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‘The Social Dilemma’ Review: Unplug and Run

This documentary from Jeff Orlowski explores how addiction and privacy breaches are features, not bugs, of social media platforms.

By Devika Girish

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.

As in his documentaries about climate change, “Chasing Ice” and “Chasing Coral,” Orlowski takes a reality that can seem too colossal and abstract for a layperson to grasp, let alone care about, and scales it down to a human level. In “The Social Dilemma,” he recasts one of the oldest tropes of the horror genre — Dr. Frankenstein, the scientist who went too far — for the digital age.

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.

The Social Dilemma Rated PG-13 for dystopian speculation and some graphic images of violence. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Netflix .

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A still from docudrama The Social Dilemma.

The Social Dilemma: a wake-up call for a world drunk on dopamine?

The new Netflix docudrama is a valiant if flawed attempt to address our complacency about surveillance capitalism

S pool forward a couple of centuries. A small group of social historians drawn from the survivors of climate catastrophe are picking through the documentary records of what we are currently pleased to call our civilisation, and they come across a couple of old movies. When they’ve managed to find a device on which they can view them, it dawns on them that these two films might provide an insight into a great puzzle: how and why did the prosperous, apparently peaceful societies of the early 21st century implode?

The two movies are The Social Network , which tells the story of how a po-faced Harvard dropout named Mark Zuckerberg created a powerful and highly profitable company; and The Social Dilemma , which is about how the business model of this company – as ruthlessly deployed by its po-faced founder – turned out to be an existential threat to the democracy that 21st-century humans once enjoyed.

Both movies are instructive and entertaining, but the second one (which has just been released on Netflix) leaves one wanting more. Its goal is admirably ambitious: to provide a compelling, graphic account of what the business model of a handful of companies is doing to us and to our societies. The intention of the director, Jeff Orlowski, is clear from the outset: to reuse the strategy deployed in his two previous documentaries on climate change – nicely summarised by one critic as “bring compelling new insight to a familiar topic while also scaring the absolute shit out of you”.

For those of us who have for years been trying – without notable success – to spark public concern about what’s going on in tech, it’s fascinating to watch how a talented movie director goes about the task. Orlowski adopts a two-track approach. In the first, he assembles a squad of engineers and executives – people who built the addiction-machines of social media but have now repented – to talk openly about their feelings of guilt about the harms they inadvertently inflicted on society, and explain some of the details of their algorithmic perversions.

They are, as you might expect, almost all males of a certain age and type. The writer Maria Farrell, in a memorable essay , describes them as examples of the prodigal techbro – tech executives who experience a sort of religious awakening and “suddenly see their former employers as toxic, and reinvent themselves as experts on taming the tech giants. They were lost and are now found.”

Biblical scholars will recognise the reference from Luke 15. The prodigal son returns having “devoured his living with harlots” and is welcomed with open arms by his old dad, much to the dismay of his more dutiful brother. Farrell is not so welcoming. “These ‘I was lost but now I’m found, please come to my Ted Talk’ accounts,” she writes, “typically miss most of the actual journey, yet claim the moral authority of one who’s ‘been there’ but came back. It’s a teleportation machine, but for ethics.”

It is, but Orlowski welcomes these techbros with open arms because they suit his purpose – which is to explain to viewers the terrible things that the surveillance capitalist companies such as Facebook and Google do to their users. And the problem with that is that when he gets to the point where we need ideas about how to undo that damage, the boys turn out to be a bit – how shall I put it – incoherent.

The second expository track in the film – which is interwoven with the documentary strand – is a fictional account of a perfectly normal American family whose kids are manipulated and ruined by their addiction to social media. This is Orlowski’s way of persuading non-tech-savvy viewers that the documentary stuff is not only real, but is inflicting tangible harm on their teenagers. It’s a way of saying: Pay attention: this stuff really matters!

And it works, up to a point. The fictional strand is necessary because the biggest difficulty facing critics of an industry that treats users as lab rats is that of explaining to the rats what’s happening to them while they are continually diverted by the treats (in this case dopamine highs) being delivered by the smartphones that the experimenters control.

Where the movie fails is in its inability to accurately explain the engine driving this industry that harnesses applied psychology to exploit human weaknesses and vulnerabilities. A few times it wheels on Prof Shoshana Zuboff , the scholar who gave this activity a name – “surveillance capitalism”, a mutant form of our economic system that mines human experience (as logged in our data trails) in order to produce marketable predictions about what we will do/read/buy/believe next. Most people seem to have twigged the “surveillance” part of the term, but overlooked the second word. Which is a pity because the business model of social media is not really a mutant version of capitalism: it’s just capitalism doing its thing – finding and exploiting resources from which profit can be extracted. Having looted, plundered and denuded the natural world, it has now turned to extracting and exploiting what’s inside our heads. And the great mystery is why we continue to allow it to do so.

What I’ve been reading

The truth about WFH How GitLab is transforming the future of online work. An interesting FastCompany piece on what we might learn from a company whose employees have always worked from home.

Plastic not fantastic America’s Plastic Hour Is Upon Us. This is the strange title of a long, sombre essay by George Packer in the Atlantic . Long read, but worth it.

Covid lessons from Swift An Immodest Proposal. A sharp, Swiftian essay by Samuel Weber in the LA Review of Books .

Social media
Mark Zuckerberg
Social networking
Documentary films

The Social Dilemma Dilemma

The 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma raises a number of legitimate concerns about the negative impacts of social media technology on our society, but it somehow fails to connect the dots from its critique of social media to a far broader set of problems. The danger of this narrow view is that it leaves the audience thinking the problems are specific to social media, an idea which is likely to result in scapegoating social media platforms without addressing the more pervasive underlying issues. The ‘social dilemma’ is not specific to social media – the same incentives and methodologies driving all of the problems the film spotlights are also ultimately the same ones that contaminate all the other media and communication we encounter in our advertising driven, consumer capitalist version of democracy.

If you watch the film, I encourage you to think about how we must address these problems not only within the realm social media, but in society more broadly, across all media and technology we use to communicate with our fellow citizens.

How Social Media Technology Influences Social Behavior

To the film’s credit, it does a decent job of enumerating many of the ways that social media shapes social behavior:

1. The hardware form factor of content delivery is new – mobile phones are ubiquitous and every member of the household has one. In past generations, a household consumed the same content (a single copy of a newspaper), often together, at the same time (sitting around a radio or TV together). Mass market paperbacks and cheap consumer electronics – VHS, cable TV proliferation, personal devices like the Walkman , etc – arguably were all steps towards “personalized” (and isolated) consumption. In the 90s, you already had kids watching MTV in the basement, mom watching the news, dad watching golf… So while fragmentation is not necessarily a totally new phenomenon, it is fair to say that never before has every individual’s world been so personalized, fragmented, and disconnected. This cannot be good for social cohesion.

2. Consumer software is designed to be addictive and attention grabbing, with elements like red badges and infinite scroll feeds (not unlike magazine covers at the grocery checkout or the endless channel surfing offered by cable TV). While media and advertising have long made use of these tactics, the internet now enables rapid improvement of the best attention grabbing techniques via the standard practice of massive scale A/B experimentation.

3. Internet media companies can use algorithms to take advantage of ideas from psychology (like variable ratio reinforcement, the reward pattern of slot machines) to increase the addictiveness of their software. Notably, the movie fails to acknowledge that all content delivered over the internet – not just social media, but “news,” product merchandising, music, studio TV and film entertainment, Netflix (the distributor of The Social Dilemma ), reference websites for technical q&a or medical information, personal blogs – pretty much all content delivery on the internet exploits these algorithms.

4. Social media leverages friend endorsements to earn your attention and trust – a point that gets less attention than it should in a movie that is nominally about the problems new and specific to social media. You are more likely to click / trust a link accompanied by a face you know. Print ads and TV commercials have long leveraged a similar tactic by paying celebrities with broad public recognition to endorse their products. Likewise, before the proliferation of social media, political ads sought the American “everyman” and national political campaigns selected “random” citizens to ask questions at publicized town halls:

Maybe they really can coexist – humanity and politics, shrewdness and decency. But it gets complicated. In the Spartanburg Q&A, after two China questions and one on taxing Internet commerce, as most of the lobby’s pencils are still at the glass making fun of the local heads, a totally demographically average 30-something middle-class soccer mom in rust-colored slacks and those round, overlarge glasses totally average 30-something soccer moms always wear gets picked and stands and somebody brings her the mike. It turns out her name is Donna Duren, of right here in Spartanburg SC, and she says she has a fourteen-year-old son named Chris, in whom Mr. and Mrs. Duren have been trying to inculcate family values and respect for authority and a noncynical idealism about America and its duly elected leaders. – David Foster Wallace, John McCain, The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys, and the Shrub

This is an age-old tactic – well, at least one dating back to the dawn of mass media – of making appeals to the authority of tribe, of trying to persuade you by showing you “people just like you” rather than making an appeal to reason.

Alternatively, appeals to popular authority sometimes feature experts, who are explicitly not “just like you.” While expert knowledge is in many cases superior to the cursory beliefs we might have as non experts, how and why we give credence to experts matters, as Agnes Callard recently wrote in an op-ed arguing that philosophers should not sign petitions:

The petition aims to effect persuasion with respect to what appears in the first part not only by way of any argument contained therein but also by way of the number and respectability of the people who figure in the second part. …. The problem is that even if it’s true, the fact that many believe it doesn’t shed any light on it why it’s true — and that is what the intellectually inquisitive person wants to know…. One expert is a learning opportunity; being confronted with an arsenal of experts is about as conducive to conversation as a firing squad.

Petitions make appeals to popularity (an “arsenal” of signers) or authority (the credentials of “expert” signers) – and Callard rightly points out that neither of these help the audience learn.

