Netflix recently released a documentary exploring the psychological effects of social media both on people and society as a whole. The Social Dilemma is technically stunning, gripping in its storytelling, and an overall fun watch. However, its analysis of the real negative effects social media can have on humanity slowly loses touch with reality, reaching near hysteria at the end in claiming that social media could literally end the world.
The documentary opens with a litany of former employees at household-name tech companies explaining why they quit the companies and outlining their concerns with the technologies they helped create. Broadly speaking, social media algorithms are designed to maximize users’ engagement on the platforms, which leads to numerous negative effects.
This isn’t a revolutionary thesis. Numerous prominent tech figures have made headlines over the years offering similar critiques. However, the manner that The Social Dilemma explores these topics through storytelling is engrossing. Throughout the documentary, the interviews are weaved into a fictional narrative of a family whose lives are influenced by social media.
A preteen daughter is so addicted to her phone that she smashes a container her mother puts it in during dinner. A teenage son breaks his mother’s challenge not to use his phone for a week when he receives a notification that his ex-girlfriend is in a new relationship. The daughter seemingly contemplates harming herself because she excessively compares her beauty to her peers. The son becomes obsessed with a radical political movement online by going down a viral-video rabbit hole.
These vignettes are powerful visual aids to highlight the dangers of social media, but they are obvious dramatizations focusing exclusively on the negative side of social media. The reality is that 31% of teenagers report that social media has had a positive impact on their lives, while only 24% say social media has had a negative impact, according to a 2018 Gallup poll. A plurality of 45% says that the effect is neither positive nor negative.
Social media, like all technologies, is merely a tool that can be used for harm or for good, depending on the users. Algorithms certainly influence user behavior, but it’s a tall claim to make that it will fundamentally change society for the worst. Tim Kendall, the former president of Pinterest, undoubtedly has the most shocking quotes along this vein in the movie, claiming that “these services are killing people” and that “in the shortest time horizon, I’m worried about civil war.”
Political polarization is undoubtedly at an extreme right now, but let’s not pretend that social media is only to blame. Cable channels that cater to partisan audiences, such as Fox News and MSNBC, were founded years before Mark Zuckerberg was accepted at Harvard University. As for political extremism, if anything, the platforms deserve credit for the good job they have done in cleaning up their platforms.
It’s more difficult to find white-supremacist content or even nutty conspiracy theories, such as QAnon, on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and the like than ever before. Yet, hateful content and conspiracies persist online. Therefore, the problem is not that of the big-name social media companies but of society itself. Adi Robertson astutely pointed out at the Verge that most mass shooters in recent years were not radicalized on any major platform, but rather on small forums and websites, such as 8chan and Stormfront.
Even if you give The Social Dilemma the benefit of the doubt in its diagnosis, the movie didn’t seem to have any useful policy answers for how to fix social media’s ills except for taxing data collection. Maybe such a tax would discourage data collection on the margin, but it seems doubtful that it would fundamentally change the revenue models of tech companies that make hundreds of millions or billions of dollars each year.
Competition is already addressing the data concern, with newer search engines such as DuckDuckGo and social media platforms like Parler refusing to profit from user information. Social media is still relatively in its infancy, given that most people alive can remember a world without it. It’s more likely than not that more popular platforms will emerge that emphasize user privacy.
The Social Dilemma did have one useful piece of advice that bears repeating: Disable annoying notifications. At the end of the day, we as users have great freedom to control when our phones are bothering us and what they’re bothering us about. Let us never forget the autonomy we have over our own lives.
Casey Given (@CaseyJGiven) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the executive director of Young Voices.
