Social media is not only scarring self esteem, making people question their self worth, causing

dissatisfaction in life, increasing depression and suicides at an alarming rate but now has
transcend past to more dangerous territory. It is now altering behaviour and changing the
perception of how people perceive this world rigidly than ever at the expense of attention that
is being sold.

Democracy is being toppling around the world, political divide is higher and more extreme
than ever, false news is spreading faster than the speed of light, citizens are on the verge of
civil war.

This is bad and I can see it, I just didn't knew social media is responsible for it.

What do you call a "documentary" that takes a firm stance on one side of an issue,
does not bother to interview a single person with a contrary opinion and then ends by asking
you to do something?

I have no love for social media companies. I don't even have a Twitter account. And there are
legitimate social issues that need to be discussed, such as increased suicide rates amongst
teenagers etc.

But while this movie is claiming that social media companies are manipulating you into
behaving differently than you otherwise would, the film itself sets out to scare the living
daylights out of you immediately before ending with a request that you do something you
otherwise would not have done. Rather hypocritical if you ask me.

Don't trust film makers or Netflix any more than you trust Facebook or Instagram.

Full disclosure: I work in tech (but not for any social media company), I hear these same claims
on a daily basis and what the film does not tell you is that there are a lot of activist groups with
different agendas trying to lobby the government into passing various laws at the moment.
Not all of these groups are on the same page, or want the same things and they are not
necessarily looking for the same results that you are. None the less, various individuals from
these groups were featured in the documentary and edited such that it looks like they have a
common goal and a common interest when they don't. For example: maybe you are concerned
with the mental health of children as related to social media consumption, and an activist
group - knowing that's something people care about - will give lip service to that issue while
what they're really wanting to do is pass censorship laws because they want the power to
control what can and can't be posted on social media.

Just beware that this "documentary" was manipulative in itself, very one sided and does not
accurately represent the disparate, nuanced and occasionally contradictory views of the
various people represented.

This film explores the cultural changes in society created by social media, as told by
experts in the field and often the actual creators of the platforms themselves.

Both eye opening and unsettling, the film details the growing monetization of the human
attention span. Remarkably unfiltered, the film is an absolute must watch for anyone who
finds themselves at a loss with the direction the world is going.

There are some dramatizations in the film which should have been left on the cutting room
floor, as they detract from the essence of the interviews. But other than that, a great film.

That social media can be addictive and creepy isn’t a revelation to anyone who uses
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like. But in Jeff Orlowski’s documentary “The
Social Dilemma,” conscientious defectors from these companies explain that the
perniciousness of social networking platforms is a feature, not a bug.

They claim that the manipulation of human behavior for profit is coded into these
companies with Machiavellian precision: Infinite scrolling and push notifications keep
users constantly engaged; personalized recommendations use data not just to predict but
also to influence our actions, turning users into easy prey for advertisers and
propagandists.

In briskly edited interviews, Orlowski speaks with men and (a few) women who helped
build social media and now fear the effects of their creations on users’ mental health
and the foundations of democracy. They deliver their cautionary testimonies with the
force of a start-up pitch, employing crisp aphorisms and pithy analogies.

“Never before in history have 50 designers made decisions that would have an impact
on two billion people,” says Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google. Anna
Lembke, an addiction expert at Stanford University, explains that these companies
exploit the brain’s evolutionary need for interpersonal connection. And Roger
McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, delivers a chilling allegation: Russia didn’t
hack Facebook; it simply used the platform.

Much of this is familiar, but “The Social Dilemma” goes the extra explainer-mile by
interspersing the interviews with P.S.A.-style fictional scenes of a suburban family
suffering the consequences of social-media addiction. There are silent dinners, a
pubescent daughter (Sophia Hammons) with self-image issues and a teenage son
(Skyler Gisondo) who’s radicalized by YouTube recommendations promoting a vague
ideology.

This fictionalized narrative exemplifies the limitations of the documentary’s sometimes

hyperbolic emphasis on the medium at the expense of the message. For instance, the
movie’s interlocutors pin an increase in mental illness on social media usage yet don’t
acknowledge factors like a rise in economic insecurity. Polarization, riots and protests
are presented as particular symptoms of the social-media era without historical context.

Despite their vehement criticisms, the interviewees in “The Social Dilemma” are not all
doomsayers; many suggest that with the right changes, we can salvage the good of
social media without the bad. But the grab bag of personal and political solutions they
present in the film confuses two distinct targets of critique: the technology that causes
destructive behaviors and the culture of unchecked capitalism that produces it.
Nevertheless, “The Social Dilemma” is remarkably effective in sounding the alarm
about the incursion of data mining and manipulative technology into our social lives and
beyond. Orlowski’s film is itself not spared by the phenomenon it scrutinizes. The
movie is streaming on Netflix, where it’ll become another node in the service’s data-
based algorithm.