This I think is the crux of the real dilemma of social knowledge – while it is indeed a superpower that our species can leverage the aggregate knowledge of past generations and experts in any field, making use of an idea we do not fully understand always exposes us to some risk. Placing more credence in ideas that are more broadly accepted or endorsed by experts can reduce our exposure when we take such risks or act as a sort of shortcut to finding the best ideas we have not necessarily verified for ourselves, but this cannot serve as a complete substitute for understanding. Or, as Callard puts it, when we leverage social knowledge, it is easy to miss out on a “learning opportunity.”

5. Mobile software leverages push notifications to grab your attention even when you have not explicitly chosen you want to look at your phone. This has made one of the most distasteful elements of consumer capitalism – advertising – more pervasive than ever. It is now available in the form of an API to every app installed on your phone.

Again, I don’t think pervasive advertising is fundamentally new – for a long time, we’ve had similarly intrusive advertising in public spaces with billboards or Cinnabon pumping their scents into the air or telemarketers and political campaign robo-dialers calling your home and cell phone or below minimum wage activists accosting you on the street or town council candidate posters staked in suburban front lawns or stickers of fish with feet on car bumpers or any t-shirts with words or logos on them. We can no longer call most of the spaces we occupy outside of our home or office “public” spaces – they are nearly all “commercial” spaces. Think about the design of the Whole Foods, of Bed Bath & Beyond, think of the language on the menu at your favorite restaurant (“locally farmed organic small batch hand massaged kale”) or the vibe of your local coffee shop – all of these are designed and optimized for conversion, just like the internet. We would do well to remember that the internet is far more a commercial space than it is a public space. ( The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist… )

6. The internet and social media have decentralized and democratized content production and distribution more than ever before. You might argue that this decentralization and democratization first became available with the advent of the printing press, which enabled people to print pamphlets, but it is fair to say that today content production and distribution are far lower cost and more broadly accessible than ever before.

7. Similarly, the reach and speed of the internet used to be only accessible to a very few centralized broadcasters in the era of TV / radio. Now these are far more broadly accessible than ever before.

The Problem is Not Social Media

While The Social Dilemma correctly identifies many of the systemic failures that have been introduced (or exacerbated) by social media technology, it does not draw historical parallels to similar challenges posed by other new communication technologies that changed the way we debate in public, understand our fellow citizens, and work towards consensus. The film fails to locate the “dilemma” as a fundamental challenge of social coordination and democracy that extends far beyond the domain of social media.

As a result, if you might walk away from the film thinking “all we have to do is fix social media.” In the best case, this might result in a local “solution” that simply pushes the same problems to another domain or medium.

This is not to say we can ignore the very real problems the film does highlight – we should certainly address these problems:

Addiction to mobile devices can result in isolation and depression.

Demagogues and profiteers can exploit powerful new technology to amplify their own voices for personal gain.

Misinformation and ‘fake news’ can degrade trust in institutions and fragment our worldviews with conflicting ideas about what constitutes reality, making it difficult to reach consensus on public policy.

But the film does not propose any great ideas for solving these problems …

Censorship is a Slippery Solution

Understandably, the natural response to all of these threats – addiction, misinformation, exploitation by demagogues – is to try to prevent them. The simplest reaction is prohibition, which might be appropriate in some domains (eg, with opiates).

But in the realm of communications technology, prohibition amounts to censorship. This might take the form of (1) calls for the corporate owners of social media platforms to perform more stringent content ‘moderation’ or (2) public mobs cancelling speakers who have uttered phrases they disagree with.

In either case, these strategies can seem attractive when you imagine they will only ever apply to the censorship of speech of others when you disagree with it, but they are far less attractive when you imagine others use them to silence your own speech.

And, the deeper problem with both of these flavors of censorship is that there is no codified set of rules agreed upon by the public defining exactly what speech should and should not be censored, which would leave this arbitration to the whim of corporations and mobs.

If indeed some sort of moderation and limits are necessary to counterbalance the powerful new distribution and amplification powers granted by new technology, it is crucial that the rules for these limits be decided by the public and encoded as laws or arbitration processes that are subject to public scrutiny, so that the rules are applied fairly.

Even if you suppose the public can design appropriate limits on speech amplified by technology – which, I grant, is very likely necessary in some form – it is a dangerous place to introduce legislation.

For, unlike the case of, say, opiates, speech technology is instrumental to citizens critiquing, resisting, and keeping in check the powers of a corrupt state – and if the public encodes limits on speech that are too stringent, it may limit its ability to critique or change these restrictions in the future. This is one reason zealots are so paranoid about protecting free speech.

There are no clean answers, and however you draw the lines, some sort of asymmetric power is likely to result. In one extreme, you can imagine granting the state monopoly power over speech and tools it can use to massively amplify its own message and censor any messages it disagrees with. In another case, you can imagine a sort of wild west where nothing is censored, and the loudest, most extreme (and potentially hateful, dangerous, or violent) messages are free to propagate. In yet another case, where dollars are fungible for eyeballs, the broadest reach goes to the incumbents with the biggest advertising spend.

Each of these systems would have a distinct set of failure modes – worth evaluating not only in the average or ‘somewhat failing’ case, but also in the worst case scenario.

Media Literacy and Counter-Intelligence Tech is Half Baked

Far preferable to censorship (imho) would be some sort of counterintelligence strategy or technology, some mechanism we might use to massively level up our sense-making abilities – either as individuals or as a public.

There are rudimentary ideas floating around in this vein – eg, broad education about identifying fake news or misinformation. You might even say that The Social Dilemma is an example of such an effort. There are also efforts to develop ‘AI’ for detecting fake news .

The issue with a lot of these proposals is that they are not aligned with the interests of any institution with the power to broadly execute on them. I think the only way sense-making technologies and techniques will emerge is in a bottoms up fashion – almost guerilla-style – when the broader public realizes it is in their own self-interest, for existing institutions certainly don’t see an educated public of voters or consumers as aligned with the maintenance of their power.

But figuring out exactly how to navigate this landscape is complicated. You might start by massively discounting the veracity of all information that seeks you out (vs information you actively looked for) – because if the information is seeking you, and you’re not profiting from it, then someone else is. But you also don’t want to completely stick your head in the sand, because that cuts you off from the messages of your guerilla compatriots. And don’t forget, many of the messages from your friends on the ground that appear to emerge bottoms up are actually curated by corporate interest! Yikes…

The Real Dilemma

He who fights with monsters should take care he does not become a monster himself. – Beyond Good and Evil

The real dilemma – both for the film and for our society – goes unaddressed explicitly in the film and runs throughout as an implicit undercurrent in how the film attempts to present its argument. When you try to address problems of information sharing and attention economics, you encounter a Catch-22, a tension between distribution and persuasiveness on the one hand vs intellectual honesty and sound argument (in the sense that Callard desires) on the other hand. And it is here that the film fails in the same way as a TED Talk.

The Social Dilemma aspires to educate its audience, yet it expects too little of them .

A key premise of the film is that social media has eroded our attention span, left us with an appetite only for short bursts of entertainment, and dulled our ability to appreciate diverse perspectives and arguments that challenge our view of the world.

How do you speak to such an audience? Like a TED Talk, the film tries to neatly package up the simplest possible, one-sided argument it can.

While I certainly appreciate old-school, print journalism principles like brevity, clarity, and information hierarchy (“don’t bury the lead”) – I have far less sympathy for the critique “this is too complicated” (with the implied elision: “for the general public to understand,” “to scale,” “to attract attention,” etc). I’m not saying that we should abandon Occam’s razor – we should certainly seek the simplest explanations for the phenomena we encounter.

But the reality is that life is pretty complex, democracy is messy, and understanding the diverse perspectives of our fellow members of society requires a lot of effort.

Expecting too little of your audience is a tempting short term strategy – and it arguably leads to some wins in the short term. But ultimately this strategy further infantilizes an audience already trained to expect every answer and service to be spoon fed to them without any personal effort, via “frictionless” economic transactions (ideally at “low low prices”).

You can see how almost anyone addressing a broad audience collapses the capable listener into the mindless consumer wherever you look. Elected representatives compete for your attention with the news media and entertainment media. They don’t expect us to have informed opinions or understand why a certain position is better than another – they just ask us to vote for a particular party – the election game is all about “voter turnout” – not the best outcomes.

Likewise, The Social Dilemma must compete with your attention with all of these and with the latest superhero movie. In its effort to win attention, the film not only ignores much of the complexity of the problems it seeks to address, but also makes stylistic choices that may ultimately work against it.

Wait, Wasn’t this Movie Supposed to be an Indictment of Corporate Style and Technique?

Visually, the film looks like a Facebook or Google commercial – an expensive, very “produced” visual aesthetic that to me makes the film feel a little too slick and corporate and a bit less authentic.

The film mixes the interviews with a staged ‘dramatic’ narrative about a fictional family of actors playing people struggling to deal with their kids being addicted to social media and some over-the-top VFX scenes where one of the actors from MadMen is supposed to personify an AI that is tuning an algorithm to ‘hook’ one of the teens back into addiction to a phone. I understand the difficulty of explaining machine learning algorithms and their potential risks to the general public – tbh, a lot of the inner workings are black box even to software engineers working at companies deploying these algorithms. But I don’t think the personification ultimately explains much about how the algorithms actually work with any sort of useful accuracy – a more useful angle, imo, would be to explain the systems problems of attention economics / what happens when your time as a user is sold to the highest bidder, how this may or may not be aligned with your best interests, why the problem extends far beyond the algorithms to all of the actors involved in the market for attention, etc. A few of the snippets of interviews with Jaron Lanier touch upon this and do far more to explain the problem than the VFX / AI scenes. (Btw, I highly Rx Lanier’s books Who Owns the Future? and You Are Not a Gadget as follow-ups if you like the film and want to go deeper).

