly wrong after a week of animating that I was expecting some hangup but the scene fell into place with ease.

I decided to replace Facebook with COVID for this shot in the film. I also dropped a mask on Mark Zuckerberg so he is less easy to identify. My thought is that having a corporate logo in the film could keep it from being screened.

I was pleasantly surprised with how easy the change was to create. After replacing each Facebook logo with COVID or C, I then exported the images into After Effects. The animation of the flag was going to be a challenge I thought. However when I replaced the Facebook flag with the new Covid flag, the scene was automatically updated and I didn’t need to dig into the animation again.

I think the next scene I will tackle is animating some smoke in the Pearl Harbor scene.

Misinformation Mind Parasites

Posted on by Thor

Andy Norman, reported that America is facing a pandemic of ignorance.  Insane QAnon theories have captured the minds of many and anti vaccine rhetoric is spreading like wildfire with reason and thought being abandoned for blind devotion to baseless doctrine.

In his provocative book Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think, Newman unearths this growing scourge. In this era,  misinformation is more common, and spreads even faster than the virus.

He explained, “Parasites require a host, bad ideas require a host. Parasites often compromise the health of their hosts. Bad ideas can also compromise the mental well being of their hosts. Parasites can leap from body to body. Bad ideas can leap from mind to mind.”

Facebook algorithms have nurtured this tsunami of misinformation. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social media giant has removed 18 million posts containing misinformation about COVID-19, but would not say how many times the posts had been viewed or shared.

A White House study 12 misinformation super spreaders they dubbed, the “disinformation dozen”.  Misinformation experts have condemned platforms for taking down some of the most egregious accounts, but not others. For instance, the anti-vaccine figurehead Robert F. Kennedy Jr. still has an account on Facebook, despite being banned from Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

 The Washington Post reported that a new peer-reviewed study from researchers at New York University and the Université Grenoble Alpes in France will show that misinformation got six times as much engagement on Facebook as real news. Pages that post more misinformation regularly got more likes, shares, and comments. Truth be damned, Facebook wants clicks.

Vaccine misinformation remains very high on Facebook. President Joe Biden said that the tech giants such as Facebook are “killing people” by failing to tackle the problem. Experts who study online misinformation say it has still largely failed to address the issue and that falsehoods about the vaccine are still reaching millions of people. Rather than tackle the issue, Facebook founder Zuckerberg has decided to instead start placing pro-Facebook messaging in its news feed. It is the usual adage of deny, deflect and do a distracting dance while raking in the dough. The mighty dollar trumps death.

Pre-Pademic: Turkey

Posted on by Thor

In Mustafapasa, Turkey I noticed this sign of Americanization, a Coke delivery truck and could not resist dong a sketch. It once had a mixed population, Greeks and Karamanlides (Turkish speaking Christians) and Muslim Turks. In 1924 after the Greco Turkish war, the population exchange agreement between Greece and Turkey, forced Greeks and Karamanlides to leave the town for Nea Sinasos a town in the northern part of the island of Euboea in Greece. Most of the exchange was based not on language or ethnicity, but upon religious identity. An estimated  384,000 Greeks were killed from 1914 to 1918, and 264,000 from 1920 to 1922. The total number reaching about 648,000.

Fast forward to 2020. Coke has pulled over 700 million dollars in advertising from Facebook because the social media platform does not limit hate speech. Trump wrote: “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a phrase used by a Miami police chief in the 1960s and widely interpreted as a violent threat against protesters. Facebook employees have condemned CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to leave up President Trump’s post. Twitter hid the same post for glorifying violence. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took full responsibility for the decision.

After weeks of a staunch hands-off approach, Zuckerberg on Friday June 26, 2020 reversed course as a parade of brands began severing their ties with the company. Zuckerberg said Facebook will put warning labels on posts that break its rules, even if they are newsworthy, opening the door to potentially labeling posts by Trump. Facebook rules say speech that inspires or incites violence is not allowed on its platform. The company has removed over 300 Boogaloo hate groups form the platform. It is a feeble start to address a much bigger problem.

If you ignore or deny history you are bound to repeat it.