John Yokoyama

September 12, 2022

Supernatural Hacking
Unfriended

Introduction

For this essay, I decided to write about the horror movie Unfriended. It is a movie about a
group of friends that were on a video call, when suddenly an unknown member joins the
call. Since it is Hollywood, this “unknown member” was actually supernatural and had not
only hacked into the call and was unremovable, but it had also hacked certain files from the
others computers and cell phones. It then used this stolen information to blackmail the
other members. In this essay, I will be discussing how this movie relates to Chapter 1
sections 1.1, 1.2, and 1.4. Those are the Video, Streaming, Social Networking sections.
1.1 Video
This movie relates to the video section of our first chapter because the supernatural hacker
uses a video that was posted on youtube as a way of antagonizing the other members of
the call. This video was an embarrassing one of an inebriated girl that defecated in her
white jeans at a college party. After the video went viral, she ended her own life and is now
the ghost that is hacking the video call. The reason she hacked this specific call is because it
was her old friend group and one of the members is the one who posted the video on
YouTube.

Video Sharing

As mentioned in the above paragraph, the embarrassing video that led to the ghost ending
their own life was posted on YouTube. In this section of our textbook, we learned that a
video created by a single person may be viewed by millions of people. We also were told
that shared videos can have real-world impact. Both of these facts were displayed through
this movie. First, one of the friends posted an embarrassing clip on YouTube. Then, the girl
ended her own life.

This strongly touches on the ethical issues of video sharing because, oftentimes, people will
post videos of complete strangers without their consent. It is illegal to record others for
commercial purposes, however, if you are not profiting off of the video, it is completely
legal. We see this all the time when there are public freakouts and the angry antagonist will
be screaming at the cameraman that they can’t be recorded. These “Karens” have also
attempted to take the cameraman to court over the video of them going viral. However, the
most justice that they have found has been the removal of the video.

Going further, even the removal of the original video is inefficient because of the amount of
reposting that there is online. When one person posts a video, smaller accounts that want
to gain views and followers will save that video to their device and then repost it under a
different account. This ensures that viral videos are never completely erased. Also, the
wayback machine allows people to view the internet before videos are removed. Essentially
rendering the removal of a video useless.

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1.2 Streaming
This movie relates to the Streaming section of our first chapter immediately in the first
scene. The movie opens with a view of someone's desktop visiting a website called
LiveLeak. On this website, they are streaming a video of a girl on a school's baseball field
with a gun pointed at her face. People scream at her to drop the gun, however, it fails and
she ends up shooting herself.

Video Streaming

In this section of our textbook, we learned mainly about Netflix. This is a streaming
website/application that is widely used and currently accounts for about ⅓ of all internet
traffic. While this is the largest video streaming website, there exists many more. Such as
Hulu, Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Roku, and Amazon Fire. These are all huge names, but
there are countless other streaming services that are less known. For example,
123movies.com, f2movies.to, zoro.to, etc. These streaming services are unethical streaming
sites because they are not paying the content creators in order to stream it on their
website. The larger names have to, or they’d face legal action. However, since these other
sites are much smaller (and typically hosted outside of the US), they aren’t met with the
same legal problems.

In Unfriended, the streaming site they were using was more related to the second half of
sites that I named. This site was definitely an unethical one because it posted a video of a
person's suicide. This is definitely illegal and would not be allowed on the larger streaming
websites.

Streaming definitely has positives. For example, many people are unable to attend movie
theaters because they simply don’t have any near them. Also, it allows users to watch a
multitude of movies whenever they want without needing a large physical collection. These
are all incredible things, however it also allows videos that might be better off deleted to
persist. Smaller streaming services are often hosted through many different servers - which
are spread out across the globe. It is similar to larger services, but for a very different
purpose. Netflix uses it to increase streaming speeds, 123movies uses it to prevent a total
shutdown of its website.

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1.4 Social Networking
This movie relates to the Social Networking section of our textbook because the
supernatural hacker, in addition to hacking a skype call, was messaging the other members
on Facebook. She is asking them questions like: “Hey Blair, who posted the video?”

Facebook

In this section of our textbook, we learned a lot about Facebook - which is perfect because
Facebook is the social media application that is used in this movie. There is an immediate
ethical issue involved in this because the continuous messaging from fake Facebook
accounts can be considered harassment. There are also legal issues involved in this since
the ghost had hacked her Facebook so that she couldn’t unfriend the account that was
messaging her. Later in the movie, one member of the call stumbles upon a Facebook
community page that was dedicated to the ghost. This is a good lead in to the social issues
that Facebook has because any user can create a community page dedicated to anything.
This is a social issue because, in addition to creating positive environments, it can create a
place for cyberbullying to take place.

Later in the movie, Facebook is brought back into the plot because the ghost had hacked
two of the members Facebook accounts and were posting embarrassing photos that
couldn’t be deleted. This is oddly similar to the problem of the YouTube video that was
posted earlier in the film as well. This brings another legal question into play. Is it illegal to
post a picture of another person without their permission? The answer is yes if it is a
picture from your own home and can even be used in a defamation case in court. However,
if you did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy (you are in public, on campus at a
university, etc) then that photo is free to be used. This can be harmful because many
photos can be taken out of context and used as a joke. And there is nothing the person can
do about it.

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Conclusion
Cyberbullying is the underlying theme of this movie and used the supernatural horror
genre as a way of talking about it. Through video websites (YouTube), streaming websites
(LiveLeak), and Social Networking sites (Facebook), the cyberbullying that Laura Barnes
faced was enough to lead her to suicide. Cyberbullying is an extreme social, legal, and
ethical issue and has been seen time and time again. While it is impossible to prevent
without government control over the media, we need to find a way to control this.

Cyberbullying will probably be a recurring theme in these essays because of how closely
everything can relate to it. This movie truly encapsulated the ethical issue of posting
embarrassing videos of someone on a Video website/application, the legal issues of
streaming a video of someone ending their own life, and the social issue of posting photos
of others on Facebook without permission. I chose to omit the ethical issue of hacking as a
key point throughout this essay because it fits in each category, but I find it important to
mention here. Cybersecurity is the most dangerous problem that we currently face in this
world and it is not just limited to social, ethical, and legal issues. It can be used to topple
governments and kill millions. In a later essay, I’m sure that we will be able to go more in
depth with the subject and find content that is based on it.

I acknowledge that there are no easy answers when it comes to solving these problems
(since the internet is nearly impossible to regulate efficiently), however, we shouldn’t just
allow them to persist. One way I can think of combating these issues is an AI that is
specifically designed to flag potentially harmful posts on Social Networking websites for a
human to judge. We could also have that type of software implemented in video websites,
like YouTube. The hardest issue to combat would be the smaller streaming services that are
often hosted on a multitude of servers across the globe. But, I’m confident that we can find
a solution!

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Sources
Gabriadze, L & Susco, S (Directors). (2014). Unfriended [Film]. Bazelevs Company

Lysecky, S, Vahid, F, & Wheatland, N. (2019). CS 440: Social, Legal, and Ethical Issues in
Computing. zyBooks, a Wiley Brand.