New Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma takes aim at social media, revealing why Twitter, Facebook, and alike are scarier than they seem. 2020 has seen the world encounter one crisis after another, while populations become ever more politically divided, and things generally seem to teeter on the edge of oblivion. And according to Netflix's The Social Dilemma, the problem – at least in part – is social media and the tech industry.
The notion that social media can be harmful certainly isn't new – in fact, there's a whole slew of social media-based horror movies, including 2020's best horror movie, Host. But Jeff Orlowski's documentary strikes a distressing chord due to the fact its warnings come directly from tech industry insiders and former employees of social media firms, some of whom actually helped build the social apps they now decry. The Social Dilemma leverages these tech renegades' specialist knowledge to paint a chilling picture of a new digital economy that turns individuals – and specifically their attention – into products to be sold for profit. Using as a foundation the work of former Google design ethicist and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, Tristan Harris, Orlowski's documentary lifts the lid on an industry that has seemingly managed to not only secretly manipulate the consciousness of users, but actually help destabilize the current world order.
As the interviewees state in the film’s opening moments, summarizing the problem with social media is difficult. Thankfully, Orlowski does a good job of making a complex issue accessible by moving steadily through a list of increasingly disturbing issues that ultimately amount to a devastating indictment of social media and technology. The Chasing Ice director allows each contributor – from the designer of Facebook's 'Like' button to the creator of YouTube's recommendation algorithm – to clearly explain why the apps they helped birth are now undermining the social order. Using this method, along with a fictionalized dramatization of social media degrading an entire family, the documentary provides enough unsettling information to make most viewers consider deleting their social apps.
The revelations in The Social Dilemma paint a complex picture of societal woe, beginning with an explanation of how social media users are not the real customers of the service in question – whether it's Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, or even Pinterest. Instead, users themselves are a product being sold to the real customers: companies looking to promote their products and ideas. This is summed up in the line: “if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product”. Next, it’s revealed just how closely social media companies monitor user activity, recording how long a certain photo is looked at, how many times a user visits a particular profile, and how long they've been away from the app. According to the Netflix documentary, bringing users back to the app involves invasive techniques such as carefully-planned push notifications based on the data gathered from the aforementioned monitoring. These techniques are designed to maximize the user's time spent looking at the screen and the potential for them to see an ad.
Things don't get a whole lot better from there. Next, an alarming rise in suicides among preteen and teen girls is shown to correlate with social media's rise in popularity. Orlowski then focuses on how social media reinforces its users’ existing opinions and preferences with an unrelenting feed of tailored content, most of which is curated by algorithms that have evolved past the point where their own human creators understand exactly how they work. Finally, the film argues this continuous supply of agreeable content, through the echo chambers it's built, has ultimately created more divisiveness and threatens to destabilize democracies worldwide. Even when it comes to the ongoing pandemic, social media is presented as making matters worse through COVID-19 conspiracies and misinformation, which Bill Gates himself has spoken out about. It sometimes comes across as a far-fetched theory, and there's no doubt the documentary sometimes appears to revel in its message of doom and gloom. But by the end of The Social Dilemma, much of the problems facing humankind certainly make a lot more sense.