The dilemma of ‘The Social Dilemma’
And why I think the documentary, while scarily convincing, tells only one-half of the story
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A couple of weeks ago, I watched a documentary everyone around me was talking about. The Social Dilemma on Netflix, is a compelling, revelatory and almost scary take on the phenomenon we devote several hours to each day — Social Media.
Largely using interviews of people who were earlier employed at social media companies and a very well-executed fictionalized representation of the problem, the film states the following points:
- Social media gives us more of what our existing beliefs are
- Social media sells our data to advertisers
- Social media tries to suck us back in by analyzing our previous usage
- Social media doesn’t curb fake news, even the ones that are so divisive that they lead to on-ground violence
- But most of all — social media was not created to be evil but has become evil over time and despite knowing this, the Companies behind the dominant social media we use aren’t doing anything about it.
This is not a review of the film, this is my take on its take.
First and foremost, is there a problem? I think so. Are social media companies the only ones to blame for it? The film thinks so but I disagree. I think the social media problem is spread out in this ratio: People 51%, Companies 49%. But more on that later.
First, let me address the film’s chosen villain — Social Media Companies. The film personifies Artificial Intelligence (AI) being used by these companies as three evil human beings operating a future-sque machine à la ‘Minority Report’. These three use their knowledge of you (as visible in the below screenshot from the film) to decide what to put on your feed when you are on social media and what to send you as notifications when you aren’t.
From 2013 to 2017, I led a Startup that, like social media companies, had a digital product. We would help students choose Colleges by getting them reviews from students already at those Colleges. Now we were not a non-profit and nor could we run this whole enterprise only with our money, so we raised funding and started out on a long-term growth plan. Moreover, we started out from a noble place, an intent to serve students, to democratize college information, to cut out all the middlemen with vested interests. We wanted maximum students to benefit from this product and hence we wouldn’t charge them a dime but then to sustain we needed someone to pay us. And so, this became our sequential plan:
- First we would generate enough data
- Then we would market ourselves so that students take College decisions via us
- We would approach Colleges to begin paying us to be matched to the right aspirants
So we would market and ask current students to come to our site and review their Colleges, we would ask aspiring students to read reviews of the Colleges they were interested in, we would ask aspirants what criteria they have in mind and would hence serve them Colleges relevant to them and we would try to bring them back to the platform sending them emails and notifications. The more the reviews on our platform, the more the aspirants who came to the platform. The more time they spent on our platform, the more they returned to our platform. And hence the more valuable we became. Not just to students, who were our ‘consumers’ but also to Colleges, who were our ‘customers’.
Can you fault us for showing students Colleges that matched their criteria and not ones from an entirely different domain, to maybe expand their horizons, which were often dictated by placements or parental perception alone! Can you blame us for sending students emails and notifications to get them back to the platform! Will you point fingers at us for using their data (with their consent) to match them to Colleges relevant to them!
As the adage goes, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. To a human race used to going to a physical shop with hard cash in their hands and buying something in return, downloading an app on their phones for free and spending all day with it, just does not register as something they must pay for. ‘Hey I got it for free, so it better be free always, oh and don’t monitor me or my usage of your platform ever!’
Welcome to new-age business models! Where you can start using something without paying money but have to pay for it in other indirect, more long-term ways. This is the internet and on the internet, data is oil. Which brings me to the villain ‘The Social Dilemma’ completely excluded — You and me. Us. Human beings.
Were we forced to download Facebook? Or Instagram? Or YouTube? Or Twitter? Yes, if we wouldn’t, we would have major FOMO (fear of missing out) but are those companies responsible for that? Once we downloaded the apps, did we read their Terms & conditions before registering on them? Once we consented to register on them and began generating and consuming data, did they force us to come back? They compelled us, by using our psychology but did they force us? Today, all operating systems have options to turn notifications off but did we? Heck, apps like Facebook have also built in features that help you measure the time you have spent on them and remarkably put locks on it as well. It’s like Mukesh Ambani making a feature to make you buy less of Jio. But did we use that feature?
Like my colleagues and I tried making a company that would make college selection easier, Mark Zuckerberg got together with a bunch of friends and tried making a company that would make connecting with each other easier. They gave us all possible features — text posts, images, video, groups, pages, messages, calls, events and more but you and I decided what we would do with them, how we would use them. Sure, there are massive inputs of consumer psychology in product design, like that one ‘Like’ button and its count, that dominates our lives and emotions all the time. But that does not make it the product designer’s responsibility to design the product such that people are forced to go against their usual behaviour.
Yes, I have wasted so many hours each day on social media, that I don’t have the courage to total it all up for it may run into years. Yes, social media has often acted as a vortex, a sinkhole, quicksand that has made me envious, hateful, biased, angry, chaotic and so much more. But social media has also made me discover extraordinary people I would never have known otherwise. Social media gave me my last job. Social media helps me learn so much about the people I admire, it makes them relatable, accessible. It is because of social media that you are reading this.
If lots of boys and girls started using Instagram to sexualize themselves, portray a false happy narrative of their daily routines, flaunt the things they bought and make it appear like they have thousands of friends, what can the Company do! Instagram, for a long time, was a haven for photographers, directors, painters and artists who would use its visual features to demonstrate their range. But post the success of Snapchat and the unethical but legal copying of its features by Instagram, the platform got taken over by boys and girls. Mind you, those photographers and those artists, they’re still there but you have got to follow them, unfollow everyone else you do not like and not click on what you claim to dislike on the search page. If you follow only photographers but on the search page, click on photos with dudes and their supercars, Instagram knows what you like, what you want, even if you may not like accepting so. Heck Instagram knows you more than you know yourself, or at least more than you like accepting.