Ultimately, the dramatic interludes fail because I just don’t think they do enough to make us care about the characters involved. It doesn’t feel like something real is at stake, it just feels like a half-hearted attempt to manufacture a vague instance of a real and broad social problem using a nameless family. Again, I am reminded of corporate consumer tech commercials – upbeat ukelele music, guy is totally disorganized and overwhelmed deadbeat, goes to fancy Blue-Bottle-type coffee shop, gets amazing new todo-list app, gets his life in order, meets girl of dreams, falls in love, marries, lives happily ever after sharing photos of cute children with the grandparents. Yes, this is sort of narrative and has a ‘character,’ but it’s too vague to evoke more feeling than a photo of a forlorn child in an ad for a non-profit.

And all of these stylistic elements just feel really expensive – like the film is throwing money at the problem of making its argument.

Maybe all of this high-budget aesthetic is what it takes to reach a mass audience and the style isn’t off-putting to anyone other than me, but the high-budget production value just feels totally dissonant with the message of this film, especially when I compare it to documentaries I love like The Act of Killing , Far from Vietnam , Influence , The Century of the Self , The Fog of War .

And, if you really can’t stomach low-budget docs, consider Spike Jonze’s film Her , which had a $23mm budget, is absolutely gorgeous, and treats the topic of loneliness and technology with all of the nuance it deserves in a beautiful film with deeply compelling characters.

Despite All That, You Should Probably Still Watch The Movie

All of that said, what I think works the best about The Social Dilemma is the set of interviews with the creators of these technologies who all say, “we’d never let our kids near this stuff.” You’ve got to imagine this is not too different from how the people who make Krispy Kreme donuts, American Spirit cigarettes, or Oxycontin feel about exposing their kids to the products they are selling to other people.

And, I do think The Social Dilemma does a nice job summarizing many of the key problems that modern communication technology presents for a democracy. It is worth watching , if nothing else, as a warm up for the 4-part, far more expansive documentary mini-series, The Century of the Self . This fantastic doc expands its critique far beyond specific technology to the values and techniques of the ruling class that emerged with the advent of mass media and have prevailed ever since.

On that half-recommendation, I’ll end and leave you with one historical exhibit illustrating the origins of ‘the dilemma’ that far predates social media. It’s from Edward Bernays’ 1928 book, Propaganda , the playbook for governance in the age of mass media:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. [I]n almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons-—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.

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The Social Dilemma

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Watch The Social Dilemma with a subscription on Netflix.

What to Know

Clear-eyed and comprehensive, The Social Dilemma presents a sobering analysis of our data-mined present.

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Entertainment

What ‘The Social Dilemma’ misunderstands about social networks

The world is more complicated than filmmakers want to believe.

By Casey Newton , a contributing editor who has been writing about tech for over 10 years. He founded Platformer, a newsletter about Big Tech and democracy.

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I. A dilemma

On Sunday night, after being encouraged to by friends and family, I hit play on a new documentary about our digital lives. Directed by Jeff Orlowski, The Social Dilemma explores the effect of smartphones and social networks on human behavior. Blending talking-head interviews with some well known Silicon Valley apostates and fictional, after-school special-style dramatizations of what happens when Johnny and Janey scroll through feeds all day, the film presents itself as an urgent warning about our modern condition.

I’m more than a little sympathetic to these concerns. I started writing this newsletter in 2017 after coming to the belated realization that social networks really did have an outsized impact on modern life, and deserved to be taken as seriously. My thinking has benefited tremendously from speaking over the years with some of the interview subjects in the film, including Tristan Harris, Renee DiResta, Tim Kendall, Jeff Seibert, and Justin Rosenstein. In particular, Harris’ work on screen time triggered a powerful sea change in the industry, and DiResta’s explorations of misinformation have been essential to helping social networks understand themselves.

And yet despite all that ... the film is ridiculous? The dramatized segments include a fictional trio of sociopaths working inside an unnamed social network to design bespoke push notifications to distract their users. They show an anguished family struggling to get the children to put their phones away during dinner. And the ominous piano score that pervades every scene, rather than ratcheting up the tension, gives it all the feeling of camp. If someone asked me to reimagine this newsletter as a drag show, I would start where The Social Dilemma leaves off.

And as Adi Robertson points out at The Verge , the idea that algorithmic recommendation engines are at the heart of our troubles leaves out vast swathes of the internet that are arguably just as important as the big social networks, and perhaps in some cases even more so. She writes :

Propaganda, bullying, and misinformation are actually far bigger and more complicated. The film briefly mentions, for instance, that Facebook-owned WhatsApp has spread misinformation that inspired grotesque lynchings in India . The film doesn’t mention, however, that WhatsApp works almost nothing like Facebook. It’s a highly private, encrypted messaging service with no algorithmic interference, and it’s still fertile ground for false narratives. As Alexis Madrigal notes , condemning the platforms together comes “uncomfortably close to admitting that mobile communications pose fundamental challenges to societies across the world.” There’s a fair case for that, he argues — but a case with much more alarming implications. Radicalization doesn’t just happen on Facebook and YouTube either. Many of the deadliest far-right killers were apparently incubated on small forums: Christchurch mosque killer Brenton Tarrant on 8chan; Oregon mass shooter Chris Harper-Mercer on 4chan; Tree of Life Synagogue killer Robert Bowers on Gab; and Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik on white supremacist sites including Stormfront, a 23-year-old hate site credited with inspiring scores of murders. These sites aren’t primarily driven by algorithms or profit motives. Instead, they twist and exploit the open internet’s positive ability to connect like-minded people. When harmful content surfaces on them, it raises complex moderation questions for domain hosts and web infrastructure providers — a separate set of powerful companies that have completely different business models from Facebook.

This isn’t to let social networks off the hook. Nor is it an effort to make the problem feel so complicated that everyone just throws their hands up and walks away from it. But I’m shocked at how appealing so many people find the idea that social networks are uniquely responsible for all of society’s ills. ( The Social Dilemma has been among the 10 most watched programs on Netflix all week.)

This cartoon super villain view of the world strikes me as a kind of mirror image of the right-wing conspiracy theories which hold that a cabal of elites are manipulating every world event in secret. It is more than a little ironic that a film that warns incessantly about platforms using misinformation to stoke fear and outrage seems to exist only to stoke fear and outrage — while promoting a distorted view of how those platforms work along the way.

Some folks who worked on the film told me that this kind of approach is necessary to “ communicate in a way that appeals to a broad audience .” But I say that’s a cop out. If you’re going to argue that social platforms are uniquely responsible for the fraying of society, you have to show your work.

On the other hand, meet Sophie Zhang. She was a data scientist who was fired in August and left this month in the fashion increasingly popular among departing Facebook employees — which is to say, quite dramatically.

Craig Silverman, Ryan Mac, and Pranav Dixit scooped her 6,600-word farewell memo in BuzzFeed . Zhang wrote:

“In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions,” wrote Zhang, who declined to talk to BuzzFeed News. Her LinkedIn profile said she “worked as the data scientist for the Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team” and dealt with “bots influencing elections and the like.” “I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count,” she wrote.

She added: “I know that I have blood on my hands by now.”

Unlike the Social Dilemma filmmakers, Zhang showed her work — first to her bosses, and then, inadvertently, to the world. She describes governments in Azerbaijan and Honduras using Facebook against their own citizens, employing large numbers of fake accounts to promote their own interests and attack critics. And she found what she described as coordinated influence campaigns in countries including India, Ukraine and Bolivia.

Zhang’s official job was to police Facebook for “fake engagement” — people buying inauthentic likes, comments, and shares. From this perch she continually wandered into an adjacent realm that Facebook calls “civic integrity,” to the apparent frustration of her bosses. It’s a higher-stakes realm that works on some of the most pressing issues a social platform will face, including foreign influence operations and election integrity. It’s also famed for its difficulty — academics tell me that unearthing these operations and properly attributing them requires significant domain expertise. Many of the people who do this at Facebook and other networks previously worked for US intelligence agencies.

Zhang, by contrast, was a relatively junior employee who was essentially moonlighting on civic integrity issues. That may have been one reason why she struggled to get her colleagues’ attention, I’m told. Everyone I’ve spoken to at Facebook over the past day says Zhang was bright and dedicated to her work. But navigating large organizations can be a challenge even for the most senior employees, and it seems like Facebook’s sheer size often prevented Zhang’s findings from getting prompt attention.

After BuzzFeed ’s story ran, some people who work on the company’s integrity team — and there are more than 200 of them — were frustrated at the implication that they are sitting on their hands all day, or otherwise bad at their jobs. (I don’t think Zhang meant to imply this, but that was certainly the tenor of the discussion about BuzzFeed ’s story on Twitter.) Many of them had worked with Zhang on the takedown efforts she described, and felt undermined by her memo, I’m told. Sometimes team leaders set priorities differently than their own employees would, and Facebook’s efforts — which focus on the largest and most active networks, particularly during elections — sometimes set aside other legitimate threats, like the ones Zhang had found.

Ultimately, that’s the aspect of Zhang’s memo that sticks. Facebook mostly doesn’t deny that her findings were accurate, significant, and sometimes received delayed responses. The company says only that the issues she found, however significant, were less pressing than the many other issues the civic integrity team was policing at the time, in other countries all over the world.

Mastering the geopolitics of each country and rooting out every influence operation that pops up while also policing hate speech and misinformation while promoting free speech and interpersonal connections is a mind-bendingly enormous task. But it’s also the task that Facebook, by virtue of its huge investment in growth and fighting off competitors over the years, has signed up for.

I can’t take seriously a film like The Social Dilemma, which seemingly wants to hold one company accountable for every change society has undergone since it was founded. But when someone takes her employer to task for the things she found on its service — and she leaves with a feeling of blood on her hands — that’s something different.

Not every issue raised by an employee will get immediate attention. But Zhang’s memo raises questions about Facebook’s size, power, and accountability to its users — particularly its non-Western users — that outsiders have been poking at for years. Increasingly, as we have learned from a summer rife with Facebook leaks, those calls are now coming from inside the house. And they deserve better answers than Sophie Zhang has gotten to date.

Today in news that could affect public perception of the big tech platforms.

