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Thread: Documentary: "Social Dilemma" - how social media is ruining society

  1. #1

    Lightbulb Documentary: "Social Dilemma" - how social media is ruining society


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    "A politician will do almost anything to keep their job, even become a patriot" - Hearst



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  3. #2

    Lightbulb

    Ok so I just watched "The Social Dilemma"


    A few thoughts...


    Yes the documentary makes some excellent points. Specifically about addiction of social media.


    In 2011 while working on the Ron Paul Presidential Campaign, serving as his New Media Manager, I had the idea of programming our volunteer dial-from-home app to operate as a slot machine would, giving specific rewards and feedback to volunteers in order to keep them dialing for longer periods of time. For better or worse my ideas were way outside of the scope of our capabilities and thus never saw the light of day. But the point being that it was obvious to me at the time that social media companies were absolutely using psychological manipulation to their advantage in the same way that slot machine programmers were and from a top down perspective this was a useful tool.


    This is a very real thing and honestly I cannot remember the last time I went more than a few hours without checking Facebook in the last 10+ years or so.


    The documentary also touched on the possibility of governmental or political manipulation of social media in order to influence public opinion. Yeah, duh, politicians and bureaucrats are always going to be looking for the next best propaganda outlet to influence public opinion. Just like the newspaper or TV, everything should be scrutinized and thought about critically before taking it at full value.


    The bigger scare in my opinion is that the government likely has a backdoor to all of the data collected by social media, lawfully or otherwise. I actually like the fact that the ads that are shown to me are relevant and interesting to me. I'm not just seeing ads for crap I'll never buy. But government should never have access to this data without a subpoena and due process.


    Then in the last 15 minutes the documentary devolves into nonsense. They attempt to pass off the idea that climate change is unquestionably manmade (it's not), but more significantly they call for more government regulation on the issue of social media. In short that is a thinly veiled call for regulation of speech, which is NEVER a good thing.


    A couple of other points I didn't care for, specifically the over dramatization and the dystopian mindset. They tried to paint a picture that all of humanity was about to come to an end due to social media, which is ludicrous. Yes of course there are some serious problems but social media doesn't create these problems for the most part, it only amplifies them to an extent.


    That being said it was worth watching and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to have a thought provoking hour and a half. But again, run it through the critical thinking filter, don't just take it at face value.
    __________________________________________________ ________________
    "A politician will do almost anything to keep their job, even become a patriot" - Hearst

  4. #3
    I watched it a few days ago. It did a good job driving home the point about the addiction engineering that is ongoing, but the issue I found most salient was the how their AI algos that determine your interests for targeting advertising aren't just used to present you with ads tailored to your interests, they are used to identify demographics for advertisers so that interested parties (political groups, disinfo operatives, etc.) can target their messages for viral distribution. That combined with news feeds filtered according to interests (by the social media AI, not necessarily user choice) surely helps exacerbate the polarization of ideas as folks increasingly shelter themselves from any intellectual challenges.

  5. #4
    I thought it was good, 4 stars out of five. I was impressed with the depth of influence social media has nowadays. The propaganda will only run deeper and be harder to extract from the mind.

    I do wish they touched more on the human behavior side a little more, the instinctual Pavlovian self gratification we seek for that dopamine fix. Also I wish they would have taken it to the logical conclusion that this a wedge in society which only helps the political classes.

    Good film overall.

    We're being governed ruled by a geriatric Alzheimer patient/puppet whose strings are being pulled by an elitist oligarchy who believe they can manage the world... imagine the utter maniacal, sociopathic hubris!



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