It’s become cliche to say social media is ruining society, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of legitimate axes to grind against our Silicon Valley overlords. The Social Dilemma, the new Netflix documentary, reviews many of them.
With a slew of psychologists, data scientists, and former tech industry gurus at his disposal, director Jeff Orlowski takes us through a list of social media’s biggest sins, providing real insight into the underbelly of how the industry operates.
“Every single action you take is carefully monitored and recorded: exactly what image you stop and look at, how long you look at it. Oh yeah, seriously, how long you look at it,” warns Jeff Seibert, a former Twitter executive.
Other whistleblowers tell us about how Big Tech designs its products’ features — think of scrolling the Twitter timeline or Facebook News Feed — to be addictive.
“You don’t know when you’re going to get it, and you don’t know if you’re going to get something, which operates just like the slot machines in Vegas,” says Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist who now works at a think tank that advocates for reforming the tech industry.
The Social Dilemma claims that in addition to invading our privacy and addicting us to our screens, Silicon Valley’s products are worsening political polarization, helping spread conspiracy theories and fake news, and even promoting violence.
In perhaps a poor directorial choice, Orlowski’s interviews are accompanied by scripted dramatizations, which feature actors experiencing the impacts of social media firsthand. We see, for instance, a dramatic reenactment of children falling under the sway of an Alex Jones-style demagogue.
These segments are cringeworthy. But both the reenactments and the interviews suffer from the same political bias. The scripted segments feature a conspiracy theorist who denies the existence of climate change, while unscripted segments feature conspiracy theories related to “Pizzagate” and COVID-19 — both associated with sects of the Right.
The film thus gives its presumably left-leaning target audience the impression that conspiracy theories, fake news, and misinformation are largely right-wing phenomena. But we know that’s not the case. After all, it was left-wing social media that took a deceptively edited clip of a confrontation between Covington Catholic High School students and a counterprotester and made it into the basis of a national scandal featured across cable news. Other examples abound. In Minneapolis, a social media rumor that police had killed a black man when the man had actually committed suicide led to a spree of looting and violence. In a desperate bid to stop the chaos, the Minneapolis Police Department decided to tweet a video of the man killing himself. A similar rumor that police shot a child led to more looting and violence in the same city.
If you didn’t hear about these cases, it’s hardly a surprise. Almost all of the political dialogue on social media conspiracies and extremism focuses on the political Right, more or less ignoring what happens on the Left. It shouldn’t be any surprise that the media only began focusing on the negative effects of social media after President Trump’s election in 2016. Former President Barack Obama’s capable use of social media to reach out to voters in 2008 and 2012 simply didn’t get the same level of scrutiny.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t very real issues with our social media platforms. Even a free speech absolutist like me can recognize that services such as Twitter and Facebook are set up to worsen polarization. The problem is not that anyone can set up an account and start broadcasting their opinions, no matter how extreme or ill-informed, but that the services’ algorithms are set up to present you with content you already agree with. They introduce users on both the Left and the Right to more extreme versions of opinions they already hold and lead them to overestimate the popularity of their views.
This is by design. Because users are much more likely to view content they agree with, platforms like YouTube have no incentive to show them content that challenges their beliefs. And when these platforms are designed to be addictive, you will have millions of people sitting behind their laptops and smartphones being fed a steady stream of propaganda that only makes them more stubborn in their own views and more contemptuous of the other side. You don’t have to believe that Russian trolls flipped the 2016 election to see that there’s a problem here.
So what’s the solution?
The Social Dilemma offers few answers: the experts recommend regulating social media companies more similar to public utilities, encouraging more competition, and taxing data collection. But these answers ignore the reality that one reason these platforms are so messy and complicated is that we humans are messy and complicated. Yes, social media algorithms are problematic, but conspiracy theories existed long before the internet. If people are able to speak freely to each other, they will sometimes say things that are not true.
Perhaps the best way forward is to take more responsibility. We can emphasize news literacy so that people can detect fake news without the need for a Silicon Valley nanny state. We can work within our families to set responsible limits on screen time, just as we had to do to combat TV addiction.
It’s easy enough to blame a powerful scapegoat like Facebook for all of the world’s problems. But, to quote another cliche, the fault may not be in our stars, but in ourselves.
Zaid Jilani is a Bridging Differences writing fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Greater Good Science Center and a freelance journalist.
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