‘The Social Dilemma’ offers inside look to social media conspiracies

Social media can do a lot of good and is beneficial to a lot of people but the bad that social media causes greatly outweighs the good, the bad is just hidden a lot easier.

Fake news is something that is very prevalent and huge nowadays. A study said that fake news spreads six times faster on Twitter than real news does. Pizzagate was a conspiracy theory that was spread around all platforms by the algorithm to people who had never even searched up pizzagate in their life, and it was totally false. We’ve basically gone from the information age to the disinformation age. False information makes companies more money than real news, so it gets spread more. The platforms make it possible to spread manipulation very easily with very little money needed.

If something is a tool, it’s just sitting there waiting; if something is not a tool, it’s demanding things from you. If your phone is just sitting on the counter, you have the urge to grab it because it might just have something for you. That’s not by accident; that’s a design technique. Also, when you get tagged in a photo, you get an email that says your friend tagged you in a photo, but the photo isn’t in the email. You have to go to the website. We’ve gone from a tools-based technology environment to an addiction- and manipulation-based technology environment.

“There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software.” Social media is a drug. How do you wake up from the Matrix if you don’t know you’re in the Matrix?

The whole generation of Gen Z is more depressed, more anxious, more fragile. Much less comfortable taking risks. The rates at which they get driver’s licenses have been dropping. The number of any who have ever gone out on a date or had any kind of romantic interaction is dropping rapidly. Depression, anxiety and suicide rates have gone up drastically since 2011, all those patterns come from social media. These services are killing people and causing people to kill themselves.

We’re training and conditioning a whole generation that when we are uncomfortable or lonely or uncertain or afraid, we have a digital pacifier for ourselves.

There are almost no laws against digital privacy. Technologies are just going to become more of a part of our lives, not less. It’s simultaneous utopia and dystopia. Social media can be helpful in keeping in contact with friends or seeing what fun activities people are up to, but as the algorithm starts to take over kids’ sense of self-worth and identity, it’s just a downward spiral. 

The beginning goal was good, but it just grows and evolves until it gets too big to change it. The bigger it gets the harder it gets to change. The engineers on the other side of your computer don’t have the same goals that you have.