“The Social Dilemma”
By: Grace Davis
If you’re someone who owns a mobile device or has access to the Internet, it’s likely you’re one of billions of people who have social media. And let’s be honest—if you don’t have social media and you live in the 21st century, one might have to assume you live under a rock or you’re over the age of 60. But it may not be a bad thing to be an outcast in the world of social media, according to “The Social Dilemma.”
“The Social Dilemma,” directed by Jeff Orlowski, is a disturbing but captivating documentary that explores the dangerous impact of social media. “The Social Dilemma” follows a fictional family who are addicted to their phones—not an atypical family nowadays. The film is guided by narration from engineers and software developers sounding the alarm on their products, which we use every day—who claim to have had no idea of the political, social, and economic changes they would spark.
The main techie in the film is Tristan Harris, a former Google Design Ethicist who now works at The Center for Humane Technology, a company he co-founded. Tristan is known in the media as Silicon Valley’s “closest thing to a conscience.” Tristan started at Google and found himself becoming addicted to the product he was designing, Gmail, and felt concerned that no one wanted to do anything about it. Harris worked on a presentation every night for months, showing that the product was addictive and it was their job to do something about it. The presentation spread like wildfire among Google employees and everyone agreed that they felt it too, but nothing changed. Harris left Google because he felt that “the tech industry was losing its way.”
Harris gave us insight into why our social media accounts don’t cost any money. Before watching this documentary, it had never crossed my mind. In short: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” Social media platforms are funded by advertising, and advertisers are fiercely competing for our attention. In the world of advertising, there has never been more certainty than social media—everyone uses it, and advertisers use the data that we naively allow them access to to easily place ads where they know their target audience will be. Jeff Siebert, former Twitter executive and serial tech entrepreneur, spelled it out, saying, “What I want people to know is that everything they’re doing is being watched, is being tracked, and is being measured.”
This made me think about the idea that our phones are listening to us—but really it’s even worse because they’re watching our every move. Our social media accounts are curated—social media platforms know what we like to look at, what we like to watch, and pretty much everything you could think of. This is important to realize when thinking about politics today. What a right-wing conservative sees on their Twitter feed is drastically different from what a left-leaning liberal sees.
In the documentary, they stress how social media has divided us politically more than ever before. This was shown when Facebook conducted a massive scale emotional contagion experiment that found that through subliminal cues on some users' feeds, they were able to get more people to vote in the midterm election. Facebook, along with other social media platforms, has found a way to affect real world behavior and emotions without triggering user awareness. Social media does an incredibly efficient job at amplifying gossip and hearsay to the point that we don’t know what’s true. I think we can all relate to this with COVID-19. I hear different things about a COVID-19 vaccine every day. It’s talked about so often on the Internet that I don’t know what to believe. Another fact the documentary highlighted is if you go into Google and type, “Climate change is...” you’re going to get different results based on where you live. This is all important to take into consideration when you form biases off of what you see on your phone—because it could be, and most likely is, totally different than what someone else sees.