The Social Dilemma

I just finished watching a documentary called The Social Dilemma on Netflix. (Thanks to my friend Kevin for recommending it.) The movie is horrifying, and I think everyone should watch it. The movie asks and answers the question, What’s the problem with social media?

I haven’t been a fan of social media for years. The algorithms behind it are designed to literally addict people to their screens, thereby wasting their time, diminishing the quality of their lives, and harming their relationships. It serves up distortions and outright lies, keeps people in their media echo chambers, and fosters divisiveness. But I didn’t appreciate just how dangerous it really is before watching this film.

Many of us are familiar with the adage, “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.” Because social media is free to its users, users are not the customers; advertisers are the customers, and what they’re buying is the time and attention of users. But Jaron Lanier, computer scientist and author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, says that’s a simplification. The real product, he says, is “the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception.” The nature of that change, multiplied by billions of people, is leading individuals and humanity down a terribly destructive path.

Just a few of the examples are a sharp upturn in suicides among teen and pre-teen girls, the timing of which corresponds to the proliferation of social media; the horrific mistreatment of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, where the only internet most people know is Facebook, on which vicious lies about the Rohingya are pervasive; and of course the profound political divisiveness in the United States, and the inclination of large numbers of people to believe preposterous lies and conspiracies about members of the opposite party.

Part of the problem is that the algorithms social media platforms use to hook users, and keep them clicking, swiping and coming back for more, have no regard for the truth. They can’t even discern what’s true. All they know is the effect of what they show you on how long you stay with the site and what you do while you’re there. And what best serves their purposes is not what’s true, it’s whatever startles you, upsets you, outrages you, and confirms your beliefs and biases.

 “There was an MIT study,” Tristan Harris says, “that found that fake news on Twitter spreads six times faster than true news. What is the world going to look like when one has a six-times advantage over the other one?”

I just want to pour everything I saw in The Social Dilemma into this post, but that would be impractical. Instead, here are some quotes from the film that I found particularly striking.

One of the ways I try to get people to understand just how wrong places like Facebook are is to think about Wikipedia. When you go to a page, you’re seeing the same thing as other people. So it’s one of the few things online that we at least hold in common. But just imagine for a second that Wikipedia said, “We’re going to give each person a different customized definition, and we’re going to be paid by people for that.” So Wikipedia would be spying on you; Wikipedia would calculate, what’s the thing I can do to get this person to change a little bit on behalf of some commercial interest? And then it would change the entry. Can you imagine that? Well you should be able to because that’s exactly what’s happening on Facebook. That’s exactly what’s happening on your YourTube feed.

Jaron Lanier

When you go to Google and type in “Climate change is,” you’re going to see different results depending on where you live. In certain cities you’re going to see an autocomplete with “Climate change is . . . a hoax.” In other places you’re going to see “Climate change is . . . causing the destruction of nature.” And that’s a function not of what the truth is about climate change, but rather where you happen to be Googling from, and the particular things that Google knows about your interests.

Tim Kendall, former executive at Facebook, former president of Pinterest, CEO of Moment

The film makes a compelling case that huge tech companies and their social media platforms are an existential threat to humanity. That’s sounds alarmist, I know. But when you step back and look at what these platforms are doing to our collective behavior and perception of reality, it seems nothing less than self-evident.

Quoting Tristan Harris again,

We’re all looking out for the moment when technology would overwhelm human strengths and intelligence. When is it going to cross the singularity, replace our jobs, and be smarter than humans? But there’s this much earlier moment when technology exceeds and overwhelms human weaknesses. This point being crossed is at the root of addiction, polarization, radicalization, outrage-ification . . . the entire thing is overpowering human nature. And this is checkmate for humanity.