‘I had to watch it with my therapist’: when real-life horrors get turned into TV

Posted on November 5, 2021 by Admin

From The Shrink Next Door to Dr Death, true-crime podcasts are being snapped up for TV. But how does it really feel when your worst nightmare becomes a bingewatch?

The dark new drama The Shrink Next Door tells an almost unbelievable story. Almost, of course, because it actually happened. In 1980s New York, wealthy businessman Martin “Marty” Markowitz fell under the spell of his psychiatrist Isaac “Ike” Herschkopf, who manipulated Marty into giving him his house, handing over his business and cutting off his family for almost 30 years. In an adaptation penned by one of Succession’s writers, Georgia Pritchett, Will Ferrell plays the patient whom many assumed was the handyman in his own home, while Paul Rudd is the smarmy shrink turned cuckoo in the nest.

If the story sounds familiar, that’s because the show is based on the hit podcast of the same name. The Shrink Next Door is the latest in the podcast to TV trend, which includes Julia Roberts’s Homecoming, Dirty John, with Connie Britton as the gaslit victim of “Dirty” John Meehan (Eric Bana), and Dr Death – based on the terrifying tale of sociopathic surgeon Christopher Duntsch – starring Joshua Jackson, Christian Slater and Alec Baldwin.

Why people believe Covid conspiracy theories: could folklore hold the answer?

Posted on October 26, 2021 by Admin

Researchers use AI – and witchcraft folklore – to map the coronavirus conspiracy theories that have sprung up

Researchers have mapped the web of connections underpinning coronavirus conspiracy theories, opening a new way of understanding and challenging them.

Using Danish witchcraft folklore as a model, the researchers from UCLA and Berkeley analysed thousands of social media posts with an artificial intelligence tool and extracted the key people, things and relationships.

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen calls for urgent external regulation

Posted on October 25, 2021 by Admin

Ex-employee tells UK MPs Mark Zuckerberg ‘has unilateral control over 3bn people’ due to his position

Mark Zuckerberg “has unilateral control over 3 billion people” due to his unassailable position at the top of Facebook, the whistleblower Frances Haugen told MPs as she called for urgent external regulation to rein in the tech company’s management and reduce the harm being done to society.

Haugen, a former Facebook employee who released tens of thousands of damaging documents about its inner workings, travelled to London from the US for a parliamentary hearing and gave qualified backing to UK government proposals to regulate social media platforms and make them take some responsibility for content on their sites.

‘Insufficient and very defensive’: how Nick Clegg became the fall guy for Facebook’s failures

Posted on October 14, 2021 by Admin

After election humiliation and Brexit, the former UK deputy prime minister swapped Westminster for a £2.7m job in Silicon Valley. The catch? Serving as the public face of the crisis-hit company

On Sunday, Nick Clegg did a succession of interviews with some of the US’s biggest TV news shows. In his role as Facebook’s vice-president for global affairs and communications, he was defending his company after weeks of headlines about its latest crisis – this time involving Frances Haugen, a Facebook staffer turned whistleblower who had testified days earlier before a committee of the US Senate. The story centred on a stash of company documents that Haugen had given to the Wall Street Journal. The central allegation, which Facebook vehemently denies, was that the company had ignored its own research into the harms caused by some of its products in favour of the pursuit of “astronomical profits”.

Anyone au fait with the five grim years Clegg spent as the UK’s deputy prime minister would have had the familiar impression of someone emphasising his good intentions in almost impossible circumstances. His facial expression regularly expressed a sort of righteous exasperation; his words seemed to imply that if only his critics could grasp the facts, everything would quickly die down. Like any well-briefed politician, he emphasised a handful of statistics: the 40,000 content moderators Facebook employs, the $13bn (£9.5bn) it says it has spent cracking down on misinformation and hate speech; the company’s claim that the latter accounts for only five of every 10,000 Facebook posts.

Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka: is it so wrong to find him scrumdiddlyumptious?

Posted on October 11, 2021 by Admin

The actor’s in-costume Instagram post has caused social media users to accuse the film-makers of “making Willy Wonka sexy” – but Wonka-lust is hardly new

In a sentence I never thought I’d ever write, Timothée Chalamet has revealed his Wonka on Instagram. Chalamet is, of course, currently filming the Willy Wonka movie prequel, and his post last night gave the world its first look at this new iteration.

Judging by the internet, there are essentially two ways to react to it. The first is to be disgusted that Hollywood has bastardised one of the all-time great children’s characters by inventing a brand new backstory, with no input from its creator, for cash. The second is just to get really, really horny.

Journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov win Nobel peace prize

Posted on October 8, 2021 by Admin

Filipina and Russian given 2021 award as organisers warn of threat to independent media worldwide

Nobel peace prize 2021 – live reaction

Campaigning journalists from the Philippines and Russia have won the 2021 Nobel peace prize as the Norwegian committee recognised the vital importance of an independent media to democracy and warned it was increasingly under assault.

Maria Ressa, the chief executive and cofounder of Rappler, and Dmitry Muratov, the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, were named as this year’s laureates by Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel committee.

