The Social Dilemma is a 2020 American docudrama film directed by Jeff Orlowski and written by Orlowski, Davis Coombe, and Vickie Curtis. The documentary covers the negative social effects of social media and is interspersed by a dramatized narrative surrounding a family of five who are increasingly affected by problematic social media use.
The Social Dilemma premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, on January 26, 2020, and was released on Netflix on September 9, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. It received mostly positive reviews from critics, who praised its message and use of interviews with established tech experts but criticized the narrative and lack of nuance in addressing technological problems.
Synopsis
The Social Dilemma covers the psychological underpinnings and manipulation techniques by which, it claims, social media and technology companies addict users. People's online activity is watched, tracked, and measured by these companies, who then use this data to build artificial intelligence models that predict the actions of their users. Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, explains in the documentary that there are three main goals of tech companies:
The engagement goal: to increase usage and make sure users continue scrolling.
The growth goal: to ensure users are coming back and inviting friends, who invite even more friends.
The advertisement goal: to make sure that while the above two goals are happening, the companies are also making as much money as possible from advertisements.
Harris summed this up with the warning: "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product", paraphrasing earlier insights from Television Delivers People, Tom Johnson, and Andrew Lewis.[1]
The film also discusses the dangers of fake news. Harris argues that this is a "disinformation-for-profit business model" and that companies make more money by allowing "unregulated messages to reach anyone for the best price".
In the end credits, the interviewees propose ways the audience can take action to fight back, such as turning off notifications, never accepting recommended videos on YouTube, using search engines that do not retain search history, and establishing rules in the house on cell phone usage.
Narrative
The documentary uses a fictional dramatized narrative to illustrate the issues discussed, centering around "a middle-class, average American family"[2] whose members each interface with the internet differently: Ben, a teenage high school student who falls deeper into social media addiction and online radicalization; Isla, an adolescent who develops depression and low self-esteem from social media's unrealistic beauty standards;[3] Cassandra, an older teenager who does not have a mobile phone and is depicted as being free from online manipulation; and their mother and stepfather, who try to curb their children's screen time but do not fully understand the factors of the situation. The narrative depicts Ben and Isla as increasingly affected by social media and internet addictions, driven by the Engagement, Growth, and Advertisement AIs, represented by anthropomorphized tech executives in a "behind-the-screen" control room, who find ways to keep their users as addicted to social media as possible, while only viewing them as depersonalized avatars, with little concern for theirs or society's well-being.[2]
The narrative starts with Isla ignoring her mother's requests to set the table, followed by her increasingly becoming depressed after her appearance is criticized on social media. After Cassandra criticizes Isla and Ben's problematic smartphone use, their mother proposes locking everyone's phones in a safe so they can have dinner together, but when one phone receives a notification, Isla tries to open the safe and ultimately breaks it open with a tool, damaging Ben's phone screen. In return for a new phone screen, Ben promises his mother he will not use his phone for a week, but the AIs, confused as to why he is suddenly inactive, decide to draw him back in by sending him a notification that his ex has started a new relationship, prompting Ben to break his promise and doomscroll in an attempt to cope. The AIs, deducing he is a centrist, begin recommending him radical centrist views to keep him engaged, which quickly devolve into propaganda and conspiracy theories by the anti-democratic "Extreme Center" movement, radicalizing Ben and affecting his daily life to the point of near-isolation. Ultimately, Ben attends an Extreme Center rally that devolves into violence when similarly-radicalized counter-protestors arrive. Cassandra learns Ben is there and searches for him, but both are detained by riot police. At the end of the narrative, the AIs merge into one entity while Ben's avatar becomes a human representation of himself, and they stare at each other.[2]
Tim Kendall, former director of monetization at Facebook,[8] former president of Pinterest, and CEO of Moment (a mobile application that tracks screen time)[9]
Jaron Lanier, computer philosophy writer, computer scientist, visual artist, and composer of contemporary classical music; author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018)[10]
