This Documentary Will Make You Deactivate Your Social Media - Vanity Fair

sanirbanir.blogspot.com

The Social Dilemma may finally convince you that we’re being watched, manipulated, and misled by unscrupulous platforms and attention-harvesting algorithms.

By Anthony Breznican

August 27, 2020

If you’re reading this article, chances are you found it through social media. And that means the platform that used it to get your attention knows you’re here. While you’re reading these words, Facebook, Twitter, or Google are likely reading you.

That’s the premise of the new Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma from filmmaker Jeff Orlowski, which features repentant Silicon Valley figures sounding the alarm that big tech companies are doing three very dangerous things: (1) Spying on you. (2) Manipulating your feeds to keep you engaged. (3) Deepening your biases and blind spots by pushing away everything else.

The movie debuts September 9, but the new trailer—debuting exclusively through Vanity Fair—may be enough to make you scroll straight to the “deactivate” setting.

Vanity Fair: Are we really being watched? That’s a powerful motivator to step away from social media, the sense that you’re being spied on.

Jeff Orlowski: Oh completely. Everything that we do is being tracked and logged in crazy ways that I think we only skim the surface of in the film.

Or are we just one piece of code, anonymized within a massive collection of data?

This is where the phrase “surveillance capitalism” really shines. There are ways that they can know inside a house, how many people are in the house, and who's watching which television. They know that your kids are watching a certain TV and you’re watching a different TV. [Social media platforms] know that my phone and my laptop belong to the same user, as opposed to my phone and the desktop that my girlfriend is using. I mean, I would never have a Google Home or Amazon Alexa because they’re just recording all the time.

What’s the purpose of this data mining?

The amount of information that is being collected is a gold rush for data to build more and more accurate profiles around us. And in many ways, whoever builds the most accurate profile, whoever can predict us better, those are the companies that are going to win out. It is really individualized, personalized data accumulation to build a more and more accurate model that is currently being used to manipulate us.

Another point The Social Dilemma makes is that we are addicted to our devices through these platforms. So I tried to watch your film without looking at my phone.

Yes. A big challenge.

I didn’t succeed.

We did countless interviews with people really talking about our attention and a mindfulness crisis, just a cognition crisis, where we’re losing our ability to think deeply and critically because we are constantly being interrupted, just 24/7.

You’ve made the films Chasing Coral and Chasing Ice about the impact of human beings on nature. The Social Dilemma is about another force that’s impacting us as natural beings, right?

Exactly. I look at this as just another existential threat, right? We are actively building systems that are causing polarization, that are causing echo chambers, that are dividing our country and our way of thinking. And it puts us on a path as Tim Kendall [former president of Pinterest and former director of monetization at Facebook] says in the film, the natural conclusion to all of this is civil war.

Okay, that’s terrifying.

It’s absolutely terrifying. We have the mindset that things are becoming more and more polarized in our society and we can feel increasing tension between the left and the right. But to hear it come from these technologists and say, “This is the source. This is what’s driving so much of it.” I mean, it makes sense to me, it completely resonates with me that we have this invisible machine that is determining what people see and it’s giving us what it thinks we want.

A feedback loop then?

We’re all in our own individual feedback loops. Your digital reality is completely different than your neighbor’s digital reality, completely different than your partner in your house. Their digital reality is completely different as well. How do you create consensus when everybody is being fed the mirrored version of themselves all the time?

What I don’t understand is why people refuse to acknowledge reality when they see undeniable, factually accurate information. They will look at a video or a legitimate news source and say, “That’s fake.”

It goes back to this line that we have in the film from Justin Rosenstein [a former Facebook engineer who cocreated the Like button], where you look at the other side and you ask yourself, “How could they be so wrong? How can they not know the truth?” And the reality is that they’re just seeing a very, very different truth than you in that instance.

My own news consumption has changed from going to home pages of news organizations that I trust to just reading what’s trending, and a lot of it is so often nonsensical, or the hashtags are obviously driven by bots. I feel like things that get attention are not necessarily things that always deserve attention.