🔼 Trending up : More than 400,000 people have registered to vote on Snapchat . The app has rolled out a series of voting tools, including a feature that lets users register to vote in the app. (Makena Kelly / The Verge )

🔼 Trending up : Facebook is investing $5 million in local news organizations that serve historically marginalized communities . It’s specifically partnering with newsrooms led by people of color. (Facebook)

🔃 Trending sideways : Facebook pledged to reach “net zero” carbon emissions, offsetting its global power consumption by investing in renewable energy projects that capture and store carbon dioxide . That puts Facebook in the middle of the pack when it comes to climate commitments from Big Tech. (Justine Calma / The Verge )

⭐ TikTok is set to become a standalone company as part of the Oracle deal . ByteDance will be the majority shareholder of the new entity, if the deal goes through. James Fontanella-Khan and Miles Kruppa at the Financial Times have the details:

The creation of a new entity shows how ByteDance is attempting to put distance between the company’s Chinese ownership and TikTok’s operations, even as it seeks to avoid the full sale of the app that Mr Trump had desired. [...] The new TikTok entity will have independent oversight and will be managed at arms-length from ByteDance, said people briefed on the discussions. The Chinese company will continue to collaborate with TikTok globally and will retain control of the powerful algorithm that keeps users engaged by predicting what sort of videos they will enjoy.

How did Oracle position itself to become TikTok’s trusted tech partner? The negotiations bore little resemblance to regular deal talks, this piece says. They were driven by US-China tensions, commercial rivalries, and President Trump’s personal interventions. (Georgia Wells, Aaron Tilley and John D. McKinnon / The Wall Street Journal )

ByteDance CEO Yiming Zhang decided to not sell TikTok to Microsoft over concerns from major investors about the financial hit of selling the app for less than it is worth . Zhang opted for a sale of only a stake to Oracle, rather than an outright divestment. (Echo Wang, Keith Zhai and Joshua Franklin / Reuters)

A TikTok ban won’t prevent employees from getting paid, the Trump administration says . The news comes in response to a lawsuit from a TikTok worker over Trump’s executive order banning the app. (Steven Musil / CNET)

The Trump campaign released a “support our troops” ad on September 11th that used a stock photo of Russian-made fighter jets and Russian models dressed as soldiers . Come on! (Daniel Lippman and Bryan Bender / Politico )

The Health and Human Services official who made false accusations about the Centers for Disease Control harboring a “resistance unit” to undermine President Trump indicated he might be stepping down from his role . He apologized to his staff for remarks he made on Facebook . (Adam Cancryn, Dan Diamond and Sarah Owermohle / Politico )

⭐ Kim Kardashian West is temporarily leaving Facebook and Instagram to support the Stop Hate for Profit campaign . Kardashian West is the 7th most followed account on Instagram with 188 million followers, and she’s taking Wednesday off! OK, Kim. Axios reports on what she said:

“I love that I can connect directly with you through Instagram and Facebook, but I can’t sit by and stay silent while these platforms continue to allow the spreading of hate, propaganda and misinformation - created by groups to sow division and split America apart – only to take steps after people are killed,” Kardashian West wrote. “Misinformation shared on social media has a serious impact on our elections and undermines our democracy. Please join me tomorrow when I will be “freezing” my Instagram and FB account to tell Facebook to #StopHateForProfit .”

Facebook launched automatic closed captions for Facebook Live and Workplace Live in six languages, to help people who are deaf or hard of hearing . The company said the move is particularly important during quarantine, when people rely on the platform to tune in to broadcasts and government briefings. (Facebook)

Douyin , the Chinese-market version of TikTok , has more than 600 million daily active users . It had 400 million at the start of the year. (Zheping Huang / Bloomberg)

TikTok’s most popular creator, Charli D’Amelio, joined rival app Triller in a non-exclusive deal . She and her family are trying out the app, but will continue to post content on TikTok. (Julia Alexander / The Verge )

“M to the B” is the song of the summer thanks to a TikTok revival . Also, here’s a TikTok meme power ranking. (Rebecca Jennings / Vox )

Gen Zers are using Discord to collaborate on projects they hope will shape the future of Silicon Valley . They’re using the Discord server Gen Z Mafia to upend a system they say is exclusive and elitist. (Taylor Lorenz / The New York Times )

Amazon launched Luxury Stores on its mobile app, with Oscar de la Renta as its first brand partner . More upscale brands are expected to join the new platform in the coming weeks. (Nicole Phelps / Vogue )

Zoom is working on a major upgrade to its messaging capabilities, in a move that would challenge Slack . The video conferencing tool currently has rudimentary text chatting options. (Kevin McLaughlin / The Information )

Twitch is experimenting with running ads automatically in the middle of streams . The ads will run across affiliate and partnered channels and creators will get paid for every ad that runs. (Bijan Stephen / The Verge )

Casino-style smartphone games have drained people of millions of dollars . Unlike the gambling industry, this market is almost entirely unregulated. (Cyrus Farivar / NBC)

And finally...

Send us tips, comments, questions, and Social Dilemma reviews: [email protected] and [email protected] .

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‘The Social Dilemma’ Movie Review

Post published: November 12, 2020
Post category: Reviews / Tips
Post author: Worood Al Humaidhan

In early 2020, a documentary was released on Netflix, and at first I procrastinated watching it for weeks. I knew people who watched it and it totally changed their view on social media. I was scared that it would make me question everything online, and it did, for the good. This documentary doesn’t just talk about how social media has changed negatively, but it talks about how we as humans can change this… We are more profitable to a corporation if we spend our time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, instead of spending that time living our life in a rich way.

The social dilemma explores the disproportionate impact social platforms have on the way we act, and ultimately live our lives. The film analyses the underlying causes of viral conspiracy theories, teenage mental health, political polarization, misinformation (fake news) and it makes these issues urgent. As a teenager in this day and age it’s so easy to get influenced by things we see on our timeline, and it makes us want to act and look like these people who are considered ‘perfect’ in society. What someone is eating and what someone is wearing…why is it that we are so interested? Why do we compare ourselves to others we haven’t even met?

Something that was stuck in my head after watching ‘’the social dilemma’’ is the fact that fake news travels six times faster than real news on social media. That’s crazy, and scary to think about. Fake news leads to the bullying of innocent people, racist ideas, and it affects the mental health of those who believe such things. I don’t think social media was made to encourage bullying, or spread false accusations, in fact, it has reunited lost relatives and educated people on world issues. As it progressed, the use of the apps and the people behind them changed in a very negative way. Many engineers of these platforms decided to leave the companies because it questioned their morals and what was ethically correct. The same engineers are interviewed on why they think social media took such a turn for the worst.

So what are we supposed to do after watching ‘the social dilemma’? Well, obviously not everyones going to delete their social media and become totally disconnected. But, there are people who might, and there are people who will hopefully become more aware of what their phones are doing to their mental health. ‘’The fabric of a healthy society depends on us getting off this corrosive business model.’’ This is an important message that needs to be talked about more and I hope that ‘the social dilemma’ opens up conversations on how we as a humans can change the fact that we are just ‘’extractable resources to these corporations that pull our attention towards the things they want us to look at, rather than things that are most consistent with our goals, our lives and our values.’’

The Documentary “The Social Dilemma”

The documentary The Social Dilemma presents social media as an undeniable force that continues to cause unprecedented damage to society. The developers and owners of such platforms exploit its unsuspecting users using data mining and surveillance technologies. The design of different social websites is capable of causing addiction and affecting the mental health of young individuals (Orlowski, 2020). Those who use social media outlets do so without considering the implications they could have on their psychological, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing.

This film is informative since it offers powerful insights that relate to the issue of healthcare ethics. Specifically, the reader observes that many professionals in the field of medicine are relying on social media to pursue their aims without taking their patients’ rights seriously. For instance, sharing of confidential information on such platforms amounts to the loss of patient autonomy (Orlowski, 2020). Such malpractice is also done without getting informed consent from the targeted users. In the future, more people who rely on different platforms to post pictures and health problems will be disadvantaged since different practitioners, entrepreneurs, or hackers will be able to access such details.

Additionally, the mental health challenges and suicide rates among teenagers arising from the use of social media explain why this issue is against the non-maleficence principle. Doctors who acquire personal details to profit themselves act against the Hippocratic Oath. These actions amount to harm and make it impossible for more people to receive timely medical support. While the original intention of launching social media platforms could have been different, the reality is that they are currently causing damage since thousands of young individuals are admitted to hospitals for self-harm every month (Clark, 2018). These insights should guide policymakers to implement superior measures that can ensure that social media networks do not result in health concerns and ethical questions.

Clark, S. A. (2018). The impact of the Hippocratic Oath in 2018: The conflict of the ideal of the physician, the knowledgeable humanitarian, versus the corporate medical allegiance to financial models contributes to burnout. Cureus, 10 (7), e3076. Web.

Orlowski, J. (2020). The social dilemma [Film]. Argent Pictures.

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Ethical Theories in “The Social Dilemma” Film Essay

Introduction, theories of ethics, application of theories to the social dilemma movie, works cited.

The world has never been so interconnected and rapidly changing. Any piece of information, events, people, fatal diseases are spreading with incredible speed. All this, of course, is thanks to technology and the Internet. People were able to make decisions in seconds with unlimited access to content and information. However, who is controlling this data flow? Does a person create his reality, or does artificial intelligence do it for him? The Netflix film “The Social Dilemma” tries to find an answer to this and other questions.

The Social Dilemma is a 90-minute Netflix documentary in which former employees of Google, Facebook, Instagram talk about how social networks manipulate people. The algorithms that underlie their actions help track and predict users’ actions and interact more effectively with them, thanks to which social networks promote advertising. But these algorithms can lead to addiction in users. The developers also say that the algorithms that underlie the actions of social networks can be used to destabilize the situation in society, influence election results, and spread fake news and false information.

