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The Social Dilemma is a 2020 American docudrama film directed by Jeff Orlowski and written by Orlowski, Davis Coombe, and Vickie Curtis. The film explores the rise of social media and the damage it has caused to society, focusing on its exploitation of its users for financial gain through surveillance capitalism and data mining, how its design is meant to nurture addiction, its use in politics, its effect on mental health (including the mental health of adolescents and rising teen suicide rates), its role in spreading conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, and distributing disinformation which can aid groups such as flat-earthers.

The film features interviews with many individuals who give first hand experiences of working in and around the tech industry. Interviewees state that the existence of social media platforms and big tech have been instrumental in providing positive change for society, however, some decisions and paradigms have caused consequences that are problematic. Throughout the documentary, many former employees, executives and other professionals from top tech, social media, and research backgrounds give their input on the problems that can be found on a variety of online platforms. These interviews are cut together with dramatizations which tell the story of a teenager’s social media addiction interlaced with a representation of how a social media algorithm powered by artificial intelligence may work.

The Social Dilemma premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and was released on Netflix on September 9, 2020.

Synopsis
The documentary examines the effect that a handful of companies, including but not limited to Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have over the public; it is emphasized that a relatively small number of engineers make decisions that impact billions of people. The documentary examines the current state of social media platforms focusing more specifically on problems in the industry. Jeff Orlowski, director of other documentaries such as Chasing Coral and Chasing Ice, designed the film to include conversations that tackle concepts in technology such as data mining, technology addiction, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and surveillance capitalism. The film follows a cast of interviewees, most of which have left their respected companies due to varying ethical concerns that the industry as a whole has lost its way.

The documentary begins with an introduction to the array of interviewees, each listing the companies they had previously worked for and their role within each respective company. The cast of actors is then presented with news coverage of social media's adverse effects playing in the background. Each interviewee then goes over their grievances with social media. Between interview commentary, the dramatization side of the documentary provides insight into the inner workings of the technology that powers social media.

In the documentary, it is stated that social media is a "useful service that does lots of good with a parallel money machine". Social media has many beneficial qualities, a few that are mentioned in the film include the facilitation of interpersonal connection across long distances, acquiring knowledge, and even finding organ donors. However, former employees of social media companies explain how user data can be used to build models to predict user actions and how companies keep user attention to maximize the profit from advertisements. The film then dives into the manipulation techniques used by social media companies to addict their users and the psychology that is leveraged to achieve this end. The film debates that this often leads to increased depression and increased suicide rates among teens and young adults. The documentary also touches upon how user actions on online platforms are watched, tracked, measured, monitored, and recorded; companies then use this human generated capital to increase engagement, growth, and advertising revenue. Orlowski uses the cast of actors to portray this in the dramatization. Ben (played by Skyler Gisondo), the middle child of the family, slowly falls for these manipulation tactics and dives deeper into his social media addiction. Following this, the dangers of AI are touched upon once again. The interviewees go on further to explain how computer processing power is advancing exponentially, increasing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

The final point the film touches on is fake news. Tristan Harris refers to it as a "disinformation-for-profit business model" and that companies make more money by allowing "unregulated messages to reach anyone for the best price". The film discusses the dangerous nature of the flow of fake news regarding COVID-19 and propaganda that can be used to influence political campaigns. The documentary also champions Wikipedia for being a neutral landscape that shows all users the exact same information without curating or monetizing it. The documentary concludes with the interviewees casting their fear over artificial intelligence's role in social media and the influence these platforms have on society. The interviewees come to the unanimous decision that something must be changed for society to prosper. They claim that social media companies have no fiscal reason to change, one example of a way to combat this would be to charge taxes on the data that social media companies acquire to incentivize lowering data collection measures.

Countermeasures
As the credits roll, the interviewees recommend taking the following countermeasures to protect oneself against social media


 * Turn off notifications or reduce the number of notifications you receive
 * Uninstall social media and news apps that are wasting time
 * Use a search engine that doesn't store search history
 * Use browser extensions to block recommendations
 * Fact-check before sharing
 * Obtain sources of information with different perspectives, including sources one might disagree with
 * Do not give devices to children; no screen time.
 * Never accept recommended YouTube videos
 * Try to avoid any clickbait material
 * Keep devices out of the bedroom after a certain time
 * Do not allow social media use until children reach high school

Business Model
Many social media companies operate on the basis of user retention and growth due to ad revenue business models; this allows social media platforms to be free to use. Some former company executives, such as Tim Kendall from Facebook, have said that a guiding principle of product creation and monetization is to acquire as much of a user’s attention as possible to increase engagement and place more advertisements. This leads to social media paradigms such as the creation of the Facebook like button and the subconscious social-validation feedback loop that keeps users engaged. In order to achieve higher engagement, algorithms enhance the social media experience on a per-user basis through the use of large amounts of data. Utilizing this data as leverage capital, social media companies are able to create large profiles on each user’s activity and interests thus increasing the efficiency of matching users to advertisers and other content on the platform. This characteristic is unique to social media, software products such as Photoshop do not spend countless hours and resources developing algorithms to customize their product on a per user basis to increase commercial incentives. Due to massive collection of personal information, social media companies have come under scrutiny by the United States government, as well as the public, for violations of privacy. Data privacy and collection, as a whole, has gone unregulated in the tech industry for many years, but lawmakers are beginning to hold executives accountable.

