The Social Dilemma (2020) Movie Review

In the new documentary "The Social Dilemma," we learn that social media has insidiously and fundamentally changed our behavior, and not for the better. Our brains are being manipulated and even rewired by algorithms that are designed to get our attention and make us buy things, including distorted ideas about the world, ourselves, and each other.

Jeff Orlowski, who also gave us the similarly terrifying documentaries "Chasing Coral" and "Chasing Ice," directs "The Social Dilemma," which might as well be called "Chasing Us" because it asks existential questions about whether we are writing ourselves out of the ability to make vital decisions about our own survival. While there have been other documentaries that have raised concerns about the impact of social media on our privacy, morale, and democracy, this one has a significant advantage. In this movie, many of the experts are the same people who got us here, top executives from Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and other sites that seduce us into spending time and sharing information so they can sell both.

As the film opens, we see that the people who will be telling us their stories are uncomfortable and embarrassed. It turns out, they will be confessing and apologizing. Justin Rosenstein, the inventor of Facebook's most ubiquitous feature, the "like" button, sheepishly says it was intended to "spread positivity." What could be wrong with letting your friends and their friends "like" something you've posted? Well, it turns out people get their feelings hurt if they don't get likes. So, they amend their behavior to attract more likes. Does that seem like a problem?

Consider this: a large population of the people urgently trying to get "likes" are young teenagers. We all know the excruciating nightmare that is middle school, when all of a sudden you no longer take for granted what your parents tell you and decide that what you really need is to be considered cool or at least not a total loser by your friends at school. Now multiply that by the big, unregulated world of the internet. This is why there is a precipitous spike in anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide attempts by the girls of Gen Z, current middle and high schoolers, as much as triple in some categories. Then there's the new clinical term "Snapchat Dysmorphia," describing the people who seek plastic surgery to look more like the filtered images they see online.

The experts assure us that their intentions were good, even the one whose job title at Facebook was head of "monetization." Another one confesses that he worked on making his site irresistibly seductive at work all day and then found himself unable to resist the very algorithmic tricks he helped to create when he went home at night.

The film's biggest mistake is a poorly-conceived dramatic re-enactment of some of the perils of social media. 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. The excellent feature films "Disconnect" and "Trust" have illustrated these issues far better.

While the film's poorly-conceived dramatic re-enactment falls short, it does offer some valuable insights. The documentary has some worthwhile suggestions, including taxing the "data assets" of social media companies, and offers clear, simple rules that parents can adopt. The most important lesson from "The Social Dilemma" is that we should question everything we read online, especially if it is presented to us in a way that reflects a detailed understanding of our inclinations and preferences.

In conclusion, "The Social Dilemma" is a thought-provoking and unsettling documentary that explores the insidious nature of social media and the ways in which it can manipulate our behavior and rewires our brains. Through interviews with top executives from major social media platforms, the film highlights the unintended consequences of algorithms designed to capture our attention and monetize our data, including the spread of disinformation, the erosion of privacy, and the negative effects on mental health.