The Social Dilemma Documentary

Do we control our perspectives? More than ever, the psychology behind how we think and make decisions is being exploited. The film suggests that through social media, we are being manipulated for others’ gain. Alarmingly, a handful of tech designers can control the way billions of us think, act, and live our lives.

• 64% of the people who joined extremist groups on Facebook did so because the algorithms steered them there.
  — Internal Facebook report, 2018

• A 5,000 person study found that higher social media use correlated with self-reported declines in mental and physical health and life satisfaction.
  — American Journal of Epidemiology, 2017

• The # of countries with political disinformation campaigns on social media doubled in the past two years.
  — New York Times, 2019

The Social Dilemma highlights the fact that we may not be in complete control of how emotionally attached we are to our perspective. We can be manipulated. See the Netflix trailer.

We each have a perspective of what is right, but once a perspective is established, it is vulnerable to manipulation. There are some brilliant people/organizations that capitalize upon our perspective for their financial gain.

We are strategically fed information (whether true or not) to support our perspective. We are fed biased information – or misinformation – to strategically drive us to become even more emotionally invested in our position. This leads to us becoming more captive on their website, which is their real objective. The longer we are on their web page, the more revenue they can generate from advertisers.

Be curious. Life is not simple so let’s not try to make it simple. People and issues are complex. As people, we are all a mixture of races/religions/nationalities/positions. Let’s seek beauty in that complexity. Be curious to learn, especially why others see the world differently than we do. Ask yourself how can so many be so wrong, and we be so right? Could we learn something?