Therefore, the film certainly reflects on the ethically moral component of social networks and the Internet space. It is especially interesting to consider the ethical concept of defining what reality is and who creates it. Thus, “Social Dilemma” shows that the usual Google search is not universal for all users. In fact, depending on the country, Google changes the search suggestions and the order of the links.

Moreover, the news feed on Instagram or Facebook is also formed based on a person’s preferences. On the one hand, the user receives the informational content that they like the most. On the other hand, an illusory subjective awareness of the world is created. A potentially false perception of events is presumed one-sidedly to interest a person, not allowing them to think critically. Hence, as Roger McNamee, Facebook’s early investor capitalist, rightfully stated, “Over time, you have a false sense that everyone agrees with you because everyone in your news feed sounds just like you” ( The Social Dilemma 00:56:20). Furthermore, once a person gets this distorted impression, “it turns out you are easily manipulated” ( The Social Dilemma 56:40). Overall, this understandably raises a crucial ethical concern among people today.

To examine this concern, it is essential to understand the classical ethical theories, including utilitarian, deontological perspectives, and Rawlsian justice. By utilitarianism, it is customary to mean such an ethical theory that considers use as the basis of moral duty (or a criterion for distinguishing between good and evil). According to Beatty et al., “a correct decision is the one that maximizes overall happiness and minimizes overall pain, thereby producing the greatest net benefit” (p. 30). According to classical utilitarian moral theory, when one evaluates human actions or practices, they do not consider the nature of the activities or practical steps, nor the motives for which people do what they do.

In contrast to utilitarianism, deontological ethics considers the inner side of human actions. Deontological ethics goes back to the ethics of duty, developed by the great German philosopher Kant, according to whom a person acts morally when they follow their commitment. A common feature of deontological theories is that they protect the intrinsic value and significance of specific actions. Different versions of the deontological approach may also consider the consequences of our efforts. However, they still insist that external means (for example, by measuring utility) cannot be used to evaluate or justify what has value in itself. The critique towards Kant’s concept is that it appears to be too naive. Indeed, as Beatty et al. state, “Yes, it is wrong to kill, but a country might not survive unless it is willing to fight wars” (p. 30). Therefore, both utilitarian and deontological are incomplete to some extent but provide a primary ground for ethical considerations.

Finally, the Rawlsian concept is based on the assertion that fair distribution will maximize the welfare of the poorest member of society. To substantiate his approach, John Rawls, whose name gave this concept, uses a specific mental structure known in economic theory as the “veil of ignorance” (Beatty et al., p.31). This means that when forming the principles of fair distribution, one needs to abstract from the possible consequences for one’s well-being. Rawls argues that everyone would prefer to hedge against a likely fall into the abyss under the veil of ignorance. Therefore, one would approve of the distribution of benefits in which society would be concerned about maximizing the income of the community’s poorest members.

Thus, coming back to the concern raised in the movie “The Social Dilemma,” it is worth considering the matter from the perspectives discussed above. In this way, the algorithm is created by people to address’ everyone’s preferences, thus, maximizing the well-being of the society. In other words, when everyone obtains exactly what they want, utilitarian ethics is reached. No matter what is at stake – privacy, adequacy, critical considerations, etc. – since the main goal of entertaining people is achieved. However, such an approach seems to be very primitive and does not reflect real-world agenda. In fact, society is preoccupied with privacy issues. Hence, after watching the documentary, many users claimed they would significantly reduce the unconscious consumption of the information and hide their geolocation and personal data whenever possible. Therefore, this proves that even enjoying personalized content, people are not ready to give all other things away. In this sense, utilizing the utilitarian approach, in this case, would be a solution to the ethical concern

However, Kant’s vision seems radical, too. “The Social Dilemma” refers to the famous movie “Truman’s Show,” using it as a metaphor for today’s events. However, in contrast to Truman, these are the individuals who make this choice of embracing themselves into the fake world of social media. Although people indeed do not control the algorithms letting artificial intelligence manipulate their choices decisions, in most cases, they do not have anything against this matter of things.

In this way, Rawlsian justice is the closest to reality to provide a guideline for this ethical concern resolution. Thus, the vital question is whether there are individuals who fail to recognize the “veil of ignorance.” In fact, the latter is essentially what makes people the main characters of the “Truman Show.” Therefore, to ensure the ethical existence of the Internet and social media, it is crucial to keep informed and aware of the algorithm’s work which in turn should definitely be regulated not to threaten the rights for privacy and freedom.

Overall, analysis of the ethical theories and a particular concern raised by “The Social Dilemma” regarding living in a world distorted by social media algorithms concludes that Rawlsian justice can be the best benchmark. Utilitarian and deontological approaches seem too naive and helpless to incorporate the complexity of the issue and the multiple parties and interests involved. Indeed, people make their choices by themselves, mainly thanks to such documentaries. However, it is essential to keep individuals aware and able to assess the situation critically.

Beatty, Jeffrey, et al. “Chapter 2: Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility.” Essentials of Business Law , 6th ed., Cengage Learning, 2018, pp. 24–33.

The Social Dilemma. Directed by Jeff Orlowski, Exposure Labs, 2020. Netflix , Web.

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IvyPanda . "Ethical Theories in “The Social Dilemma” Film." November 19, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/ethical-theories-in-the-social-dilemma-film/.

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THE SOCIAL DILEMMA

SUBJECTS — Health

SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL LEARNING — None.

MORAL-ETHICAL EMPHASIS — None.

93 minutes; unrated Documentary with fictional scenes, 2020.

Benefits of the Movie Possible Problems Parenting Points Selected Awards & Cast

Helpful Background Using the Movie in the Classroom Discussion Questions Assignments and Projects

CCSS Anchor Standards Links to the Internet Bibliography

MOVIE WORKSHEETS & STUDENT HANDOUTS

TWM offers a worksheet for students to review before seeing the film and then to fill out after they have watched the movie. While not required for the lesson plan, teachers may want to review it. See Film Study Worksheet for a Documentary Seeking to Persuade the Viewer On a Matter of Political or Social Significance .

DESCRIPTION

This documentary/drama hybrid explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.

SELECTED AWARDS & CAST

Vincent Kartheiser, Skyler Gisondo, Kara Hayward, Catalina Garayoa, Barbara Gehring, Chris Grundy, Sophia Hammons, Tristan Harris, Jeff Seibert, Bailer Richardson, Joe Toscano, Sandy Parakilas, Guillaume Chaslot, Lynn Fox,Aza Raskin, Alex Roetter, Tim Kendall, Justin Rosenstein, Randima Fernando, Jaron Lanier, Roger McNamee, Shoshana Zuboff, Anna Lembke, Jonathan Haidt, Cathy O’Neil, Rashida Richardson, Renée DiResta

Jeff Orlowski

BENEFITS OF THE MOVIE

The Social Dilemma explores the unintended and devastating consequences of social media including: polarization, isolation, anxiety, low self-esteem, disorientation from reality, and even violence against self or others. It exposes how social media corporations exploit the human desire for attention, belonging, affirmation, and community in order to make a profit.

This Learning Guide adds information about one of the psychological mechanisms on which social media relies and places social media in the context of the advertising industry. It provides information, vocabulary, discussion questions and projects to extend and confirm the lessons of the film.

POSSIBLE PROBLEMS

Parenting points.

Watch the movie with your children. Talk to them about the Neurological Common Currency Hypothesis and dopamine hits from social media.

HELPFUL BACKGROUND

Almost everyone in developed countries uses social media. We use it on the Internet and on our cell phones. If controlled and ethically administered, social media enhances communication and is a benefit to society. However, if it is profit-centered, as it is today, social media can surround its users in a cocoon of altered reality, isolating us, enhancing polarization from other parts of society, and potentially dominating our lives.

The social media companies do this by capturing information about us. They know more about our interests, what we like, and how we think than we know ourselves. They market this information to people, companies, or interest groups (some controlled by foreign governments) seeking our attention, trying to sell products, or attempting to influence us. Perhaps the most dangerous is the sale of information to those seeking our attention because that includes people or organizations seeking to surreptitiously influence us and our opinions. Some of these groups seek to destroy our democracy.

Everyone who uses social media, to some extent feels the effects of the algorithms designed to appeal to basic human needs and drive usage.

The collateral damage of these efforts includes focused exposure to web sites of people who agree with the user or that exaggerate tendencies already present, an increase in isolation from other viewpoints, and exaggerated division in society. Over-use of social media can also increase loneliness, depression, poor self-image, and expose people to cyberbullying. For millions of the people most affected by social media, many of them children, social media has taken over their relationships, fostering feelings of inadequacy — all interfering with daily life.

The Neural Common Currency Hypothesis and Social Media. Also called the “common currency hypothesis,” holds that positive inputs are converted into a common neural currency by the human brain to use in the computation of motivational values. It asserts that when making a choice or evaluating whether to engage in a particular experience, the brain converts expected benefits into a common scale for comparison. (The theory was first put forward by economists to describe the way people make financial decisions.) Thus, the pleasure chemicals in the brain such as dopamine that are secreted when we value positive potential concrete experiences like the prospect of making money or going on a walk beside a beautiful river are the same chemicals released when we evaluate the prospect of social interactions, find out information that is pleasing, or merely satisfy our curiosity. Engaging in social media events and the prospect of receiving social media communications implicate the expectation of pleasure in the common neural currency.

While not as well accepted as some other scientific hypotheses such as the theory of gravity (to explain why objects fall to earth and why the planets orbit the sun) or the theory of evolution (to explain how species change over time), the neural common currency hypothesis is supported by many peer-reviewed scientific papers. As scientific research progresses, the Neural Common Currency Hypothesis will be subject to revision. However, it provides an excellent conceptual framework for understanding the effects of social media on human behavior.

Humans are social beings. We have no armor to protect us from other animals, no claws or sharp teeth with which to defend or attack, and no fur to insulate us from the cold. We cannot exist on our own outside of society. One way of looking at the success of the human species is that it comes from three things: 1) our intelligent brain; 2) our hands and fingers and the resulting technology; and 3) our ability to socialize and cooperate with other human beings.

