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From Wired

Disney’s Pivot to Streaming Won’t Change Hollywood

Disney

When you’re the highest-grossing studio in Hollywood, it’s hard to imagine you wouldn’t always want to do the thing that you’re immensely good at: making movies and showing them in theaters. And yet, it’s 2020 and nothing is predictable, and as such, this week Disney announced plans to—for lack of a better way to put it—pivot to streaming, a move that could shift the entire landscape for movie and TV distribution.

Or maybe not. You see, under Disney’s new plan, the company says it is looking to streamline its direct-to-consumer business by enlisting a new division, the Media and Entertainment Distribution group, to decide how the content made by its studios—Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel, etc.—goes out into the world. Some of those studio offerings will still go to theaters, of course, but CEO Bob Chapek told CNBC this week, “We are tilting the scale pretty dramatically [toward streaming].” It’s a bold move, and one that shows just how big an impact outfits like Netflix have made on Hollywood. But it's not a move that every other studio is likely to mimic, nor should they. Why? They’re not Disney.

Netflix's Social Distance Captures All Your Quarantine Feels

With its all-too-familiar webcam views and smartphone shots, Jenji Kohan's new show turns Covid-19 isolation into a drama everyone can relate to.

MY MEMORIES OF 2020 refuse to coagulate, but a man sobbing over a houseplant on Instagram certainly feels like it could be one that does. It’s a moment too relatable to not solidify in the mind. Netflix’s new anthology series, Social Distance, is full of Covid-era moments like this. There’s a frantic dad trying to keep his child away from a sick spouse, and a small business owner scrambling to make virtual haircuts a thing. A working mother has to watch over her child via webcam. Partners are driven into bitter, sniping quarantine madness by their constant proximity. Families unravel over Zoom while one uncle can’t even figure out how to unmute himself. They are all people questioning crucial choices they made in a world that looked so different from the one that exists today. I know these people. I’ve been some of these people. That’s no small achievement for a show that tried to digest a global trauma so quickly that it should have come right back up.

A Facebook Ban Won't Stop QAnon

facebook

Even if the social network's new policies work perfectly, Q followers can still camouflage their activity or move to other platforms.

QANON, THE CONSPIRACY theory that claims President Trump is secretly battling a Hollywood-Jewish-Democrat-deep state-globalist cabal of Satanist-murderer-pedophile-human traffickers, is huge. In both the span of its reach and the depth of its ideas, the conspiracy has grown into a juggernaut of misinformation. (“We call it a superconspiracy,” says Antonis Papasavva, a data scientist at University College London. “Name any conspiracy theory—JFK, MK Ultra, Pizzagate—it’s in there.”) This week, Facebook vowed to remove any pages, groups, or Instagram accounts that represent QAnon, which has gobbled up loads of engagement on the platform thanks to its something-for-everybody theories. Up until two months ago, Facebook didn’t really have any policies when it came to QAnon, and Tuesday’s ban marked a sharp escalation. Sharp, but also perhaps too late.

In case you are (blissfully) unaware, QAnon was born on the internet. Their prophet, Q, amassed followers by posting cryptic messages on 8kun, a message board popular with extremists, but the conspiracy theory has since seeped into every mainstream social media platform. Unlike a lot of conspiracy-minded internet subcultures, QAnon has had no trouble moving offline. At first, it was just T-shirts and mysterious billboards. Now QAnon has allegedly inspired criminal acts including murder and terrorism, been endorsed by multiple Republican congressional candidates, and had its followers praised as patriots by President Trump.