Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Facial recognition & HBO Max
The show tonight started with a direct continuation of what we saw last week: A subject of the police. Oliver spoke about reform, about protests, and the reaction to the protests. That includes the removal of statues and Gone with the Wind being taken temporarily off the air. (This, somehow, led to Oliver hilariously ripping into the HBO Max streaming service.) Sure, there’s a lot of ridiculous outrage … but were some of these people outraged at all about the actual issue here? Isn’t that what matters? Dealing with painful parts of the past may not be easy for some, but without it nothing will get better. The people who are complaining over Gone with the Wind may not have spent that much time looking at police brutality and the reason for the protests.
Main segment – This was the focus of the main segment tonight and at first, we wondered why. What was the point of this at this point? It took a few minutes for us to recognize what was going on here.
Yet, facial recognition has been a key part of what police are using right now in order to track and stop suspects. Meanwhile, it is also reportedly being used to track protesters during the Black Lives Matter movement. We think that some of the problems with this system are apparent from the get-go. While it can be used at times to catch dangerous people, at the same time there are serious privacy concerns. Enormous ones. Social media could be used against you depending on what you share there. These are the sort of things that are especially dangerous.
We don’t know if Oliver really dove too much into ground here that is totally surprising, but it’s still an important thing to be aware of. It may not be getting a lot of attention right now, but it’s worth focusing on.
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What did you think about the June 14 episode of Last Week Tonight?
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