The Social Dilemma is a documentary that was released in 2020. It focuses on the dangers of social media and how it is rapidly manipulating human weaknesses and spreading false information. I found the Social Dilemma interesting because while it was a documentary that interviewed many people who previously worked in social media, it also provided a fictional story that adhered to the warnings in order to highlight these dangers. The narrative follows a family with three teenagers, two of which are struggling with the addiction of their phones.
In the documentary, computer scientists as well as psychologists such as Tristan Harris, Jaron Lanier, Tim Kendall, Jonathan Haidt, and Shoshana Zuboff explored three main arguments on how social media is affecting our society: the control over humans, the spread of disinformation, the deterioration of teenage mental health, and the spread of disinformation.
Tristan Harris is the co-founder of Humane Technology, the organization that created the Social Dilemma. He was previously a design ethicist at Google until he realized that no one was working to make it less addictive. Harris highlighted that social media companies create models to predict each user’s actions and keep them hooked on the app. This infinite tracking is also used to guarantee that the ads that they place will be successful. Harris also stated that if something is a tool, it just sits patiently waiting to be used, whereas if something isn’t a tool, it wants and demands things from you, in order to manipulate you. Social media is implied to be the latter, since it has its own goals and achieves them by using your psychology against you. Another speaker in the documentary, Jaron Lanier, pointed out that these apps are essentially “selling” their users. He argued that if you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product. To quote him, “it’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior that is the product.” Advertisers pay companies to get our attention, and each app competes for our attention. When humans are put against supercomputers with infinite knowledge compared to us, we are not going to win, therefore we get addicted and our devices start controlling us. Technology overwhelms human weakness, and is overpowering human nature. These apps can manipulate people and their choices without their awareness.
In the narrative side of the documentary, social media’s control over humans is exhibited when it shows the computer behind the teenage boy, Ben’s, screen constantly trying to keep him hooked. This AI is seen as the “villain” in the story and sends notifications to his phone to keep him on it, then places media that he’s enjoyed before in front of him so he stays on his phone. Since humans’ psychology is not evolved enough to be able to handle the idea of thousands of people perceiving us at a time, especially not young people, our mental health is deteriorating. In teenage girls in the United States, self harm in teens aged 14 to 19 went up 62%, and aged 10 to 14 it went up 189%, nearly triple what it was before, since 2009. For this same demographic, suicide rates went up for girls aged 15 to 19 by 70%, and 151% for girls aged 10 to 14. Gen Z, the generation born after around 1997, is the first generation to have had access to social media as tweens and teenagers. This generation uses their devices as something of a “digital pacifier” when they are scared, anxious, or uncertain. Because of this, the new generation has less of an ability to handle problems like that. Many people argue that social media is just something humans can adjust to, as we have adjusted to everything else. The fundamental difference is that technology is advancing so much and so quickly that we don’t have the ability to handle it because we can’t evolve fast enough. From the 1960s to today, processing power has gone up more than a trillion times.
The effect social media has on teenagers is manifested in the fictional story in the documentary when the mother of the family decides to lock away everyone’s phones during dinner. The youngest girl, who is around 11, doesn’t even last one minute before she smashes open the locked box to get access to her phone. We later see her in her room, taking selfies, putting on dozens of filters, and then posting them. One of the comments criticizes her ears and says they’re too big, and the girl tries to hide them under her hair and starts crying. Naturally, people are made to want others to like them and to be aware of this fact, but we aren’t able to know how thousands of people are perceiving us at the same time.
With the rise of technology, we have entered something of a “disinformation age”. Social media skews information and news to adhere to where you are and what you like. In the documentary, they described it as “2.7 billion Truman shows”. In the Truman Show, a man named Truman grows up from birth in a TV show that is always live, and he has no idea. People are easily manipulated without ever knowing because you think that other people are seeing the same information that you are, but they’re not. Therefore you have a false sense that everyone agrees with you. This has caused a lot of political polarization recently because people on each side aren’t seeing the same information as the other side, and are therefore less informed on different perspectives. There was an MIT study that found that fake news on Twitter spreads “six times faster than true news.” The reason for this is that people are interacting more with fake news that is more ridiculous or fits what you think better than what is actually true. Therefore, false information makes more money than true information, so social media apps spread the fake news more.
In the story portion of the documentary, Ben gets a lot of conspiracy theories on his feed that the government is lying to everyone and that people can’t trust them. He is warned by his sister that those videos are propaganda, but he ignores her. Ben then goes to a protest for this cause instead of going to school, and eventually gets arrested.
After watching the Social Dilemma, I found myself questioning what I saw on social media more often. Before watching this documentary, I more or less blindly followed what I saw as, and what I believed was, the general public opinion. Because of this, the section in the film that focused on the “disinformation age” had the biggest impact on me. I had always assumed that my political views were objectively correct and was confused on how the people on the opposite side could possibly think differently. Now, I understand that both sides are supported by a great amount of misinformation and don’t even realize it. With the rise of social media, it’s getting harder and harder to decipher what is true or false because both will be believed easily by people who want to believe it.