Roger McNamee, early investor at Facebook,[11] author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe (2019), and cofounder of the venture capital firm Elevation Partners[12]
Randima Fernando, former product manager at Nvidia, former executive director at Mindful Schools, and co-founder and executive director of the Center for Humane Technology[29]
Joe Toscano, former experience design consultant at Google and author of Automating Humanity (2018)[30]
Bailey Richardson, early team member of Instagram and partner at People & Company[31]
The Social Dilemma centers on the social and cultural impact of social media usage on regular users, with a focus on algorithmically enabled forms of behavior modification and psychological manipulation. The film depicts an array of related themes, including technological addiction, fake news, depression, and anxiety.[43]
One interviewee, Tim Kendall, a former director of Facebook, spoke up on the alarming goal of the company: updating the app with increased addictiveness for a consistent boost in engagement.[8] Another interviewee, Tristan Harris, former Google designer, compares the addiction level to a "Vegas slot machine" as users "check their phones hoping that they have a notification, as it's like they are pulling the lever of a slot machine hoping they hit the jackpot".[44]
Misinformation and fake news are commonly spread on social media, and users are unable to distinguish between fake and real news, resulting in differences in ideology and societal division. The immersion of users in this app, who are thus exposed to limitless information, according to Kendall, could potentially lead to tension within society.[8]
The Social Dilemma also discusses how social media can cause depression and give users anxiety. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and author, highlights the influence of social media on depression and anxiety, especially in younger adolescents. The documentary reports statistics on depression, self-harm, and suicide leading to hospitalization, specifically in American teen girls, resulting from social media use. The number of hospitalizations remained stable until around 2011 and rose a significant 62 percent in older teen girls (ages 15–19) and up 189 percent in younger teen girls (ages 10–14) since 2009 in the US. The same pattern is shown in the rates of suicide, which had increased 70 percent in older teen girls and 151 percent in younger teen girls compared to 2001–2010. According to Haidt's interview, people born after 1996 have grown up in a society where social media usage is the norm, thus resulting in consistent exposure to overwhelming content from a young age.
Production
Inspiration
Jeff Orlowski, who is mostly known for his work in Chasing Coral and Chasing Ice, began production on The Social Dilemma in 2018 and concluded it in 2019. When asked where his inspiration came from during the film's panel at Deadline Hollywood's Contenders Documentary event, Orlowski said that he has "always been curious about big systemic and societal challenges".[45] He came to believe that "invisibly, a handful of designers in Silicon Valley are writing code that is shaping the lives of billions of people around the planet".[45]
We were drawn to tell the stories of our changing glaciers and changing coral reefs because they were powerful signs of a huge global issue facing humanity: climate change. When we started talking with Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology, we saw a direct parallel between the threat posed by the fossil fuel industry and the threat posed by our technology platforms. Harris calls this "the climate change of culture", an invisible force that is shaping how the world gets its information and understands truth. Our hope has always been to work on big issues, and we now see the "social dilemma" as a problem beneath all our other problems.
The film's music is composed by Mark Crawford, "a Primetime Emmy-nominated composer and filmmaker" who was nominated for an ASCAP Award for his work on The Social Dilemma.[48] With the use of "human-produced" and mechanical sounds, as Crawford explained in The Social Dilemma interview, he displayed the alarming impacts of social media through this soundtrack.[49]
No.
Title
Length
1.
"Logos"
0:34
2.
"A Totally Normal World"
2:31
3.
"Am I Really That Bad"
0:49
4.
"Server Room"
3:45
5.
"A Call to Arms"
2:00
6.
"Manipulated"
2:28
7.
"Magic Tricks"
1:49
8.
"Hooked in the Classroom"
1:09
9.
"Growth Hacking"
1:44
10.
"Programmed at a Deeper Level"
1:29
11.
"Addicted"
1:44
12.
"Kitchen Safe"
0:53
13.
"Family Dinner"
0:57
14.
"The Kids Are Not Alright"
0:34
15.
"The Bet"
1:12
16.
"Perceptions of Beauty"
2:22
17.
"Theremin Lullaby"
1:30
18.
"Time Offline"
0:53
19.
"Hominid Brains"
2:12
20.
"The AIs Are Losing"
0:39
21.
"Machine Learning"
1:33
22.
"Late Night Snack"
0:52
23.
"Checkmate Humanity"
1:49
24.
"The Sliding Scale"
2:51
25.
"Exponential Hearsay"
3:54
26.
"Myanmar"
3:09
27.
"Caught in the Crowd"
4:37
28.
"Rapid Degration of Society"
3:16
29.
"Senate Hearing"
5:00
30.
"Justin Drops the Mic"
4:02
31.
"Shut It Down"
3:09
32.
"Welcome to the Drum Machine"
2:02
33.
