Documentary About the Real-Life Lisbeth Salander

Just about anyone who spends considerable time on the internet knows that hate speech proliferates on social media like a virus. But would you be surprised to learn that tech corporations tacitly condone such bigotry in order to profit off the engagement that far-right influencers generate? If you were previously unaware of such in-your-face malfeasance, Simon Klose’s new documentary “Hacking Hate” unpacks the ways that social media companies benefit from the amplification of white supremacy online and how they’re complicit in its real-world effects. Through slick photography that utilizes the visual language of genre films and digital life (tweets, memes, TikTok videos), Klose’s activist procedural illustrate the failures of the tech world to safeguard society through one reporter’s undercover operation into a Nazi organization. 

The reporter in question is My Vingren, an award-winning investigative journalist described by the media as “the real life ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’” seemingly because she and the fictional Lisbeth Salander are both Swedish women who know how to use a computer (to be fair, “Hacking Hate” does chronicle Vingren’s work for Expo, a magazine founded by the late “Millenium” trilogy author Stieg Larsson). Vingren initially wishes to uncover how extremist movements use social media to their advantage. After setting up a string of fake profiles that would conceivably glom onto right-wing content, it doesn’t…