The social balance sheet opens on the side of the highway. Police arrest a white woman whose car is emitting smoke. She is drunk and not polite; the interaction between her and the police escalates, until she takes out her phone and begins berating the officers, throwing racist insults, before they arrest her.
“Watch me own the DEI cops” is the caption that accompanies the video, posted on a fictional right-wing Facebook page called “Voice of Reason.” This catches the attention of Frances Haugen, played by Mikey Madison, a data scientist on Facebook’s “civic integrity” team, which was created, we later learn, “to create tension between growth and security” within the tech company. Haugen knows Karen going wild in the workout class video and, get this, the woman was a progressive before becoming a power Facebook user and then, apparently, a right-wing extremist.
As Haugen tells anyone who will listen, it’s no coincidence: as she tries to tell her boss, then her office colleague, then Jeff Horwitz, an investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journalshe “performed a classifier on 251 political groups” and “30% of content presents multiple risk factors,” including political polarization and misinformation. Wow, multiple risk factors? You can imagine how captivating cinema this all makes.
Gn entert
