Someone told me about this documentary today. I don’t have netflix, so I’m not able to take a look, but it seems interesting. Anyone seen it?
https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/
Never before have a handful of tech designers had such control over the way billions of us think, act, and live our lives.
The Mental Health Dilemma
A 5,000 person study found that higher social media use correlated with self-reported declines in mental and physical health and life satisfaction.
— American Journal of Epidemiology, 2017
The Democracy Dilemma
The # of countries with political disinformation campaigns on social media doubled in the past 2 years.
— New York Times, 2019
The Discrimination Dilemma
64% of the people who joined extremist groups on Facebook did so because the algorithms steered them there.
— Internal Facebook report, 2018
We tweet, we like, and we share— but what are the consequences of our growing dependence on social media? This documentary-drama hybrid reveals how social media is reprogramming civilization with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.
From the creators of Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral, The Social Dilemma blends documentary investigation and narrative drama to disrupt the disrupters, unveiling the hidden machinations behind everyone’s favorite social media and search platforms.
4 replies on “The Social Dilemma”
I found it very enlightening and scary. The best part about it is that there are high up execs and technical people that used to work for the companies involved telling you how bad it is. How they manipulate you, the product, into spending more and more time on their platforms and feed you info that they want to feed you. They won’t let their own children on these social platforms and say that, even knowing how the platforms are designed to manipulate, they would find themselves falling into their own traps and spending hours a day on them. Highly recommend.
Said about these “free” platforms…if something is free then YOU are the product.
Yup. I no longer create accounts with any platform that doesn’t have a paid option. Just a standing policy now. (Paid *personal* option, I should add–as opposed to businesses paying to get their ads into peoples’ news feeds, etc.)
Facebook makes people less happy. They should avoid it like the plague.
It was a vast relief when I shut down my account years ago.