Netflix's 'The Social Dilemma' drops the truth-bomb about the big bad world of social media

Netflix's 'The Social Dilemma', directed by Jeff Orlowski, that was released on the streaming platform on September 9, 2020, is making headlines for all the right reasons. 

A documentary about how adversely social media is affecting our lives and revealing details about how we are being manipulated by 'algorithms', the little more than 1 hour 30 minute Netflix original is not just a riveting watch but also enlightening.  

In what comes across as an urgent warning for our generation, the documentary captures interviews with some well known Silicon Valley non-conformists and fictional dramatizations of the consquences when the characters Johnny and Janey scroll through their social media feeds all day. 

'The Social Dilemma' throws light on the dark side of using social media and how it is affecting and influencing our lives, thinking, behaviour and even our actions. 

"It's kind of like a prison experiment, where we are just roping people into the matrix, and we're harvesting all this money and data from their activity to profit from. And we're not even aware it's happening," says Tristan Harris - Google, Former Design Ethicist; Centre for Humane Technology, Co-Founder in the documentary.

In the documentary, Jaron Lanier - Author, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now talks about how the tech companies have put manipulation at the centre of the entire communication. He says, "We have created a world where the online connection has become primary, especially for young generations. And yet, in that world, any time two people connect, the only way it is financed is through a sneaky third person who is paying to manipulate those two people. So, we have created an entire global generation of people who are raised with a context where the very meaning of communication, culture is manipulation."

A scene where Tristan Harris performs a coin trick 'now you see it, now you don't' close to about 20 minutes into the documentary, is quite a metaphor that the makers have used to explain how the tech giants create illusions and manipulate us into doing exactly what they want us to do. The scene is a defining moment in the documentary. 

Explaining how we have moved away from a tools-based technology to one which is all about manipulation, Harris says, "We have moved away from having a tools-based technology environment to addiction and manipulation-based technology environment."

The documentary also rightly highlights how vulnerable the generation is and how social media has tapped into the lives of the people and made them addicted to a world that does not exist in real life.

Shedding light on how social media has made people more insecure, depressed and lonely, how children are relying more and more on these mediums for social validation and take extreme measures like suicide when they can't live up to the unrealistic beauty standards of the virtual world, Harris says, "These products were not designed by child psychologists who are trying to protect and nurture children. They were just designed to make these algorithms that were good at recommending the next video to you or good at getting you to take a photo with a filter on it."

The Social Dilemma apprises audiences of how tech giants invented certain features like photo-tagging, scrolling, comment etc to increase viewers screen time so that the advertisers could make more money, which of course is the ultimate goal.

It also talks about how these mediums are used for encouraging polarization, radicalism, hate speeches and misused to float conspiracy theories. It also explains how these unregulated messages affect the masses and elicit certain actions. 

Talking about how polarisation is extremely useful in keeping viewers glued onto the screens and how it is used as a tool during elections, Guillaume Chaslot - YouTube, Former Engineer; IntuitiveAI, CEO; AlgoTransparency, Founder said, "It worries me that an algorithm that I worked on is increasing polarisation in society. But from watch time, this polarisation is extremely useful in keeping people online."

Adding to that, Renee Diresta - Stanford Internet Observatory, Research Manager;  Data for Democracy, Former Head of Policy stated, "It's not that highly motivated propagandists haven't existed before. It's that the platforms make it possible to spread manipulative narratives with phenomenal ease and without very much money."

Who do you think is being sold here?

Explaining that while people think that everything on the internet is free, which is, of course, untrue, Justin Rosenstein - Facebook, Former Engineer; Google, Former Engineer; Asana, Co-Founder says that the advertisers are the ones paying for everything that we consume so that they can get our 'attention'.

He says, "There are all these services on the Internet that we think is free, but they are not free, They are paid for by the advertisers. Why do advertisers pay those companies? They pay in exchange for showing their ads to us. We are the product. Our attention is the product being sold to advertisers." Jaron Lanier - Author, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now adds, "It's the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception that is the product. That is the only thing it is for them to make money from. Changing what you do, how you think, who you are." 

Elaborating the same Sandy Parakilas - Facebook, Former Operations Manager; Uber, Former Product Manager says, "Companies like Google and Facebook would roll out a lot of little, tiny experiments that they were constantly doing on users. And over time, by running these constant experiments you get to design the most optimal way to get users to do what you want them to do. It's manipulation."

The documentary also talks in-depth about how in this age of information technology we don't know what the 'truth' is. It talks about 'fake news' and it's consequences and how we are moving from an age of information towards the age of disinformation. 

And while we all somewhere deep inside know that excessive social media consumption isn't good for us and that some tech giant company is manipulating our feeds to make us watch exactly what we want to, we are still going to go back to our smartphones and tablets despite and inspite of knowing this reality. 

Therefore, the documentary, without being preachy and going all out to say that we must all delete all our social media accounts because there is no easy way out of this, it incites a call to action where these former innovators repeatedly urge users to ‘turn off notifications’, ‘delete as many apps as you can’, to 'get over that initial urge to check, scroll and post ' and asks social media users to hold the tech giants accountable.

It also, towards the conclusion, talks about how there should be more laws to protect the users more than the companies who are already making trillions of dollars at the behest of social media users. 

The documentary also brings to light how the people v/s algorithm fight is one-sided because we can't match up to the latter which is more than six times faster at predicting what we will do next. 

And therefore, towards the end, Harris, concludes by saying that 'the race to get people's attention isn't going away' and that 'technology is going to get more integrated into our lives, not less' that, 'AIs are going to get better at predicting what keeps us on the screen', so we just need to mind every action we atke on these platforms, the social media footprint that we leave behind, because ultimately that is what the machines are being fed and that is how the algorithm understands what and who we are.