Tech Landscape
Data is being collected at rates that have never been possible in the history of humanity. The documentary details that processing power of computing technology has increased exponentially since the 1960’s and has catalyzed the ability to collect more data at a faster rate. The documentary states that no other technology in the history of humanity has advanced at a faster pace and that humans are virtually the same as they were in the 1960’s. In the information age, people are exposed to more information than ever before powered by warehouses full of computers and deeply connected networks. The rates of growth between humans and technology are compared to explain that there is a disconnect between human adaptation and tech evolution which has raised negative societal implications. As stated in the film, the algorithms used to power social media platforms are becoming increasingly complex and intelligent to the point where they iterate and improve themselves autonomously. The documentary explains how algorithms are developed with a goal state in mind, and the goal state for many algorithms on social media platforms is to increase efficiency for commercial interest. Parallels can be drawn between the rise of the newspaper and television industries in terms of information dissemination; however, impacts both positive and negative are exacerbated by the interconnected and global nature of the Internet and modern technology.

Scientific Basis
The documentary explains how an extended amount of media consumption can subtly have a plethora of negative impacts on individuals. Orlowski presents specific data to support this thesis, such as:


 * A 62% increase in hospitalizations for American females ages 15-19 and a 189% increase in females ages 10-14 due to self harm, beginning in 2010-2011.
 * Johnathan Haidt explains that this spike is due to the great amount of time spent on social media, because people have the tendency to check social media as often as they can and the psychological effects it has on the brain. If a user is feeling distressed, media can release dopamine into the brain, and they eventually find themselves dependent upon it. Harris refers to this as a "digital pacifier" in the film. The reliance on technology in this manner can lead to inability to properly deal with emotions because it alters the development of one's frontal cortex.
 * The release of dopamine makes technology work similar to addictive drugs, such as alcohol or nicotine.
 * A 70% increase in suicide for females ages 15-19 and a 151% increase in females ages 10-14, beginning when social media was first introduced in 2009.
 * The phenomenon of patients wanting to receive plastic surgery in order to look more similar to a picture with a filter on it due to Snapchat Dysmorphia, which can lead to a body dysmorphic disorder and the lowering of one's self esteem
 * This is because individuals may have a constant feeling that they should take on an appearance similar to the one they have on social media, leading to a spike in individuals diagnosed with depression.
 * Snapchat introduced the first filters in January 2015. Since then, there has been a significant increase in body dysmorphic disorders (BDD), which negatively affects one's mental and physical functionalities.
 * Harris explains that increased media usage can lead children to "compare themselves to unrealistic standards of beauty".
 * The practice of using positive intermittent reinforcement in media development to keep users' attention for longer periods of time. It is mentioned that this psychological practice in media is similar to how slot machines work in Vegas, in which the user is unsure if and when something good will happen, so they continue to check their devices in hopes that something new will come.
 * People are highly likely to believe false information on the Internet, such as conspiracy theories, affecting off-screen behavior and lives.
 * False information on Twitter spreads six times faster than true information, according to an MIT study, because people have a greater emotional reaction towards fake news.
 * Pizzagate was a popular conspiracy theory that circulated the internet in 2016 which claimed that politicians were associated with human trafficking, and that Comet Ping Pong was one of the locations where the events took place.
 * Renée Diresta explains that the algorithms are biased towards false information because as more people show interest in such articles, it is recommended to more people.
 * The documentary also explains that due to false information having high success in grabbing user attention, it produces large amounts of revenue for social media companies. This can be partially attributed to the phenomenon known as clickbait.

Reception
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 87% based on 485 reviews, with an average rating of 7.62/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Clear-eyed and comprehensive, The Social Dilemma presents a sobering analysis of our data-mined present". On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 78 out of 100, based on nine critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

ABC News's Mark Kennedy called the film "an eye-opening look into the way social media is designed to create addiction and manipulate our behavior, told by some of the very people who supervised the systems at places like Facebook, Google, and Twitter" and said it will "[make you] immediately want to toss your smartphone into the garbage can ... and then toss the garbage can through the window of a Facebook executive". Variety's Dennis Harvey said the film does a good job of explaining how "what's at risk clearly isn't just profit, or even poorly socialized children, but the empathetic trust that binds societies, as well as the solidity of democratic institutions [which] we're learning can be all-too-effectively undermined by a steady diet of perspective-warping memes". According to IndieWire's David Ehrlich, the film is the "single most lucid, succinct, and profoundly terrifying analysis of social media ever created". A Financial Times review said the film "carefully details the skyrocketing levels of depression among children and teenagers; the flat-earthers and white supremacists; the genocide in Myanmar; the Covid misinformation; [and] the imperiling of objective truth and social disintegration". The New York Times said that the film features "conscientious defectors from companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram [who] explain that the perniciousness of social networking platforms is a feature, not a bug". A review in the Los Angeles Times Kevin Crust stated that "while most people are aware that they're being mined for data while on these sites, few realize how deep the probe goes ... if you think the trade-off is merely getting targeted ads for your favorite sneakers, you are in for a big shock".

Adi Robertson of The Verge called The Social Dilemma an "enjoyably lucid explanation of how sites keep users scrolling and clicking," but wrote that the film offered a "familiar and simplistic assessment of how the internet has changed our lives". Author and digital media researcher Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argued that the film gives an inaccurate portrayal of how social media algorithms work and exaggerates how much control they have over their users. Facebook released a statement on its about page that the film “gives a distorted view of how social media platforms work to create a convenient scapegoat for what are difficult and complex societal problems".