Social media allows us to connect with others in easy instantaneous ways. And, social media is a buffered type of connection, without the complications of face-to-face meetings with other human beings in society, which are more uncertain and which require more energy and more personal commitment than merely tapping on a cell phone or clicking a mouse.

Ming Su, associate professor of neurology at University of California, Berkeley, co-author of a study that compared the dopamine rewards for obtaining even useless information to the rewards for obtaining items of intrinsic value, explained the relationship between the Neural Common Currency Hypothesis and social media in this way,

… [T]he brain converts curiosity about information into the same common code it uses for money and other concrete rewards…. While the research does not directly address over-consumption of digital information, the fact that information engages the brain’s reward system is a necessary condition for the addiction cycle, . . . And it explains why we find those alerts saying we’ve been tagged in a photo so irresistible.

The way our brains respond to the anticipation of a pleasurable reward is an important reason why people are susceptible to clickbait . . . Just like junk food, this might be a situation where previously adaptive mechanisms get exploited now that we have unprecedented access to novel curiosities.

Quote from Your Brain Gets a Dopamine Hit From Information Technology Networks , 6/20/19

Social Media in the Context of the Advertising Industry: To understand social media it helps to know about advertising. The socially beneficial function of advertising is to convey information about products and services. However, advertisers also try to increase the volume of sales by appealing to our emotions. For example, a commercial for toilet paper that shows a baby’s soft skin and says or implies that the brand of toilet paper being advertised is as soft as the baby’s skin, is trying to use the love that most people feel for babies to convince us to buy that brand of toilet paper. There is no actual relationship between toilet paper and a baby’s skin or love for babies.

Companies that advertise clothing usually show attractive people wearing what they are selling with the subliminal message that by purchasing and wearing the clothing, the customer will give the same impression as the attractive model. However, very few of the people who purchase the clothing will ever be as attractive as the model and, when wearing the clothing, they will not give the same impression as when the clothing is worn by the model.

But advertisers don’t stop with trying to compete with other companies producing things that we need. They use advertising to create a new want that is not a legitimate need. This can be seen in advertisements for clothing of the newest style that changes every year. (Some savvy consumers try keep their clothing that has gone out of style betting that in 10 or 20 years, the style will return as the “newest” fashion; it often does.) Other examples are the latest model of a car or truck, piece of jewelry, celebrity endorsed sneaker, cell phone, computer etc. There are even some industries that are totally invented and useless – like “pet plants” or the latest craze in dolls.

Our desire for fads can get totally out of hand as in the “cabbage patch riots” of 1983 in which customers at toy stores rioted to get their children the then current craze: cabbage patch dolls.

Then there is addiction, in which those who deal in products that act directly on the human brain, such as alcohol, tobacco, heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, pain killers, and other drugs, legal and illegal, actually try to addict people to their products. Gambling companies do this as well. For example, the producers of slot machines calibrate their product so that the user gets dopamine hits every few seconds to keep them at the machine. Slot machines must all too often be serviced to clean the urine from users so entranced that they urinate at their seats rather than forgo the dopamine hits caused by the slots, even for the short time to use a bathroom.

One of the insights of the film is to add social media companies to the list of bad actors who use dopamine hits to cause addiction.

The “Singularity” and the “Point of Social Collapse”

Predictions are that unless action is taken, these two events will occur within the lifetime of today’s students.

The Singularity: Even now machines have better memories than people and can sort through much more data than people can remember or absorb. The advent of “big data” is promising new insights into problems that could otherwise not be solved. Artificial intelligence (“AI”) programmers are developing machines that have greater than human skills at problem solving and invention. These machines are constantly improving their performance. For example, a computer program designed to look for patterns in the weather can sort through much more data than can be comprehended by the human mind. They can look for patterns that a human could never see. With AI these capacities will be magnified.

The singularity is the point at which machines can autonomously improve their own software and design to create even more capable machines – far beyond human capacities. Many human jobs are already becoming irrelevant and are being lost to computer automation. Other unforeseeable changes to human civilization will, no doubt, occur. The singularity is the boundary when artificial intelligence and automation are out of human control.

The Point of Social Collapse: The movie makes the point that:

We were all looking for the moment when technology would overwhelm human strengths and intelligence. When is it going to cross the singularity, replace our jobs, be smarter than humans? But there’s this much earlier moment… when technology exceeds and overwhelms human weaknesses. This point being crossed is at the root of addiction, polarization, radicalization, outrage-ification, vanity-ification, the entire thing. This is overpowering human nature, and this is checkmate on humanity.

Are the movie makers correct when they claim that there is another tipping point that will occur that people have not foreseen until now, when technology and the greed of social media corporations destroy human society as we know it? We can call this the “Point of Social Collapse” when society spins out of control and breaks down. [This is a TWM term and not used, so far as we know, by anyone else.] Will this happen? To control social media will we have to turn to all-seeing, all-controlling big brother dictatorship on the model of modern-day “communist” China? The incompetent U.S. reaction to the Corona-19 Pandemic, fueled in large part by distortions of the truth on social media, compared with the effective Chinese reaction to the Pandemic, is a case in point.

Autonomy is a cherished human value.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Liberty is defined as the quality or state of being free: the power to do as one pleases – which includes the power to make your own choices. In society, liberty is constrained by the obligation to obey the law and to act ethically – we know about these limits and accept them because they are necessary for society to function properly. In addition, in the long run, we all benefit from a society in which people obey the law and act ethically.

However, there are vast areas in which we can operate freely and choose what we want to do. This is the liberty referred to in the Declaration of Independence. What do we mean by the power to make a choice? In order to make a free choice, we must be able to evaluate different options and select the option that is most consistent with our values – with what we consider to be important. However, if we put ourselves into situations in which people can, without us knowing it, affect those choices through psychological manipulation, then we lose that part of our autonomy – that part of our freedom.

The movie makes the point that addiction to social media monopolizes our attention, which is one of our most valuable resources. This, too, is a loss of autonomy.

USING THE MOVIE IN THE CLASSROOM

The lessons from this film and this Learning Guide can be enhanced by teaching students the following vocabulary.

Algorithm — a set of step-by-step procedures that provides the correct answer to a particular problem. In social media, algorithms take information that the social media companies have collected about their users and the provide advertisements, posts, and other information to the user according to the criteria that the social media company sets for that user.

Big Data: Massive amounts of data – much more than a human being can comprehend — that can be fed into computers to allow them to search for patterns that people could not see.

Dopamine – a neurotransmitter made in the brain. It has many uses in the body, one of them one of them being to act as a chemical messenger between neurons. It is released when the brain is experiencing a reward.

Dopamine hit – the pleasure chemicals in the brain released when someone receives a positive response from an activity, e.g., obtaining a “like” on social media.

Growth hacking – the process of using aspects of human psychology to obtain growth for a social media platform in the form of more user sign-ups and increased engagement.

Neural common currency hypothesis also called the common currency hypothesis – See discussion above.

The Point of Social Collapse – This is a term newly minted by TWM to describe the tipping point when social media and the resulting isolation, polarization, and spread of disinformation leads to the destruction of human society as we know it.

Positive intermittent reinforcement — a conditioning schedule in which a reward is not administered every time the desired response is performed.

Psychometric doppelganger — the description of your psychological traits, characteristics, and interests created by the social media companies for the purpose of predicting your preferences and behavior.

Hack people’s psychology — using your psychology against you.

The Singularity – The point at which artificial intelligence and the power of machines becomes so strong that technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, overwhelming humanity and signaling the end of the human era.

Tipping Point: the critical point at which a significant and often unstoppable effect or change takes place.

User — a customer of a drug dealer, a slot machine, or a social media company.

Class exercise – Secondary Social Media Persuasive Techniques

The primary technique of social media is to use the human desire for connection to activate the common neural currency of the brain. However, there are also other techniques to attract and engage the social media user employed not only by the social media companies but also by websites who use the internet to sell products, to influence people, or simply to communicate information. This class exercise will acquaint students with some of those techniques.

Working with students list some of the secondary social media techniques for advertisers and give examples: They include:

1. An authoritative source or a famous personality to support your claims – such as an endorsement from an expert, a media personality, or an influencer;

2. Using psychologically appropriate colors;

3. Providing persuasive content, including

a. Creating urgency and FOMO (fear of missing out); b. Promises to let people in on secrets if they come to your site or join up; c. Showing people that their friends love the product; d. Being inclusive; e. Being positive and happy; f. Connecting with emotion; g. Building curiosity.

4. Be Everywhere on the Internet;

5. Use attractive images that capture viewers’ attention and communicate content; this is especially true of attractive images of people; and

6. Give your audience something so that they will have a sense of obligation; use reciprocity.

This list was developed from the following web sites. They can also provide examples.

Tips and ‘Tricks’ From Psychology for Better Engagement on Social Media by Charli Day, 9/17/20
7 Powerful Psychology Hacks That’ll Increase Your Social Media Engagement by Neil Patel
5 Psychology Tips to Improve Your Social Media Posts by Wade Harman
6 Social Media Psychology Hacks To Increase Your Engagement Rates by Devan Ciccarelli

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. The movie makes the point that:

Is there another tipping point that people have not foreseen until now, when technology and the greed of large organizations destroy human society as we know it. We can call it the “Point of Social Collapse” when society spins out of control and breaks down. What do you think about this observation – are we moving toward a “Point of Social Collapse?” Defend your answer.

If the information in the first formulation of this question has already been given to the class, ask the question this way, “Do you agree with the concept of ‘the Social Collapse’ even before we get to the Singularity? Justify your response. How close are we to social collapse?”

2. One commentator who reviewed the film said, “We all know the excruciating nightmare that is middle school, when all of a sudden you no longer take for granted what your parents tell you and decide that what you really need is to be considered cool or at least not a total loser by your friends at school. Now multiply that by the big, unregulated world of the internet. This is why there is a precipitous spike in anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide attempts by the girls of Gen Z, current middle and high schoolers, as much as triple in some categories.”