What do we expect Instagram or Twitter to do! To show us things on their feeds that we have not interacted with at all in our years of usage? To reduce the number of posts that we repeatedly keep clicking on day and night? To not send us notifications to pull us back based on what we interacted with in the past? Let’s assume that Zuckerberg of Facebook + Instagram + WhatsApp or Dorsey of Twitter miraculously transformed into social reformers tomorrow and actually begin doing the above, in 6 months another entrepreneur will put out a new product and they will completely lose market share while we will move on to those new platforms and continue doing what we did earlier!
If we overuse social media to compensate for the emptiness in our lives or a sense of unhappiness with what we are doing or with whom we are living, it is not the job of a private company to change its business to help us, especially when it was created for something else but we drove it to where it is now. It is up to us to choose to not utilize the products offered by that business and spend our time on more constructive pursuits.
When lots of people started using social media to spread hate and lots of people responded to them by lapping it up, you can hold the company responsible for failing to delete posts that openly called for violence and hence violated its own community standards. But what can the company do about posts that may not call for violence directly but openly demonstrate discriminatory opinions fiercely lopsided in their own favour! Those cannot and must not be controlled. The day we begin walking down that road, we will cross a point of no-return and soon become what we hated. Or one day, a right-winger will take over that mechanism to control free speech and the world will descend further into doom. Freedom of speech must be held up even when what is being spoken is not to our liking, it cannot be a weapon used only to voice our opinions and junked entirely when others voice theirs. I know how frustrating that can be, we live in a time when social media in India is used primarily to further a hateful, right-wing agenda that I don’t agree with, that I have personally suffered at the hands of but still — I, we must endure!
By no means am I exonerating social media companies entirely. There have been cases where they have used user data illegally without consent, there are thousands of cases where they do not delete something openly calling for violence and delete something very peaceful instead! Blame them, name them, shame them for these. Although, remember the following:
- The World’s population is 7.8 Billion or 780 Crores. On the internet are 4.54 billion people or 454 Crores. Facebook has 2.89 Billion Monthly Active Users or 289 Crore people use Facebook ‘actively’ every month.
- The average daily time the world spends on social media is 142 minutes or under 2.5 hours. That’s 863 hours or 36 full days in 1 year. If you have been on social media since 2010, you’ve spent nearly 1 full year with each second spent on social media.
- On an average, people open Facebook 8 times every day
- 500 million tweets are made each day, that’s 6000 every second
- Over 95 million photos are uploaded to Instagram every single day
- Over 4.2 billion or 420 crore Instagram likes are made every single day
It is not as easy as you think it is to moderate every single social media post and AI isn’t as advanced yet as Hollywood movies would like to think so. Social media has become so big and omnipresent that ‘social media is what people are’. Having a problem with social media is equivalent to having a problem with people!
We must understand that life post-social media is life pre-social media on steroids. You subscribed to a newspaper based on whether you liked its larger ideology, you followed an Actor if their films appealed to you, you bought things that compelled you, you spent time with those you leaned towards, you voted for those you agreed with or considered the lesser evil. However a lot of these behavioural decisions were spaced out and not as incessant. But now we have that one device in our pockets, that new organ of ours, that extension of our lives — the mobile phone. Which makes human connection and hence its pros and cons reach us real-time, as they happen, with deafeningly higher frequency than before.
Also understand that the world is in transition right now. I do not think that in the modern human’s 3,00,000 year old history, things have ever changed as fast as they have in the last 20 years. Not even fire, not even transport changed the world so fast, for the world wasn’t as inter-connected then as technology has enabled it to be now. Technology has accelerated the transition of this world from a collective to an individual. So many collective systems like religion, Society, polity, markets failed and created unprecedented harm, so now there is rebellion, there is opposition, people want to claim their rights, they felt trampled upon for so long, they want to feel heard, they want to feel not powerless, being able to go to Amitabh Bachchan’s Twitter and curse him directly gives us an unprecedented kick. This rebellion shall keep boiling, often more than necessary but eventually it will stabilize, like everything else in human history. We often forget that in the context of time and space, we are insignificant specks on a pale blue dot. Things shall change and a hundred years later, when you and I are dead, these twenty years shall appear insignificantly small.
Yes, what we can do is watch documentaries like ‘The Social Dilemma’ to be aware of the damages our usage of social media is causing us. We can turn off social media notifications, we can monitor and regulate the amount of time we spend on them, we can consciously increase the time we devote to activities that help us feel better — like exercise or meditation or work we enjoy or people we love. We can even try being completely away not just from social media but from the internet itself for a few hours each day. I started trying this a couple of weeks ago and all of a sudden it felt that the same ‘slowness’ I had missed for such a long time started coming back. I began noticing the family of monkeys on the tree just outside my workplace and the two eagles who sit on opposite ends of the building just behind the tree. All of a sudden, it felt like I have more time, I felt calmer, less chaotic, less busier but started getting more work done. I ended up finishing this piece because I had no internet in the daytime. And it feels good not having days where I feel busy all day long yet feel unproductive and anxious at night.
But if we think of social media companies as the enemy, think of this as an us v/s them game, believe that social media only harms (while continuing to spend all day on them), then we are fighting off the inevitable, we are refusing to accept, to adapt to what will now be the new normal forever!
If you think this is the end, I assure you it is just the beginning!
