The Movie “The Social Dilemma” Is a Complete Overreaction

Blaming social media for our problems seems childish.

It’s easy to place blame. It’s harder to be responsible and work on your own version of discipline.

As someone who has spent the last six years writing on social media and working with tech companies, the documentary, The Social Dilemma, solved nothing. It highlighted obvious challenges and pinned the blame on social media tech giants.

Social media is nothing new

The generations before you were told newspapers would harm society. They were told that society would spend far too much time looking down at a newspaper rather than talking to each other. The newspaper didn’t end up killing social interaction.

Books were also supposed to steal our attention away. We were supposed to become zombies that hid away in bedrooms, isolated from the world, and did nothing other than read books.

Books didn’t create an attention apocalypse either.

Your grandparents were warned of the dangers of television. They were told people would lock themselves up in their homes and shackle themselves to the television. TV changed humanity but it didn’t ruin us. We found a way to live with TV and still talk to one another. Holidays didn’t die. Nature didn’t stop being explored. Cafes full of people having conversations didn’t become extinct.

Innovation explained as a means to steal our attention isn’t a new concept.

The first cars we drove were unsafe. It was only until years later when cars became safer and reached mass adoption. Social media is the same — it’s not perfect and there is a lot of improvements that need to occur to make it more useful to society. Blaming social media for our problems is silly, though.

Here’s what you can learn from the movie The Social Dilemma.

Discipline is always going to be needed

No one is denying social media can be addictive. It’s up to the individual to be disciplined in the way they use it.

I have fought social media addiction through the discipline of:

• Turning off all notifications on all my devices.
• Having a black and white screen on all my devices.
• Choosing not to discover new content through social media newsfeeds.

You can design your interaction with social media to serve you if you choose. Blaming a tech company for providing us with a tool is ridiculous.

Social media isn’t going anywhere

Nobody is bankrupting Zucks.

The social media phenomenon is here to stay. Yes, these companies make money off advertising. Advertising isn’t going anywhere either. Ads aren’t bad or evil; they’re just part of our economy. There are worse ways to make money as a business than selling ads.

The idea portrayed in The Social Dilemma documentary is that the tech giants are purposely trying to manipulate us. The movie depicts three men standing in a dark room and trying to manipulate a user for profit.

I don’t buy it. I don’t believe for a second that the people who run social media companies are purposely trying to ruin humanity so they can buy another Ferrari.

It’s a conspiracy, not a fact.

The lesson from the movie is we need to learn how to live with social media, not switch it off for good. Using the internet to be social was always going to happen. The internet is designed to connect humanity, and too much connection can obviously be addictive. So can ice cream.

People can abandon social media (again)

If the worst-case scenario does happen and social media companies are breaking laws and acting evil, the solution is obvious: users will delete their social media accounts. The social media companies know this.

An idea on social media can become viral. That idea can serve the monetization interests of social media companies, and at the same time, destroy them too.

We’ve seen people abandon Uber and Facebook in the past when they’ve fallen out of love with the company’s mission — the same can happen again. It hasn’t happened because there’s no hard evidence social media companies are evil.

Solutions to the Addictive Nature of Social Media

• Removing the ‘like’ button can certainly help remove the addictive nature of social media. Instagram has experimented with this already.

• You can schedule time away from your phone screen. I don’t use my phone on Sundays or during dinner time. My phone is on airplane mode while I sleep. There are practical ways to decrease your social media time.

• The rise of dumbphones is another trend. I predict we will have more people choosing to have two phones: a smartphone for everyday use, and a dumb phone that can only make phone calls and receive text messages. You have clothes for different seasons and you could have phones for different occasions.

• Track your screen time. This feature is available on a lot of phones. It’s easy to see how much time you’re spending on social media and decide if you need to be more disciplined and reduce your investment. You can track calories to lose weight and fight food addiction, and you can track screen time to avoid social media addiction.

• Put your phone in a draw. My phone is in a draw right now as I write this. I can’t see the phone so there’s no reason to engage with it. Out of sight and out of mind works well.

• Choose what devices you install social media apps on. I have no social media apps on my work computer, work phone, or the computer I write on. This is one way to consciously decide how available social media is to you, so you can choose when to use it. The friction of downloading a social media app every time you want to use it will be far too great.

Final Thought

The Social Dilemma documentary made me think, and anything that makes you think deeply has value in your life. I don’t agree with the movie and its premise that social media companies are evil.

I did reflect on my social media usage, though, and what matters in life. You might want to watch the documentary and see if it helps you think too.

Too much of a good thing can always become addictive. The trick is not to ban or remove things we love, or blame the companies who make them — but to find a way to be responsible, disciplined, and to live with them.

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Disclaimer

The original version of this story was published on another platform.

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