Review: The Social Dilemma (2020)

Over the past couple years, Netflix has been mounting a quiet but unmistakable campaign to show their rivals for Internet dominance—Facebook, Google, Apple—as unethical, corrupt, and downright apocalyptic. Documentaries like Fyre and The Great Hack have criticized the unchecked power of social media and its corrosive influence on democracy. Netflix has finally coalesced these mounting critiques with their latest release, The Social Dilemma. Directed by Jeff Orlowski (Chasing Ice), the docudrama is alarmist, didactic, and surprisingly popular. It features tech developers and executives who used to work at Google, Facebook, and Instagram roundly criticizing how social media is rewiring our brains and empowering our worst personality traits. Less a nuanced documentary than a broad work of persuasion, the film has a message that we’d be wise to heed.

I made a comment in my review of Fyre last year that that film would’ve been more intriguing had it leant further into its scathing critiques of Instagram instead of exclusively focusing on the Fyre Festival and Billy McFarland. I guess I got what I asked for. The Social Dilemma doesn’t focus on one company or technology scandal, but blames the entire tech sector for the problems in our modern world. The film makes the argument that the best thing any of us could do would be to delete our social media accounts, scrap our smartphones, and install government regulations on tech companies.

The Social Dilemma has a curious narrative approach. Most of the film consists of interviews with various developers, executives, and technology critics, most notably Tristan Harris, who founded the Center for Humane Technology. But in between interview segments loosely focusing on different problems with social media, the film cuts to a dramatized tale about a teenage boy (Skyler Gisondo from The Righteous Gemstones) dealing with online addiction. The dramatization isn’t particularly successful. It’s written like an after-school special, with scolding parents, oblivious teens, and befuddling political commentary. But it does have one interesting element. 

Orlowski and his fellow writers Davis Coombe and Vickie Curtis personalize the algorithm behind most social media platforms as three individuals played by Vincent Kartheiser (Pete Campbell from Mad Men), each representing a core aspect of AI: engagement, growth, and advertising. The three AI watch Gisondo’s teen from their dystopian control room and chat about the best ways to manipulate him to spend more time on their social media app and channel his attention to the content of paid advertisers. It’s a silly concept on the surface, but it’s effective at demonstrating the ways that social media algorithms are designed to manipulate us. AI may not have the cognition that the dramatization represents it as having, but the effects are the same: to monitor us constantly and prod us to take actions that benefit the company.

While it’s likely the film would’ve been better without the dramatization as a whole, at least the talking heads interviews are compelling. They cover a wide variety of topics about how social media is designed to make us addicted in order to drive sales and command our attention. The film gives examples of the negative consequences of our addiction to social media. For instance, the engagement algorithm recommends divisive, and often false, content in order to provoke negative emotional reactions, and thus, further engagement. This leads to everything from misinformation about COVID-19 on Facebook to online radicalization to mass lynchings in India spread through WhatsApp to popular, but dubious, claims about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. 

But the most effective moment in the film comes in a simple graph shown on screen during a talk given by Harris (similar to the famous graph in An Inconvenient Truth). The graph shows the hospitalization rates of girls due to self harm on a yearly basis, with a massive spike in rates once smartphones were introduced with social media apps in 2011. The causation is impossible to ignore, especially as Snapchat leads young women to develop body dysmorphia regarding photo filters and the simple existence of likes on Instagram makes every social post a bid for superficial approval of their appearance.

After diagnosing the problem, the film essential offers two ways forward: rejection or reformation. The latter is the more likely of the two. As Harris says, social media is here to stay, so the best option is to regulate it and create limits to its ability to influence our behaviour. Our brains are not equipped to deal with the subtle, all-encompassing influence that social media exerts on us, so supposedly common sense solutions like exerting more self-control are likely to fail. As well, children are the main target of much of social media, and they cannot be held responsible for controlling their developing brains. Thus, the solution needs to be more systemic.

You can quibble about why the film only focuses on the most alarmist aspects of social media, like self harm and radicalization and political division, instead of heartwarming tales of family reconciliation or social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. But the fact of the matter is that social media is not designed to make our world better, and, as that one graph makes clear, it’s evidently making it worse. The anxiety and anger that plagues most people on a daily basis is no accident. It’s the feature, not the bug, of social media.

Thus, however lame The Social Dilemma’s dramatizations are, and however standard its talking heads presentation is, its message is compelling and the argument persuasive. In this respect, it works more like a commercial than a film, using both facts and emotions to make its message clear to any member of the audience. The emotional components of the dramatization are obvious, but they’re meant to play broadly, thus making it impossible to miss the core message that social media is corrosive to our brains. In the end, the film could potentially do some good, which is always commendable.

6 out of 10

The Social Dilemma (2020, USA)

Directed by Jeff Orlowski; written by Davis Coombe, Vickie Curtis, and Jeff Orlowski; starring Skyler Gisondo, Kara Hayward, Vincent Kartheiser.

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