"I Put a Spell on You"
2:53
Total length:
60:10
Release
The Social Dilemma premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2020, and was released worldwide on Netflix on September 9, 2020.[50] The documentary went on to be viewed in 38,000,000 homes within the first 28 days of release.[51] It won two awards out of seven nominations at the 73rd Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards in 2021.[52]
The film is approximately 94 minutes long and can only be accessed on Netflix. However, a free 40-minute version can be viewed by requesting it through the film's official webpage.[53]
Reception
Critical response
The Social Dilemma received generally positive reviews. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 85%, based on 66 reviews, with an average rating of 7.2/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Clear-eyed and comprehensive, The Social Dilemma presents a sobering analysis of our data-mined present."[54] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 78 out of 100, based on nine critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[55]
Devika Girish from The New York Times gave the film a positive review, stating it was "remarkably effective in sounding the alarm about the incursion of data mining and manipulative technology into our social lives and beyond".[56] Mark Kennedy of ABC News called the film "an eye-opening look into the way social media is designed to create addiction and manipulate our behaviour, told by some of the very people who supervised the systems at places like Facebook, Google, and Twitter".[57]Nell Minow of RogerEbert.com noted that the film "asks fundamental and existential questions" of humanity's potential self-destruction through its own use of computer technology, and praised its "exceptional" use of confessions from leaders and key players in the social media industry.[58]
Elizabeth Pankova of The New Republic noted "none of the information in the film is particularly new" but argued what made The Social Dilemma effective was "the purveyors of this information: the remorseful, self-aware warriors turned conscientious objectors of Silicon Valley".[59] Pranav Malhotra of Slate stated the film "plays up well-worn dystopian narratives surrounding technology" and "depend[s] on tired (and not helpful) tropes about technology as the sole cause of harm, especially to children", while also failing to acknowledge activists and commentators who have long criticized social media, citing scholars such as Safiya Noble, Sarah T. Roberts, and Siva Vaidhyanathan.[60] In an analysis of the film's persuasive techniques, Laura Alvarez Trigo of PopMecC stated, "The Social Dilemma manages to construct a Manichean narrative with a very elusive and misconstrued evil side" but pointed to the film's own resemblance to the propaganda and manipulation it criticizes, stating the film could have benefited from "providing the audience with the necessary tools to engage with the platforms that they use in a more critical way" and "a nuanced explanation of the present ethical problems [to] help people benefit from new technologies without having to completely shut them down or ban them for their teenage children".[2]
Notable criticism was directed toward the fictional narrative surrounding the family and the AIs. Casey Newton at The Verge pointed to certain directorial decisions, such as "the ominous piano score that persuades every scene" as giving it "the feeling of camp".[61] Nell Minow stated that "even the wonderfully talented Skyler Gisondo cannot make a sequence work where he plays a teenager seduced by extremist disinformation, and the scenes with Vincent Kartheiser embodying the formulas that fight our efforts to pay attention to anything outside of the online world are just silly."[58] Pranav Malhotra called the narratives an "uncritical" presentation of a dystopia lacking nuance.[60] In a rare defense of the film's oft-denounced dramatizations, John Naughton of The Guardian commented on the narrative's focus, stating that "the fictional strand is necessary because the biggest difficulty facing critics of an industry that treats users as lab rats is that of explaining to the rats what's happening to them while they are continually diverted by the treats (in this case dopamine highs) being delivered by the smartphones that the experimenters control."[62]
Industry response
Facebook released a statement on its About page, stating 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".[63]
CNBC reported that social media users were doubting if they should continue using Facebook or Instagram after watching The Social Dilemma. However, when asked about the possibility of a decline in its users, Facebook refused to answer or give any comment on the subject.[64]
Mozilla employees Ashley Boyd and Audrey Hingle noted that while the "making, release and popularity of The Social Dilemma represents a major milestone towards [the goal of] building a movement of internet users who understand social media's impact and who demand better from platforms", the film would have benefited from featuring more diverse voices.[65]
↑ Orlowski, Jeff (September 9, 2020), The Social Dilemma (Documentary, Drama), Tristan Harris, Jeff Seibert, Bailey Richardson, Joe Toscano, Exposure Labs, Argent Pictures, The Space Program, archived from the original on October 28, 2020, retrieved October 28, 2020
↑ "Rashida Richardson". Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies. July 16, 2019. Archived from the original on January 29, 2022. Retrieved May 3, 2022.
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