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Blog Post 14: The Social Dilemma

 Welcome to the Blogging Brooke, 



Today I would like to talk about the Netflix film called The Social Dilemma. I had already watched this documentary prior to this film class earlier on in the semester for my social media class. 

In this blog post, I will define my key takeaways from the film.

First I will start off with how many dilemmas I was able to count in the film. 

  • At minute 6:40, Tristan Harris, a former Google design enthusiast and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, names 7 dilemmas. These seven include a cacophony of grievances and scandals, data stealing, tech addiction, fake news, political polarization, elections getting hacked. Cynthia Wong named a few more offline harm dilemmas including hate speech, manipulating public opinion, and inciting violence. There is also populism, mass chaos, and lack of trust.  In total, I counted thirteen dilemmas. One in detail would be fake news. Fake news is always harmful to society. It causes people to be mislead on a topic and then it spreads worldwide and can ultimately result in chaos. For example, the Covid-19 vaccine was said to be derived from eating Chinese food, this caused Chinese restaurants to almost go bankrupt for a while. Fake news is dangerous to society, and we need to be careful with all information we see online.

 Then the question of whether or not we should trust we trust algorithms that rely on constantly surveilling our activities online arises. My answer to this question would be no, I do not think we should trust algorithms (methods) that rely on constantly having to be surveilling its user’s activity online. It is even more dangerous when the surveillance is regarding personal use such as job searching, finances, and housing. Jeff states that “every single action you take is being carefully monitored and recorded.” To me, that is very alarming. Jeff Siebert stated that they can see and measure exactly what image you stop and look at and even the length of time you were looking at that certain image. So back to my first point, no, we should not trust algorithms that rely on the constant stalking of our [the users] activities online. We do not know what they do with the data that they are constantly collecting. After watching this documentary, I think that it is best to either delete social media or limit your use of it because of the unknown realm of information that the internet has on us that we are unaware of. I do not want to be on Zillow looking for a house in the future and then open my bank account on my phone when the screen can see how much I have or where I want to live, it is truly unsettling. The algorithms gather all the data from your usage and decide what to show you to get your attention and gain clicks or likes.  


To conclude, this film points out all of the horrifying things that users do not see when it comes to social media. This film also does a good job of helping these people realize the effects that social media can have on a person/people, and how it is a dangerous social media revolved world that we live in. This scenario is just a couple of the many that users face worldwide. What can we do to stop this evolving problem? There is only one answer; delete social media. 

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