Checkmate on Humanity — 3 Reasons To Must Watch “The Social Dilemma” a documentary from Netflix
Every aspect that exist can have a dark side of it which can’t be uncovered until it was brought to light by someone. People are at the edge of highly impacting situations of the world and this was accepted by the tech experts who created or part of those. Every social software/tool that had been created was having the spirit of making the world more better in their origin, unfortunately all of them are failing. When a creation couldn’t serve it’s purpose that creates a negative impact as what can go wrong. The latest documentary directed by Jeff Orlowski in the name of “The Social Dilemma” is a clear alarm on the upcoming social threat that can completely destroy the democratic life in the world. The tech experts who were part of them has started to bring this awareness among the people on how people are being monitored by a team of engineers at the other side of screens. These gigantic companies are becoming a government like entities and clearly they are able to manipulate to the commercial interest of advertisers, the recommended content on your screen is not exactly what are you interested in but if you choose one of them, the model gets repudiated based on your input and keeps improving. It was not you who decides to see/watch a particular content on your social media as it was predicted before and sent to your screen based on the algorithm and imagine this happening to 3.6 billion people. Each one of them has their own model running behind the screen, no parent wish that their child spending more number of hours on phones/computers but this is happening and people who were part of these creations are also turning into prey for the trap they have created. Here are the top 3 reasons why every person must watch this documentary which is revealing the upcoming of mass chaos.
1. If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product.
- There is no business that can run without profits and obviously there is a need for business model for every company to grow. The focus is always on the ways of generating revenue from the advertisements.
- If you think you are using an application for free, it’s definitely not because that application’s revenue depends upon the number of users they can bring in so that advertisers can invest to show their products to you.
- Each of your activities online is being tracked, every search on Google, every LIKE you hit on Facebook and Instagram, everything is being monitored by algorithms which can improve itself and gradually it will change your decisions to make you buy the products from advertisements. Not only this but the other side of screens are having a complete analysis of your personality based on your entire history.
2. There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software.
Engagement: This is the first and important aspect to keep you spend more time on the platform by allowing notifications and tracking your post engagement time. Yes, you read it correct, how many seconds you are spending on each post on your timeline is also tracked to analyse your interest on the news feed.
Growth: Allowing friends tag you on a picture, notifying friend of friend joined the platform to say Hi, comments, likes and what else, every activity can helps them to keep growing.
Revenue(Ads): Based on your likes, search, and engagement time, the advertisements are pushed to your screen and gets your interest to show more those kind of Ads or to change them. Did you ever observed that when you search something on Google/Amazon, the same product will start appearing in your Facebook/Instagram timeline as an advertisement?
3. Age of Disinformation/False News can lead to Civil War
No application can distinguish between the truth and fake news, be it Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc.., basically it’s all data from their perspective and this is high time for companies to bring something on table that can solve this problem because there are many serious attacks happening across the world, can be elections hacking, can be a protest and it can happen in form that directly impacts the existence of democracy. Considering the pandemic in 2020, there was lot of disinformation filled over pages and there is no one to confirm which is truth and which is not.
I am not part of this film promotions but this content has to be understand by every person who spent time online. It’s different when newspapers and televisions were started to enter our life, but this is on far high level and it’s growing rapidly in the last 10years. There are lot of unbelievable facts in the film but yes it’s happening on the other side of screens and before a mass chaos touches our life, we need to be aware of what problem we are in to solve the problem. Please watch the film and follow The Social Dilemma and Humane Tech to know more details.
