by Charlie Stewart. The latest social media takedown documentary launched on Netflix in early September 2020 and should be a must-watch for everyone in the marketing sector.
A pithy indictment of the tech industry’s failings, Jeff Orlowski’s The Social Dilemma opens with a quote from Greek tragedian, Sophocles: “Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” The words set the scene for a compelling 90 minutes of interviews and cautionary commentary from the people who helped build social media.
Days of our lives
While the takeout is obvious — that, like Mary Shelley’s story of Frankenstein’s monster, social platforms have evolved far beyond their intended purpose — the manner in which the documentary intersperses its interviews with scenes of a fictional family dealing with the daily impact of social makes for fascinating viewing.
Break out the popcorn and open a bottle, peeps. This really is the days of our lives.
Justin Rosenstein, a former Facebook engineer who created the perfidious “like” button, expresses his horror at the way his invention — which was designed to be a tool for spreading “positivity and love” — has become a behavioural tracking device. He notes that fake news spreads six times faster than real news.
A former design ethicist at Google, Tristan Harris, speaks to the dilemma at the heart of it: social media simultaneously offers us utopia and dystopia. While it can connect families, match organ donors with those needing transplants and raise money for the local church restoration project, it also brings out the worst in society.
Baader-Meinhof
The film highlights how social media’s echo chamber has used the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (where something you’d never previously noticed is suddenly all around you). It’s a breeding ground for the propagation of myths and radicalisation.
Speaking to the spread of political disinformation, Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, makes the rather frightening observation that, far from hacking Facebook, Russia simply used the platform and the tools it offered to destabilise the last US election.
One of the documentary’s hallmarks is the manner in which it simplifies digital jargon to present an accessible picture of how social algorithms work.
While we’re all aware of the tradeoff we make each time we log into Facebook or Google, the film unpacks the extent of it, and it goes way beyond being the recipient of targeted ads for products we’ve just looked at, too.
“Attention extraction”
Design features and algorithms are configured to manipulate our behaviour. Infinite scrolling and push notifications create a dependency and addiction, helping deliver what one interviewee called “attention extraction” — namely the way in which the platforms keep us browsing and clicking for as long as possible so the quantity of data harvest is maximised. Data that, of course, is then sold to the highest bidder.
To land the point, director Jeff Orlowski creates a scene in the fictional family’s life where Ben, the teenage son, is manipulated by a bunch of humanised AIs. Alert to his changing mood, these AIs tweak the content that’s pushed into his timeline, feeding him news, friends’ updates and ‘sponsored’ stories that keep drawing him back to his phone and make him click. And each click, of course, means revenue.
One interviewee, Prof Shoshana Zuboff, draws a parallel between the futures market for oil and pork bellies and the way our data is gathered, packaged and sold in what she terms as “human futures”. It’s daunting to think that we’re no different to an agricultural product.
It’s highly unlikely that The Social Dilemma will change consumer behaviour; we’ve been down this path all too often and yet we continue to sign away our privacy and data with nary a thought. I hope, though, that the message might land with more publishers.
A response
The journey that MarkLives is on — to move from web to email — is in large part a response to the impact of social media. Yes, social has impacted publishers’ revenue, forcing them to seek other ways of monetising their content, but it goes further than this. As Ben’s family interactions demonstrate, social echo chambers are eroding the very fabric of life.
If other publishers are brave enough to emulate what’s happening here on MarkLives, we might starve the social monsters of data and see them revert to their original purpose. Let’s not forget, after all, that until 2018 Google used to have the phrase “do no evil” in its corporate code of conduct.
Charlie Stewart is co-founder and CEO of Rogerwilco, an independent digital agency. Clicks ‘n Tricks looks at how brands are using digital channels to engage their customers.
