The filmmakers saw how real social media issues are, and thus decided to use a fake story to prove them.

The movie The Social Dilemma made a huge impact upon its release – people were talking about it online, journalists were discussing it in their articles, there were press releases, interviews, etc. It garnered a lot of buzz, partially because of its message – “social media is bad, it’s preying on your weaknesses and presents a threat to democracy”, but I believe the main reason why it exploded the way it did was its presentation. This movie is as much of a drama as it is a documentary. It stars a fictional family whose members are being torn apart by social media. But what’s the harm in that, right? It’s just a visually interesting way of presenting the topics discussed in the movie.

The problem is that this way presenting social media issues is meant to scare people, rather than educate. The documentary directors relied on this fake family drama narrative to back up its claims, rather than solid, well-researched science articles. I’ve discussed this in my post about social media screen time and the impact it has on people’s mental health. I’ve gone through dozens of studies and meta-analyses, and none of them were able to provide conclusive evidence that time spent on social media causes mental health problems. So, without actual scientific research to back up the claims of ‘social media is like gambling’ or that it’s ‘hijacking your brain’, they used a dramatised example to scare the audience.

In fact, this movie sacrifices a lot more than just scientific research. The directors seemed to have actively suppressed the criticism of the main narrative of the movie. Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked and Indistractable, was actually supposed to participate in the movie and give his own perspective. However, his entire three-hour interview was cut out, supposedly because he presented skepticism about the apocalyptic tone of some of the arguments. It simply didn’t fit the narrative of the consumer powerlessness, in the face of the goliath that is Big Tech.

If you dig deeper, The Social Dilemma is filled with vagueness. It delves into a lot of issues on a superficial level (mental health, fake news, data collection etc.), and backs up its arguments with horror-style drama. It never truly presents any actionable advice on how to ‘fix’ social media – they only introduce a vague undefined concept of ‘humane technology’. Even the Center For Humane Technology’s website doesn’t have a clear example of technologies like this. As a consequence, people are left with a clear feeling of despondency, without any idea how to fix the very real issues social media has created. My guess is they wrote themselves into a corner. Just like Kishimoto made Madara too powerful to kill off, The Social Dilemma made its ‘villains’ (Mark Zuckerberg & co.) seem too entrenched in our daily lives to end with a quick and easy solution.

So, what is the answer to the big bad corporations leading us to our doom, or, as an ex-Facebook employee Tim Kendall predicted, “civil war”? Talking about it. Raising awareness. And raising awareness they did. People were discussing this docu-drama left and right. Tristan Harris and Roger McNamee were one of the more prominent figures in the movie. The sentiments they expressed in The Social Dilemma were very similar to the ones Roger described in his book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. That is, they were waiting for a time where people actually started caring and talking about the negative impact of social media. In other words, that they kept trying to explain to people why social media tech was heading in the wrong direction, but that people would simply ignore their pleads. The story of Roger’s talk with Mark Zuckerberg, who he helped guide in Facebook’s early years, and trying to reason with him, was similar to Tristan’s experience of trying to explain why Gmail shouldn’t be designed to be addictive to his former Google coworkers. Both efforts failed, and nothing changed. Other interviewees in the movie had a similar narrative – “no one expected to create such a terrifying monster”. As a consequence, The Social Dilemma felt a bit wishy-washy, like it was created to help these employees feel better about what they did in the past. I’m sure they had good intentions, but it sure dampened the message of the movie for me.

Jaron Lanier, the author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and an interviewee in the movie, tells us to delete our social media. However, this is not an option for everyone. The reality of today’s world is that you’re expected to be ‘available’ in some form or another. It’s also a necessity for some, such as social media managers, teachers, activists, writers and content creators in general. It’s easy for a prominent figure from Silicon Valley, like those that appeared in the movie, to tell you not to use social media. They’ve already established themselves as authorities, and people recognize their faces on the street. But for upcoming developers, artists, musicians, writers, entrepreneurs, and other creators who are only starting out and building up their name, they need to go to where their userbase and clientele is. One can make a website and wait for the clients to come to them, but that’s not what happens. Not being on social media is a privilege, be it for economic, social or political reasons.

The best use is controlled use. Only to identify the apps you need, and get rid of the rest. The method I personally implement is to have an app for a single use-case. In the online privacy world, this is referred to as compartmentalization. You only use an app for a very specific reason, which will help fire a red flag whenever you start to drift away from that purpose, and it will keep your personal data limited to the confines of that specific app. I deleted Twitter, but I still keep in touch with online friends over Discord. WhatsApp is for family members (I’m trying to get them to use Wire) and friends from my hometown. I have to use Facebook for my foreign language course. I use YouTube for tutorials and Netflix for entertainment. I don’t use Instagram but I still have the account in case I need to reach out to an old classmate or acquaintance.

While individual responsibility is important, and you should take some measures to prevent overuse and/or misuse of technology, the problems that need to be tackled are much greater than any one individual, and can only be solved through systematic change. The documentary does say that regulation is important and will produce results, and I agree with this. However, tech giants know this just as well as we do, which is why they spend millions on lobbying every year. Solutions like regulation and data taxation would increase the barrier to entry into the market, mostly harming new companies, while huge corporations would be able to overcome higher costs. It would only make the social media game more exclusive to companies with deep pockets.

The most effective “real” solution would be the move to free open-source software (FOSS) model. FOSS is different from your usual free social media platform in the way that it’s open-source, which means anyone can see and edit the code the software is based on. Therefore, if a software provider suddenly decided to secretly share user data, they wouldn’t be able to do so, as the code is public and free for anyone to see, edit, copy and remake. It simply isn’t in their interest to alienate their userbase by doing sneeky backdoor deals, as someone could simply take their code and recreate the same software without the privacy breaches and data leaks. So, how are they even in business if they’re giving up all of their goodies for free? They have a different business model, that doesn’t rely on selling data. It’s usually in the form of donations, sponsorships, hardware-based revenue, or freemium models.

Another option is abolishing copyright. A lot of critics of this idea name small creators who would be hurt by this, because corporations could simply steal their idea and make money off of it. But in reality, they already do that. Most small creators don’t have the budget to get into legal battles with big corporations, so they’re forced to swallow the loss most of the time. Case in point: YouTube’s copyright system. Music or movie production houses are able to get file a copyright claim for a few seconds of video or audio material, even if that material abides by copyright infringement guidelines. For most creators on that platform, it’s easier to either remove the copyrighted material completely, or simply go unpaid for the hours or days they put into making that video. It’s easy to abuse a system like this.

Now, imagine if there was intellectual property. Small creators could take a big franchise and make it their own. An independent artist could take a popular franchise like Star Wars or Harry Potter, create a spin off, and make money from it. It brings attention back to the original show, makes it even more popular, and it makes the artist more discoverable. Similarly, in the world of mobile and web apps, a developer could create an app that connects all of your favorite social media feeds while stopping data collection. It would be a great thing for consumers, but it would put a great dent in social media giants’ profit margins, which is why they’re doing their best to keep you on their platforms. For example, Google made Android open-source because it gave the company competitive advantage in the early days, but it has since begun locking Android users into using Google products by making G-suite apps uninstallable.

The key takeaway from this should be to view The Social Dilemma and its ideas with a more critical eye. The goal isn’t to disparage or discredit the people who created and participated in the movie, but to exert caution with this new wave of ‘social media wokeness’ (for a lack of a better term), which consists of poorly thought-out solutions, such as “outlawing big tech” or sitting on your bum and waiting for the world governments to step in and do something. Creating a discourse, which The Social Dilemma also suggested as a solution, is good and all, but talking never stopped a crisis.