That sentence that you just said, “Things that get attention don't necessarily deserve attention”— that is, in many ways, the problem with this entire system and this business model, right? It’s user-generated content where whatever sticks will rise to the top. And it trends towards our base instincts, it taps into deep emotions. It taps into fear, it taps into outrage. It taps into heightened emotions. Heightened emotions trend better than full rational thought.

Even if I want to leave Twitter, I feel like I can’t because it’s the town square, right? It’s the area where people gather. It’s where news circulates, even if I have a problem with those trending topics. My feeling after watching your film is I want to delete everything, but the competing feeling is that I don’t want to miss out on things.

Right. Right. And that’s a huge tension, right? There’s a professional work opportunity loss, right?

Well, or even personal. I want to see what my friends are doing. I want to hear about their birthdays. I want to see pictures of them on their vacations and celebrating the holidays. This is how I stay connected.

This is fundamentally the tension between the actual value that these platforms can offer people and were originally designed around—the ability to connect to friends and family was the original intent, but [there was] the need to build a business model…and the separation between what actual value is it providing versus how are you actually being monetized is the real tension. How are they luring us in versus how are they actually profiting?

On the positive side, people are able to speak out in real time in ways they couldn’t before. We see videos of police violence, and revelations of incidents of sexual and mental abuse perpetrated by people in power, that wouldn’t have been shared as widely without social media. Injustices are highlighted, wrongs are exposed. That has value, doesn’t it?

Absolutely. And I think ultimately that’s why we opted to put “dilemma” in the title because there are benefits that come from these technologies, right? Movements that can grow in such a meaningful and powerful way. We can really celebrate those positive aspects. It’s a matter of keeping in mind that there is somebody on the other side of that political ideology that disagrees and is not seeing your side of the conversation and is probably being reinforced with their own thinking and their own views.

In your documentary, you didn’t just feature critics of social media use. You focus on people sounding the alarm who actually were advocates at one time or helped develop these platforms.

You could always have critics from the outside arguing about how flawed this thing is. But if the people who built it are saying, “Well, actually, you know what, I had a change of heart. And these are the reasons why.” They drank the Kool-Aid and then spit it out. The opening scene of the film is just everybody from within the tech companies revealing their credentials and what they built. For the person who built the Facebook Like button to say, “We’ve got a huge problem with this business model,” that means more to me in terms of persuasion.

Is social media making us feel even worse in the coronavirus lockdown? It’s one of our few connections outside the home now. But just given the real-world circumstances, people around the world are feeling depressed or angry, feeling stressed. Rather than allowing them to vent it, is social media magnifying it?

I would make that claim for sure. I think there is a difference between venting and feeling relief versus venting and having that be reinforced and deepened and fed back into its own feedback loop as the algorithms operate. Personally, removing myself from these platforms, it has been a place of mental solace in some ways just to not have negativity constantly reinforced. But that said, even if you don’t use these platforms, you live in a world that does. So even if I’m not on social media, the people that I talk to are still in large part on social media. So those same emotions and the same thoughts and the same filter bubbles are being reflected back through friends and peers anyway.

What’s the thing you hope people will do? Do you hope that they’ll deactivate?

It’s more a matter of how the technologists respond. We need to redesign and rebuild the code. We need to rebuild these platforms. I’m just drawing the analogy back to climate change. It’s like, okay, we know that the fossil fuel industry is a really problematic industry and we need to shift off of it. We need renewable energy. From the [social media] perspective, we need to get off of an advertising extraction business model and I don’t know what it takes to get there. We need the public to change their mindset. We need the technologists to literally change the code, we need policy to shift to potentially change or even outlaw these business models.

Okay, so when this article is ready…should I tweet it out?

You’re asking a question that we have been wrestling with constantly. Our mindset is that we want to fight fire with fire. And we are going to be posting this information on these platforms. You don’t have to tell non-smokers to not smoke. You have to talk to the smoker, right? We need to have the conversation on these platforms. As we were saying, we need a town square, we need places for conversation to happen. We just need them to be designed in our interests and not in some other opaque business model’s interest.

This Q&A has been condensed and edited.