Movie Synopsis: The Social Dilemma
A must to watch movie of the year that will change how we use our social media accounts (warning — major spoiler ahead)
The Social Dilemma is a documentary movie produced by Netflix and was released in September 2020. The movie has two major lines. One is the interviews of ex social media big company executives who left the company because they think, the ethical problem caused is not worth the benefits gained. The other story line is a drama, centered on a family who got impacted by the continuous “wrong” use of social medias.
Semiconductor technology, especially micro processors power, rose significantly in 2010. This leads to huge development of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence researches. Year 2010–2011 is when the social media started to boom also. And also the same time when rate of suicidal cases of teenagers in US rose exponentially.
Coincidence? Not really.
Let us talk how it began.
Instagram, youtube, facebook, snapchat, etc — why are we using them? To be connected. Ok, connected with whom? To our friends, family and society of course, and if possible to connect to whole world.
Indeed social media has brought many benefits to life, like ease the communications, even able to search missing person or to search organs donors (cited in the movie). But how the social media get used nowadays, and how it impacts the society, was not in the mind of the creators when they were developing these.
Let us take Facebook for example. It is being used by two billions of users around the world. To make system as large as that, you can imagine the money they spend everyday to pay the servers, storages that always be extended everyday for new contents, and also bandwidth. From where they get the money to pay ? Mostly from advertisement.
Why would ads companies paid the service to use in Facebook? Because Facebook promises to show the ads only to high potentials users. How does Facebook know that I am fit to the ads. Simple. If I open video, pictures or talk, discuss about martial arts, then Facebook will start recommending me products related with sports. Facebook machine learning, continuously non-stop 24 hours monitors our behavior. All links we clicked, all images we saw, all videos we played, all posts we created — all these are combined to build on our personalized model, to predict what we will do next, to predict what we like.
It doesn’t sound so bad.
But it does not stop there. In order to sharpen the machine learning on your profiles, and to boost more advertisements, Facebook will require you to keep online and keep using Facebook as long as possible. The active notifications sent to your phone and items you see on your wall have been designed to keep you engaged.
What you see on your social media, and what others see on theirs, are different.
When you see a politic video in Youtube talking about candidate A, Youtube engine will “research” whether you are interested in topic A or not. If the outcome is yes, Youtube will show all videos related with A, and rarely about candidate B.
Vise versa, persons who are inclined to candidate B will receive many positive videos about candidate B. What does this impact?
Extreme separation in US politics, is the example of the impact. The recent polls, according to the movie showed, according to Republicans, the Democrats people are all bad guys. Likewise, according to Democrats, the Republicans are enemies of the country. And this gets worse over time. For every side there is specific social media groups talking about how good A is and how bad B is.
Social Media is no longer about sharing the truth
Social media has been abused to share hoaxes and fake news. The information era has turned into disinformation era. How easy fake news can spread to anybody to this world, and how easy somebody can believe the news, because they social media, is filled in with that topics.
“Hey, this is everywhere, everybody is talking about this, so this must be true”
Right now because everybody can post and share as they like, there is no way to govern if the content is actually legitimate or not. The lines between fact, fake, jokes, bullies have become blurry.
Social Media also causes addictions
When people are developing UI/UX of social media, they do not do it by accident. There are disciplines in human psychology that helped them to make such engaging software, to be used continuously, by the users.
Basically it abuses the fact of human basic needs to be in contact with each other, because human is a social creature. When you upload a picture, you want it to be seen by your friends. You want them to recognize it. To enhance even further, you want it to be LIKED by your friends, even virtually. You feel happy if many people liked your photo. You feel sad if somebody gives thumb down. Making a friend online, means like having a real friend. Being unfriended in Facebook will lead you to actually break friendship in real life. You are happy when somebody says you are cute. You feel desperate when somebody posted that your ear looks like elephant ear. Signs that you are addicted to it.
100 posts saying you are cute — 1 post saying your ear looks weird, making you depressed. This makes you regrets on why you are born with ears like this. Is it possible to cut this ear, or is it possible to have plastic surgery to change our looks?
Social Media, Bullying, and Depressions
It is much easier to trolls on social media, than to directly say in person. This increases rates of bullying in social media. When we post status update or photo, our addicted brain tells us “oh boy oh boy oh boy — I can’t wait who is gonna reply — I hope I look cute on the photo!”
Then somebody replied “cute” — our addicted brain produces dopamine that makes us happy.
Then somebody replied “ugly” — our addicted brain which already expects that we get acknowledged and get appreciated by ALL of our friends, cannot accept this.
Our brain is not designed by nature to continuously receive reviews and acknowledgements for every minutes, and keep coming in as long as you are connected, by all people around the world. These continued judgements, sent virtually, come everyday — is changing on how we think about ourselves, and what we need to change. Most of the time, things we are unable to change, i.e. physically, or economic status. When you can’t change these according to VIRTUAL WORLD’s expectation, you get hopeless. And when there is no hope, you choose to suicide.
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My dear friends, there are much more to see on the movie. What I wrote above is just small excerpt from the entire issues happening. I do really hope that by watching this movie, we are able to change our point of view regarding social media — know how to use it wisely and know when not to use it.
Reduce screen time — ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶m̶e̶d̶i̶u̶m̶s̶— more real world engagement. Cheers 🍻
