Smile, you’re slacking off: Flemish politicians blasted on social media by tech creative

Smile, you’re slacking off!

Dries Depoorter, an artist based in Belgium, has crafted a system that analyzes live-streamed footage of Belgium's parliament members and tags those who appear distracted.

Every meeting of the Flemish government is live-streamed on YouTube. The artist uses facial recognition tools and artificial intelligence to detect government members who are using their phones, Dries Depoorter writes.

The images of the distracted politicians are posted to his dedicated X and Instagram accounts, “The Flemish Scrollers.”

Every meeting of the flemish government in Belgium is live streamed on a YouTube channel.
Software is searching for phones and tries to identify a distracted politician. This with the help of AI. The results are then posted to social with the politician tagged. By @driesdepoorter pic.twitter.com/QUQHiYx2HI

undefined The Flemish Scrollers (@FlemishScroller) July 5, 2021

The politicians are then tagged by The Flemish Scrollers and put on blast.

On X, the live-streamed video of the politician being distracted is shown along with the message: “Dear distracted…, pls stay focused!”

For example, a member of the Flemish parliament, Robrecht Bothuyne, can be seen not so sneakily using his device.

Dear distracted @RobrechtB, pls stay focused! pic.twitter.com/BP1xrLIcDU

undefined The Flemish Scrollers (@FlemishScroller) May 24, 2022

The software used to detect distracted lawmakers is written in Python and uses machine learning to identify devices (specifically phones) and facial recognition tools to detect the politician.

Dries Depoorter is an artist who deals with themes of privacy alongside artificial intelligence, surveillance, and social media, as per Depoorter’s website.

Other projects he’s worked on include “Die With Me,” a chat app that can only be used by people whose devices have less than 5% battery, and “The Message,” which shows one message that you can only replace if you have more followers than the previous user.