Amy Kraft - Week 5: "The Social Dilemma"

         Over the weekend I watched the documentary The Social Dilemma, and wow. This documentary talks about the impact social media and the internet has on our world. A family is portrayed in the documentary, by which it shows how real people, especially teenagers, are affected by social media, while former workers of these major tech companies, including Instagram, Google, Facebook, etc. explain the good intentions of these platforms, but unfortunately how they are now tearing our world apart. 

        The current major problem of such tech companies is the lack of ethics, concerning the mental health of these users, the spread of false information, and the spread of hate. Because of the vast abilities of the internet, ISIS, as well as, white supremacist groups have been able to recruit members through social media. With the current global political scene and much of the global news being reported online, false information spread like rapid-fire, by which “we have gone from the information age into the disinformation age.” In fact, as reported in this documentary, fake news spreads 6 times as fast as real news online, and this abundance of fake news has major consequences. The fake news has created polarization in our nation, and that polarization will only continue to tear apart our democracy.

  

        Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google who is “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,” explains how the internet is not what it used to be. When the team at Google was first designing Gmail, they were worried about the design, but not about how addictive it would be. Whether you are addicted to Gmail, Snapchat, or even Tik Tok, as a population we have fallen under the tech companies’ spell. He had enough. So he spoke up, and even his CEO became aware of his presentation of integrating ethics into their products, but nothing happened. 

        These apps are not the products that we use. No, we are the product and as users, we are being sold by the companies. Now, as users we don't pay for these so-called “products,” advertisers do. They are the customers who are paying for us as users to see their products. We often misconceive that it is our data being sold by these companies, but the issue is actually what they do with that data and how they use it to build models, a sorta “avatar voodoo doll-like model of us”  to predict the most engagement. 

        These companies are not just what they seem to be. Google is not just a place to search for things up, and Snapchat is not just a platform to send pictures to friends. The companies are, in fact, competing for our attention; they want to keep us engaged in their apps for as long as possible. They don't care about us, but what they do care about is our engagement, our growth, by which we keep coming back, we invite friends onto these apps, and the advertisement goal. 

        Programs and software are monitoring our attention and what engages us to create a sort of personalized feed for each of us. You ever wonder why you search up PacSun on your phone and then get PacSun ads on Snapchat or Instagram; this is why. They know which image we look at and how long we look at it. They know what we feel when we look at a picture if we're introverted or extroverted, what music we like, etc. It could be a picture of your ex, which makes you angry or sad, or a picture of sports, which excites you. All of this is to create a personalized feed that changes as we change. All of these responses and changes, like liking a picture, all go into creating a better model of us, ultimately getting us to stay on the app longer and longer. It’s kinda creepy and unprecedented. 

        

        When these tech companies started their projects, they wanted to open the world to new and endless possibilities, but little did they know how it would affect society. For example, when Instagram first created the feature of liking someone else’s post, they wanted to spread kindness and positivity. However, now teenagers judge themselves on how many likes they get or don't get, which leads them into a hole of depression and low self-esteem. With teenagers succumbing to low self-esteem, suicide and self-harm rates have drastically increased by a rate of 151% in girls ages 10-14 and 70%+ in girls ages 15-19 between the years 2009-2020. There is also the rise in cosmetic surgery in the younger generations, and due to this rise in teenagers getting plastic surgery, plastic surgeons have even coined the term “Snapchat dysmorphia” for this new syndrome. These teens who are driven to cosmetic surgery want it to look more like they do in filtered selfies and ultimately get more likes on a post. 

        Parents are worried about their children and if social media will mentally harm their children. But what can we do? How can our parents make it so that we are the only one of our friends not on social media? We can't live in a world driven by social media without it. Imagine being a teenager and all of your friends have Snapchat and Instagram, but you don't. You would feel left out. 

        

        Although I had already given a lot of thought to this topic, this documentary was definitely eye-opening. Personally, I hate social media. Sure some good things come out of it, like meeting new people and being able to talk to our friends in different states or countries, but it is also an addictive waste of time. I think it plagues our society and is ruining future generations. When I was little, every day after school, I would swim or play sports outside. Now, three-year-olds walk around with an iPad glued to their hands. That's insane. I didn't touch a smart device, like an iPhone, till my mom got one when I was 8. The kids today don't go outside to play, and not only is it sad that they won't experience the outdoors like I did, but it’s also not healthy. 

        Unfortunately, there are no laws that limit the use of the internet or stop the spread of fake news and hate. They can't stop the spread of fake news because that would technically be a violation of our first amendment rights. So is there a practical and legal way to fix these extreme problems on the internet? Can you think of any?