Jeff Orlowski’s “The Social Dilemma” may be the most important documentary you see
this year. An indictment of the tech industry, the film succinctly lays out the damage
being done by companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter through their social
media platforms and search engines, the how and why of what they are doing and most
vitally, what needs to be done to stop it. It debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in
January and has been updated since with references to the coronavirus.

Like climate-crisis documentaries a generation ago, “Social Dilemma” is a dire warning

and Orlowski marshals the voices of former key employees of the tech giants, plus
industry critics and academics to sound the alarm. An unabashed advocacy doc, “The
Social Dilemma” attempts to identify the root of the problems, but like some Facebook
relationship statuses, it’s complicated.

Even if you have little interest in social media or rarely Google anything, this is a
worthwhile peek behind the curtain and helps explain so much of the craziness we see
right now in the real world. It’s not paranoia. It’s not disgruntled former employees with
axes to grind — in fact, many of those interviewed walked away very wealthy and
continue in tech, bullish on its benefits, only with more altruistic ambitions.

The movie opens with a quote from Sophocles: “Nothing vast enters the life of mortals
without a curse.” And the veterans of Silicon Valley weigh in with tales of good
intentions from the early days of social media (prior to its own vastness) even as they
paint a bleak picture of the current situation. As former Google and Facebook engineer
Justin Rosenstein points out, the latter’s “like” button was designed to be a tool for
spreading “positivity and love,” not the behavioral tracking device it has become.

Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google and co-founder of the Center for
Humane Technology, is the movie’s driving force as he attempts to appeal to tech
companies’ better angels. It is Harris who notes that the “dilemma” is that social media
and related apps simultaneously offer utopia and dystopia. They bring out the best and
the worst in society. They make so many things so easy, but at what cost?

Mental health is a huge concern with ample data pointing to increased anxiety,
depression and suicides coinciding with the rise of social media and mobile phone use,
especially among teenagers and middle-schoolers. The film also cites the rising spread
of disinformation, the radicalization of extremists in the Middle East and white
supremacists in the U.S., political polarization and the use by authoritarian regimes in
countries such as Myanmar and the Philippines, as examples where these platforms
have failed.

Orlowski (“Chasing Coral”) and his team, which includes producer Larissa Rhodes,
writer/editor Davis Coombe, writer Vickie Curtis and composer Mark Crawford, use
animation, graphics and dramatization to augment the interviews. The vignettes,
featuring a family of five negotiating the turbulent digital world, seem superfluous but
are elevated by a good cast including Vincent Kartheiser, Kara Hayward and Skyler
Gisondo, and may connect with audiences on a more emotional level.

The truly disturbing part of the movie is learning the degrees to which Facebook and
friends go to monetize their users. “If the product is free, you’re the product,” Harris
reminds us. And while most people are aware that they’re being mined for data while on
these sites, few realize how deep the probe goes. If you think the trade-off is merely
getting targeted ads for your favorite sneakers, you are in for a big shock.

The manipulation of your behavior through predictive A.I., “attention extraction”

(keeping you clicking for as long as possible) and the harvesting of your data and
selling it to the highest bidder (oh, you like conspiracy theories, do you?) are all ways
that you become the merchandise and advertisers become the customer. (And it’s not
just commercial interests. Foreign entities are wreaking havoc, destabilizing societies all
over the world.) These platforms are designed to create dependency and addiction in the
service of this “surveillance capitalism.”

Professor and author Shoshana Zuboff refers to these data markets as “human futures”
— like pork bellies — and believes they should be outlawed. And ultimately the
documentary lands on the business model as the villain of the story. Most of the
interviewees are reluctant to label Mark Zuckerberg, or any individual, as a bad guy,
preferring to present the companies as victims of their own success, trapped in a vicious
cycle of needing to make more money to keep the machine alive

According to Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, VR pioneer and author, the stakes for
reform could not be higher. “If we go down the status quo, for let’s say another 20
years,” he states, “we probably destroy our civilization through willful ignorance … fail
to meet the challenge of climate change … degrade the world’s democracies so they fall
into some type of autocratic dysfunction … ruin the global economy. We probably
don’t survive. I really view it as existential.”

In 2019, Harris testified before the U.S. Senate that it is up to companies to take
responsibility. Given their track records, however, according to the film, self-regulation
isn’t a credible option. Some of the subjects suggest stricter regulatory measures to
protect consumers. Others propose that only financial incentives, such as taxing
companies’ data collection processing, will stem the tide. Whatever happens, Harris
says, it will require the collective will to embolden necessary change.

Full disclosure: “The Social Dilemma” is full of things I’ve been muttering about to
myself the last five years, but said by smarter, better informed people. Watch for
yourself (and if you don’t subscribe to Netflix, take advantage of a free trial but try not
to succumb to their algorithms). It’s all pretty terrifying.