Available for a few weeks on the Netflix platform, the documentary “The Social Dilemma” addresses the impact of social media on our daily lives, including the issue of data collection and resale.
Many interviews with former high-ranking executives from major tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter reveal the whole process that is carried out and raise many societal issues related to this. The documentary is interspersed with fictional scenes depicting the life of a family.
The impact of fake news in the information age turns it into misinformation. For Tristan Harris, a former designer at Google, products should be ethical without making users addicted. Silicon Valley companies no longer sell products but consumers, through advertisements, email addresses, addresses, etc.
“If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product”
These free services make profits by integrating advertisers into news feeds. They sell certainty by collecting a huge amount of data. Profit is only made by tracking all our actions. We work for free by generating data offered to companies. Moreover, by collecting all this flow, our personality traits can be revealed.
All our suggestions are predicted by algorithms analyzing our navigation, allowing them to target and precisely predict our next desires and expectations. Major figures of Silicon Valley have studied at top universities offering courses on persuasive technology. This is a technique pushed to the extreme, aiming to alter our interactions while implementing a constant update of posts, tweets, or videos. It’s the phenomenon of intermittent positive reinforcement. It’s the same principle as slot machines in casinos, where we perform tasks without even realizing it. Science is therefore closely linked with new technologies, creating a reward circuit with likes, boosting dopamine. These applications flatter our egos with different filters that set beauty standards.
Netflix creates an original documentary to denounce the actions of the world’s most powerful tech companies. However, they don’t refrain from employing the exact same processes. They bombard us with notifications to bring us back to their platform while curating what we might like. The homepage of your account is not the same as that of a friend or family member. This “freedom of choice” that Netflix denounces, where is it?
