The Social Dilemma

    This week in class, we are watching the movie The Social Dilemma. This is a movie that encapsulates the negatives of social media that many of us are not even aware of. The film is a combination of real actors, complemented by professionals giving their opinion in a documentary format. This movie sheds a light on the technology industry and the tactics they use to keep people addicted to their phones. From what started out as recommendations has turned into an algorithm that controls people's tendencies on social media. One of my favorite quotes from the movie is "if you're not paying for the product, then you are the product". This shines light on the advertising industry and their agenda to make money through our attention. Overtime, the processing ability of our computers and mobile devices has increased more rapidly than any technology of our time. This allows social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok to build specific algorithms that keep you on your phone as long as possible. 

In the movie, experts compare how a platform like Facebook calculates your algorithm as if sites like Wikipedia give every person a different definition. I found this very scary as all news that people see on social media is picked to influence your opinion in a certain way. The example the movie provides is with politics where if a platform believes you are a democrat, they will only feed you negative views of the republican party and vice versa. To me this is wrong and needs some sort of regulation around it as it only turns people against each other even more. Another fact I found interesting was that fake news travels six times faster than real news on what is now X. This is shown in the movie as fake conspiracies about Covid-19 spread rampant throughout 2020 and 2021. One of the best ones I saw from the movie is the belief that 5G cellular towers give out radiation that causes Covid. 

Overall, I learned that social media started out as a way of connecting with friends and utilizing new technology and has quickly turned into a weaponization of the same platforms. Although there is a lot of good that social media does, this movie highlights the dangers of spending too much time on it. I think the scariest part is that whatever major corporation has the most money and use that to influence people's thoughts through their personal algorithm.