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The Social Dilemma Had Me Questioning Everything

“ If you are not paying for the product, you are the product”

By Let's Discuss Published 3 years ago 4 min read
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Image from Unsplash

In case you don’t know, The Social Dilemma is a new Netflix Documentary Film released in September 2020.

The movie tries to explain to you the rise of social media among all the age groups of the society and How Many Tech Giants are using the data of the customers to manipulate them, which leads to mental health effects and gives rise to more and more conspiracy theories every day.

First of all, without diving into the plot, my personal review is that the Documentary is Amazing and it’s a must-watch.

The story revolves around a family that is torn apart by the usage of social media and how it affects their activities in day-to-day life.

You see a girl measuring her beauty based on the likes she gets on her Snapchat and how a teenager gets his views from a random YouTuber with conspiracy theories.

They have also interviewed several people who worked as chief officers in building Google, Facebook, and several companies. It’s always good to know from experts.

The Social Dilemma (2020)

I am not going to be like delete your social media accounts right now and get out of google or something. You probably can’t at this point. But this movie will definitely be a warning signal for you to try to reduce its usage and dependence on social media.

Don’t believe whatever you see on social media. For god sakes, there are people who still believe that the earth is flat. I once even started an argument with a guy who believed that the earth is flat, and it ended with him saying “ See dude, you have your opinions and I have mine”, I was like “ Wtf?”.

Always fact checks before you believe something.

The Social Dilemma strongly highlights the ways our habits and behaviors are altered by the usage of social media.

Does this mean that the CEOs or employees in those companies are evil villains? Nope, not like that, the way by which companies like Google, Facebook earn those billions of dollars is by advertising. That’s how their business works.

And why are companies paying them so much money? Because they have a lot of data and they can actually predict which one of these customers will buy the product if they show it to them. They have way too much data of you that they can actually predict will you watch a video in your Facebook feed or not with high precision.

I mean the main goal of Youtube is to increase your screen time ( how many hours are you watching a video and how are you switching and what are your interests), by increasing your screen time on youtube they can show you more ads.

Are the people on Facebook knowingly provide you fake news? Nope, it is the machine learning recommendation system that is doing that. And it's not possible to fact check every single post posted by millions of people every day.

If your previous watch history were conspiracy theories, then there is a more chance that you will watch this conspiracy video too. That is how the recommendation systems work.

And it’s always going to getting better in recommending videos with more and more data. The main problem is that the algorithm can never distinguish between real and fake news.

It can only differentiate it based on the topic and whether the user will watch it or not. And it will provide the users with the video based on the topic of his/her interest irrespective of whether its a real or fake news.

I really liked this quote from the movie:

“ If you are not paying for the product, you are the product”

The main solution that the documentary is trying to give to society is to make someone accountable for the data that is being collected. I mean if you buy a phone and it is exploding while charging, then the manufacturing company will be responsible and accountable. But there is nothing like that for the digital data that the companies are collecting from us.

Things that I learned from watching the documentary that may be useful to you:

1. Turn off your post notifications. This is something that’s shown many times during the documentary. The notifications are the ones that are triggering your mind to open social media apps. It is irresistible for us nowadays to not open the app after seeing a notification pop up.

2. Don’t believe whatever you see on social media blindly. Always fact-check.

3. Don’t watch the videos youtube suggests you to watch or Facebook provides you in the feed when you join social media for the first time. Search for videos that are of interest. At first, the suggestions from youtube are completely random and can be misleading. If you watch 10/15 videos of your interest, then automatically youtube will start recommending those kinds of videos to you, I mean that’s how the recommendation systems work.

Thanks for reading through the article. If you like the article, make sure you like and subscribe to my website — Let’s Discuss to get notified for future content like this.

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