Do you agree with this comment? State reasons in support of your opinion.

3. One of the people in the film refers to the fact that social media uses your own psychology against you. What does she mean by that?

Suggested Response:

Strong responses will refer to the fact that we are social beings and love to be engaged with others and that social media is a quick and easy way to do that. Very strong responses will refer to the Neural Common Currency Hypothesis and explain how that relates to the question.

4. Explain the meaning of the phrase, “If the service is free, then you are the product.”

The product that the social media giants sell to advertisers and influencers is information about you and your attention.

5. How are the feeds of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Instagram tailored to the user?

Algorithms designed to record our interests and preferences tell the social media companies which messages will interest us and these are the messages that are placed on the social media feeds.

6. The Neural Common Currency Hypothesis claims that the positive inputs from experiences in reality like when we make money or eat good food cause the same chemicals to be released in the brain as when we receive a “like” or connect with someone on social media. Why does this theory make a lot of sense from the standpoint of the evolution of the human species?

Human beings have no claws, no sharp teeth to bite with, no armor to protect us from other animals and no fur to protect us from the cold. As a result, we need to cooperate with our fellow human beings in families, tribes, cities, states, and nations in order to thrive. Thus, the pleasure in social contact and connection is as vitally important as making money or eating.

7. Jaron Lanier, the man how invented Facebook’s “Like” button, stated that the financial purpose of social media is to “manipulate and influence us by tiny, lucrative degrees.” That’s why the tailored feeds of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and the like are so effective at radicalizing users and fomenting division. How is this accomplished?

Strong responses will refer to the Neural Common Currency Hypothesis.

8. Some people say that the singularity has already arrived that we are already living in a time controlled by computers. Do you agree or disagree? Justify your conclusions.

There is no one correct response.

9. This film complains about manipulation by the social media giants. However, it too manipulates its audience. Cite some instances.

The entire fictional section, including the conflicts among the family members, the staged riots, the personification of the algorithm. Also, the selection of the commentators. You notice that there is no one defending the social media giants.

Follow up question: Even though some scenes are fictional, do they ring true? Do they appear to be true to life and therefore meaningful?

10. Do you think that you could go for a week without your cell phone?

There is no one correct response, but this is a great idea for a class project.

11. How important is your right to privacy?

There is no one correct answer. Teachers should guide the discussion to the relationship between privacy and autonomy. If we have no privacy our autonomy is limited. Another important concept is that the right to privacy is not absolute and must be weighed against other social interests. For example: (1) Does the right to privacy of a family or of parents include the right to stop investigations of child neglect or abuse? (2) Is a student’s right of privacy in his or her backpack or locker? What about the situations when students bring drugs, alcohol or guns to school? Is that student’s right to privacy worth you being exposed to a school in which those items are present? (3) What about the Pandemic? Should all our movements be tracked through an app on our cell phones so that wherever we have gone and whomever we have come in to contact with is stored on a government computer so that our contacts can be tracked if we come down with or are exposed to the Coronavirus?

12. What are the sources of division and polarization in American society other than social media?

There is no one answer. Good discussions will include a discussion of radio and TV talk shows and newscasts that encourage people to take extreme views; disinformation spread by foreign countries for the purpose of weakening the U.S., politicians seeking to sow division for their own political ends.

13. If you live in a country that is evenly divided and you are firmly on one side of that divide, and if you believe that the policies put forward by the other side are dangerous for the country and just plain unintelligent, why would you compromise with the other side?

Because (1) no one can be completely sure that their policies are the best in the long run and (2) the only alternative to compromise is disunion and civil war.

14. This is from the script for the movie:

[Chamath] We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in these short-term signals– hearts, likes, thumbs-up– and we conflate that with value, and we conflate it with truth. And instead, what it really is is fake, brittle popularity… that’s short-term and that leaves you even more, and admit it, vacant and empty before you did it. Because then it forces you into this vicious cycle where you’re like, “What’s the next thing I need to do now? ‘Cause I need it back.”

Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Defend your position.

15. Give some examples of social interactions and their level of importance to you?

Suggested response:

There is no one set of correct responses. TWM would rate family, relatives, teachers, and friends ahead of social media. Other examples to discuss can include, news reports on the media, strangers, authority figures etc.

16. Is social media a drug? Justify you’re answer.

Suggested Response: Strong responses will refer to the drug-like nature of social media in the dopamine hits it gives its users and the fact that it leaves users wanting more and more.

17. What do the people interviewed in the film mean when they say, “If you are not paying for the product then you are the product.”

Suggested Response: The product is information about you and your attention. Facebook, Twitter, etc. then sell this information to advertisers or influencers.

18. What does Cable News Network (CNN) have in common with social media?

Suggested Response: CNN is constantly updating with “Breaking News.” This builds curiosity and FOMO. We get an adrenaline hit when ourcuriosity is satisfied but often, especially when we watch a lot, the experience leaves us unsatisfaied.

ASSIGNMENTS, PROJECTS & ACTIVITIES

Many of the discussion questions are excellent essay prompts.

1. As a class, go through some or all of the steps in Take Control from the Center for Humane Technology .

2. Have a competition to see which members of the class can go for a week without their cell phones. To make this work, you will have to get parental permission and support for the project.

3. A person can give up their autonomy in a number of ways. For example, a person can act only in ways approved by his or her classmates. Write an essay about a situation in which a person gave up their autonomy or in which they resisted pressure and retained their autonomy.

4. Research the latest statistics on teenage depression, anxiety, and suicide and the latest theories about the reason they are increasing. Obtain materials from at least four reputable sources, peer-reviewed journals, or mainstream press.

5. Write an essay on the use of subliminal clues in social media for good and for ill and the implications of the use of subliminal clues on our right to autonomy.

CCSS ANCHOR STANDARDS

Multimedia: Anchor Standard #7 for Reading (for both ELA classes and for History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Classes). (The three Anchor Standards read: “Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media, including visually and quantitatively as well as in words.”) CCSS pp. 35 & 60. See also Anchor Standard # 2 for ELA Speaking and Listening, CCSS pg. 48.

Reading: Anchor Standards #s 1, 2, 7 and 8 for Reading and related standards (for both ELA classes and for History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Classes). CCSS pp. 35 & 60.

Writing: Anchor Standards #s 1 – 5 and 7- 10 for Writing and related standards (for both ELA classes and for History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Classes). CCSS pp. 41 & 63.

Speaking and Listening: Anchor Standards #s 1 – 3 (for ELA classes). CCSS pg. 48.

Not all assignments reach all Anchor Standards. Teachers are encouraged to review the specific standards to make sure that over the term all standards are met.

LINKS TO THE INTERNET

Center for Humane Technology
Movie Review of the Social Dilemma , Rogert Ebert.com, by Nell Minow September 08, 2020
Its intentions are good, but Netflix doc ‘The Social Dilemma’ is as manipulative as Facebook NME , by Mark Beaumont, 24th September 2020
Our Brains are No Match for Our Technology , NY Times
Surveillance Capitalism , a podcast from Harvard Business Review Podcast by Azeem Azhar
Free Speech Is Not the Same As Free Reach — Bad faith politicking about the way search algorithms work makes it harder for tech companies to solve the real problems by Azas Raskin, Wired
The Truth About Algorithms by The Truth About Algorithms by Cathy O’Neil on Youtube
Want to Work for Google? You Already Do , Joe Toscano TEDx Talks
Harvard Business Review . listen to Shoshana Zuboff, Interviewed at Exponential View with Azeem Azhar on June 19, 2019
Transcript of the film
Free Speech Is Not the Same As Free Reach Bad faith politicking about the way search algorithms work makes it harder for tech companies to solve the real problems .
The Dark Psychology of Social Networks Why it feels like everything is going haywire story by Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell December 2019 Issue The Atlantic Article
Your Brain Gets a Dopamine Hit From Information Technology Networks.com 6/20/19
Common neural code for reward and information value Kenji Kobayashi and Ming Hsu , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 6/25/19 (“[I]nformation-seeking behavior in humans is driven by the subjective value that is shaped by both instrumental and noninstrumental motives, and that this subjective value of information (SVOI) shares a common neural code with more basic reward value.”)
The root of all value: a neural common currency for choice by Dino J Levy and Paul W Glimcher , Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2012 Dec; 22(6): 1027–1038. Published online 2012 Jul 3. (“Meta analysis using data from thirteen different functional magnetic resonance imaging studies published in recent years . . . [shows] that the principle brain area associated with this common representation is a subregion of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)/orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). The data available today suggest that this common valuation path is a core system that participates in day-to-day decision making suggesting both a neurobiological foundation for standard economic theory and a tool for measuring preferences neurobiologically. . . . The data indicate that when two disparate kinds of rewards are equally desirable to a subject, then activity in this area will be of equal magnitude for these two rewards in that individual. This is strong evidence supporting the claim that a subregion in the vmPFC/OFC tracks subjective value in a single common currency of the kind first described in the abstract by economic theory hundreds of years ago.”)
A common currency for the computation of motivational values in the human striatum by Guillaume Sescousse , Yansong Li ,and Jean-Claude Dreher Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci . 2015 Apr; 10(4): 467–473. Published online 2014 Jun 19. ht (MRI study in which participants were scanned with fMRI while they were presented with single cues predicting either monetary or erotic rewards finding that “the relative response of the striatum to monetary vs erotic cues was correlated with the relative motivational value of these rewards …. Together, these results are consistent with a common currency mechanism for the representation of motivational value in the ventral striatum in the absence of choice.”)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

See Links to the Internet Section.

This Learning Guide was written by James A. Frieden . It was published on December 31, 2020

How is hugging a friend or eating a delicious grape the same as clicking on a link or receiving a “like” for a web post? Click here to find out .