Twitter trials warnings about ‘intense’ conversations

Posted on October 7, 2021 by Admin

Users urged to ‘look out for each other’ and ‘remember the human’ as platform tries to limit abuse

Twitter users poised to dive into a heated online debate will be warned they are about to enter an “intense” conversation, under a safety trial.

The social media platform is testing a feature that drops a notice under a potentially contentious exchange, stating: “Heads up. Conversations like this can be intense.” Another prompt, which appears to be aimed at people making a reply, goes to greater lengths to calm down users and urges the tweeter to “look out for each other”, “remember the human” and note that “diverse perspectives have value”.

‘I don’t judge his decision to die’: the hit podcast about love, loss – and Britney Spears

Posted on October 6, 2021 by Admin

When Chris Stedman’s friend Alex took his own life, he left him a final puzzle to solve. Unread charts Stedman’s journey down a rabbit hole of grief and realisation

“When someone dies, there are always questions that will be left unanswered. But what happens when you lose someone and they leave you a trail to follow after they are gone?”

Chris Stedman is explaining the central conceit of his podcast Unread. The four-part series sees the writer and podcaster memorialise his friend Alex, who took his own life in late 2019, via narration, voice notes and testimonies from mutual friends. It also follows Stedman’s quest to better understand his friend’s life, digging into parts of his history that he didn’t know existed. Bringing together an affecting story and a compelling mystery, Unread garnered critical acclaim from the likes of Vulture, and has been among the podcast highlights of the year since its release in July.

From bawdy fun to fantasising with Demi Moore: the best erotic podcasts

Posted on October 5, 2021 by Admin

If it’s audio kink you’re after, there’s a podcast for that. Rhik Samadder picks out the best out of the horny bunch

The biggest noise on the audio porn scene is Dipsea, whose range of consensual, sex-positive stories are written by women, for women. The stories, all between 10 and 20 minutes long, are streamlined, yet grounded in character and situation. By the time things descend into panting, the idea is that attuned listeners will be, too. The app has more than 400 stories behind a paywall: straight and queer and diverse in content, with a few enticing freebies concerning military-style yoga instructors and massages between friends. Anyone whose primary erogenous zone is inside their head will find succour here.

Media startup Ozy shuts down after New York Times report raises concerns

Posted on October 1, 2021 by Admin

Ozy faced questions about its viewership figures and claims that its co-founder impersonated a YouTube executive on a call with Goldman Sachs

Ozy, a digital media startup, is shutting down less than a week after a New York Times column raised questions about the organization’s claims of millions of viewers and readers, while also pointing out a potential case of securities fraud.

The story triggered canceled shows, an internal investigation, investor concern and high-level departures at the company.

Nike and Amazon among brands advertising on Covid conspiracy sites

Posted on September 18, 2021 by Admin

Household names may have unwittingly helped spread fake news, investigation reveals

Dozens of the world’s biggest brands, including Nike, Amazon, Ted Baker and Asos, have been advertising on websites that spread Covid-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories, it has emerged. The companies, as well as an NHS service, are among a string of household names whose ads appear to have helped fund websites that host false and outlandish claims, for example that powerful people secretly engineered the pandemic, or that vaccines have caused thousands of deaths.

Analysis of nearly 60 sites, performed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and shared with the Observer, found that ads were placed through the “opaque” digital advertising market, which is forecast to be worth more than $455bn (£387bn) this year.

Social media giants increase global child safety after UK regulations introduced

Posted on September 5, 2021 by Admin

TikTok, Twitter and Facebook among companies bringing in new measures worldwide that protect children

TikTok has turned off notifications for children past bedtime, Instagram has disabled targeted adverts for under-18s entirely and YouTube has turned off autoplay for teen users: moves seemingly triggered by Britain introducing a new set of regulations aimed at protecting children online.

On Thursday the UK introduced a new set of regulations aimed at protecting children and at a stroke became a global leader in the field, with the prospect of multimillion-dollar fines for companies that breach its new “age appropriate design code” leading to a cascade of last-minute changes across some of Silicon Valley’s largest players.

The D’Amelio Show: what do you do with TikTok fame?

Posted on September 3, 2021 by Admin

The new reality show on Charli and Dixie D’Amelio attempts to transfer one kind of gargantuan fame into another with mixed results

“I get asked why I’m famous a lot,” says Charli D’Amelio, the most followed person on TikTok, early in the third episode of her family’s new Hulu reality show. Just two years ago, she was a high school sophomore in suburban Connecticut posting snippets of dances and jokes with friends to the app. Now 17, she has 123.6 million followers on the app; she and her sister Dixie, 20, are two of the most recognizable faces among Gen Z, superstars on the most culturally influential social media platform in the country right now.

Yet “I don’t consider myself famous,” she says. “I’m just a person that a lot of people follow for some reason. I think it was right place, right time. I think it was a vibe, maybe, that I give off.”

Roundup Newswires

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Category Archives: Digital media

‘I had to watch it with my therapist’: when real-life horrors get turned into TV

Journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov win Nobel peace prize

‘I don’t judge his decision to die’: the hit podcast about love, loss – and Britney Spears

From bawdy fun to fantasising with Demi Moore: the best erotic podcasts

Media startup Ozy shuts down after New York Times report raises concerns