LEARNING GUIDE MENU:

Benefits of the Movie Possible Problems Parenting Points Selected Awards & Cast Helpful Background Using the Movie in the Classroom Discussion Questions Assignments and Projects CCSS Anchor Standards Links to the Internet Bibliography

MOVIE WORKSHEET:

For a movie worksheet for this film, see Film Study Worksheet for a Documentary .

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the social dilemma.

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The more we learn about the insidiousness that underlies social media in the new documentary "The Social Dilemma," the more it seems like the film is bringing a sling shot to a nuclear war. What we learn in this movie is that our brains are being manipulated and even rewired by algorithms that are designed to get our attention and make us buy things, including buying into distorted ideas about the world, ourselves, and each other.

"The Social Dilemma" is from Jeff Orlowski , who gave us the similarly terrifying "what are we doing to ourselves" documentaries " Chasing Coral " and " Chasing Ice ." This one might as well be called "Chasing Us" as it asks fundamental and existential questions about whether we are literally writing (with code) ourselves out of the ability to make vital decisions about our own survival.

There have been other documentaries raising concerns about the impact of social media on our privacy and our morale and even our democracy, including the very good-to-excellent " Screened Out ," " Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World ," and " The Great Hack ." But this documentary has a significant advantage. While all of the films have impressive experts to explain how we got here and why here is not a place anyone should be, in this movie many of the experts are the same people who got us here—top executives from Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and other sites that seduce us into spending time and sharing information so they can sell both. As the film opens, we can see that the people who will be telling us their stories are uncomfortable and embarrassed. It turns out, they will be confessing and apologizing.

For example, there is Justin Rosenstein, the inventor of Facebook's most ubiquitous feature, the "like" button. He sheepishly says it was intended to "spread positivity." What could be wrong with letting your friends and their friends "like" something you've posted? Well, it turns out people get their feelings hurt if they don't get likes. So, they amend their behavior to attract more likes. Does that seem like a problem? Consider this: a large population of the people urgently trying to get "likes" are young teenagers. We all know the excruciating nightmare that is middle school, when all of a sudden you no longer take for granted what your parents tell you and decide that what you really need is to be considered cool or at least not a total loser by your friends at school. Now multiply that by the big, unregulated world of the internet. This is why there is a precipitous spike in anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide attempts by the girls of Gen Z, current middle and high schoolers, as much as triple in some categories. Then there's the new clinical term "Snapchat Dysmorphia," describing the people who seek plastic surgery to look more like the filtered images they see online.

The experts assure us their intentions were good, even the one whose job title at Facebook was head of "monetization." Another one confesses that he worked on making his site irresistibly seductive at work all day and then found himself unable to resist the very algorithmic tricks he helped to create when he went home at night.

The film's biggest mistake is a poorly-conceived dramatic re-enactment of some of the perils of social media. Even the wonderfully talented Skyler Gisondo cannot make a sequence work where he plays a teenager seduced by extremist disinformation, and the scenes with Vincent Kartheiser embodying the formulas that fight our efforts to pay attention to anything outside of the online world are just silly. The excellent feature films " Disconnect " and "Trust" have illustrated these issues far better.

We may question whether audiences are able to absorb any old media narrative requiring sustained attention without the "positive intermittent reinforcement" of a "like" button to click. Even in the world of "the attention economy" this film has some worthwhile suggestions, including taxing the "data assets" of social media companies, and be sure to stay through the credits for some clear, simple rules parents can adopt. The most important lesson from "The Social Dilemma" is that we should question everything we read online, especially if it is presented to us in a way that reflects a detailed understanding of our inclinations and preferences. And we should resist the "attention extraction model" that makes social media seem friendly and reinforcing. Now, you'll have to excuse me—I have to go delete Twitter from my phone.

Now available on Netflix.

Nell Minow is the Contributing Editor at RogerEbert.com.

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The Social Dilemma movie review (2020)
The film's biggest mistake is a poorly-conceived dramatic re-enactment of some of the perils of social media. Even the wonderfully talented Skyler Gisondo cannot make a sequence work where he plays a teenager seduced by extremist disinformation, and the scenes with Vincent Kartheiser embodying the formulas that fight our efforts to pay ...
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An Analysis of. The Social Dilemma. A review from the perspective of someone who types code, understands design, and is a consumer of social media. WARNING: SPOILERS. "This documentary-drama ...
The Social Dilemma: a wake-up call for a world drunk on dopamine
The two movies are The Social Network, which tells the story of how a po-faced Harvard dropout named Mark Zuckerberg created a powerful and highly profitable company; and The Social Dilemma, which ...
Review: The Social Dilemma
By Anna Volk. 23rd January 2021. The Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemm a, depicts the rise of social media and personalised online services. Deeply unnerving, it shows us not only their power over each and every one of us, but also their damage to society. Despite being a documentary, truths are revealed through help of a fictional plot.
The Social Dilemma
Teen depression and even suicide have been linked to engagement on social media. In the film, how this could happen comes across in a scenario of a young girl (Sophia Hammons) upset about the response to posts of her selfies. Recreations also demonstrate how an individual can be targeted by the platforms so that he behaves as they want him to.
The Mechanics and Psychology Behind the Social Dilemma
Sep 13, 2020. 16. The Social Dilemma, a years-long passion project from Jeff Orlowski and the Exposure Labs team, just premiered on Netflix this past week, and to my amazement and delight it has ...
The Social Dilemma Dilemma
The 2020 documentary *The Social Dilemma* raises a number of legitimate concerns about the negative impacts of social media technology on our society, but it somehow fails to connect the dots from its critique of social media to a far broader set of problems. The danger of this narrow view is that it leaves the audience thinking the problems are specific to social media, an idea which is ...
The Social Dilemma
The Social Dilemma is a thought provoking must see documentary. ... 5 stars 01/24/24 Full Review Nico Watched this documentary in my English class and then wrote a 4 1/4 page essay on why I ...
What 'The Social Dilemma' misunderstands about social networks
A dilemma. On Sunday night, after being encouraged to by friends and family, I hit play on a new documentary about our digital lives. Directed by Jeff Orlowski, The Social Dilemma explores the ...
Netflix's 'The Social Dilemma' looks at how social media is changing
This essay was inspired by Jeff Orlowski's The Social Dilemma documentary, which is on Netflix. It's not a review and is more of a rehash of points they made intertwined with my own opinions. I don't really know why I wrote this, I guess I just wanted to because the topic interests me.
'The Social Dilemma' Movie Review
The social dilemma explores the disproportionate impact social platforms have on the way we act, and ultimately live our lives. The film analyses the underlying causes of viral conspiracy theories, teenage mental health, political polarization, misinformation (fake news) and it makes these issues urgent. As a teenager in this day and age it's ...
The Social Dilemma by Jeff Orlowski Review
With the advent of modern technology and social media networks, communication has become much easier. However, as Sophocles, a Greek tragedian, once said: "Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse" (The Social Dilemma 00:00:17).The Social Dilemma, a documentary released in 2020 by Netflix, examines the expansion of social media behemoths and the harm they have wrought on ...
The Social Dilemma': Summary Essay
The Social Dilemma goes above and beyond by interspersing the interviews with P.S.A.-style fictional scenes of suburban families dealing with the effects of social media addiction. There are somber dinners, a teenage son (Skyler Gisondo) radicalized by YouTube suggestions espousing a vague philosophy, and a pubescent daughter (Sophia Hammons ...
Social Dilemma. Reflection Essay ( by STEPHANIE GANEB)
The Social Dilemma is a documentary that was directed by Jeff Orlowski and released on Netflix in 2020. The documentary explores the impact of social media on society and the various ethical and…
The Documentary "The Social Dilemma"
Words: 305 Pages: 1. The documentary The Social Dilemma presents social media as an undeniable force that continues to cause unprecedented damage to society. The developers and owners of such platforms exploit its unsuspecting users using data mining and surveillance technologies. The design of different social websites is capable of causing ...
Ethical Theories in "The Social Dilemma" Film Essay
In this sense, utilizing the utilitarian approach, in this case, would be a solution to the ethical concern. However, Kant's vision seems radical, too. "The Social Dilemma" refers to the famous movie "Truman's Show," using it as a metaphor for today's events. However, in contrast to Truman, these are the individuals who make this ...
THE SOCIAL DILEMMA
The Social Dilemma explores the unintended and devastating consequences of social media including: polarization, isolation, anxiety, low self-esteem, disorientation from reality, and even violence against self or others. It exposes how social media corporations exploit the human desire for attention, belonging, affirmation, and community in order to make a profit.
The Social Dilemma movie review (2020)
Even in the world of "the attention economy" this film has some worthwhile suggestions, including taxing the "data assets" of social media companies, and be sure to stay through the credits for some clear, simple rules parents can adopt. The most important lesson from "The Social Dilemma" is that we should question everything we read online ...
Essay on 'The Social Dilemma': Critical Analysis
Addiction is built into the social media site design. The 'social dilemma' indicates that many social networks exploit human weaknesses by creating what is called positive iterative reinforcement. Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist and one of the experts interviewed for the film, likens it to a Vegas slot machine.
Social Dilemma Essay. Brendan Sullivan
In the Social Dilemma they discuss the fact that "everything you do online is being watched, is being tracked, is being measured. Every single action you take is carefully monitored and recorded.". When Jeff Seibert, a former executive from Twitter says this, he refers to every image or video we look at and how long we look at it for.
The Social Dilemma final essay with the correction
"The Social Dilemma" Compare & Contrast Skyler Stevens Clayton Rosati MDIA 1030 10/8/ In the Netflix-produced film " The Social Dilemma" are interviewed many people who work in the industry, including people from platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and similar companies.In " The Facebook Dilemma," Frontline and PBS focus on individuals who work for ...
The psychology of social dilemmas: A review
Abstract. Broadly defined, social dilemmas involve a conflict between immediate self-interest and longer-term collective interests. These are challenging situations because acting in one's immediate self-interest is tempting to everyone involved, even though everybody benefits from acting in the longer-term collective interest.