That was one of the questions put to viewers by Netflix’s recent documentary, The Social Dilemma. The documentary interviews prominent technological experts who helped design some of the most iconic social media functions: for example, Facebook’s “like” button. The documentary begins with experts acknowledging there is a problem but having difficulty labelling and defining the problem.
Of course, the notion that social media is creating problems is not surprising. As a privacy enthusiast myself – let me plug our club, the Osgoode Privacy Law Society (OPLS) – I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that social media companies are data mining and selling our information to advertisers. Information selling may seem relatively harmless since if you’re going to get advertisements anyway, it might as well be for something that is of interest.
But as The Great Hack, another Netflix documentary about the Cambridge Analytical scandal, illustrated, targeted advertisements and rapidly changing algorithms designed to reinforce your thinking can change the way we think. We’ve all been through those rabbit holes on YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter. There’s something extraordinary about being interested in one topic and having similar content recommended to you. Yet, there’s also something uniquely harmful about having your biases reaffirmed as the truth because people are less likely to engage in dialogue with the other side. A low point reinforces this for the documentary – depicting a family whose lives are negatively affected by their addiction to social media.
While social media proponents want to argue that social media is just replicating the traditional news media framework, that’s not true. Yes, people could buy newspapers that reaffirm their biases, but the number of people impacted and the amount of information they could access is incomparable.
So, how do we go about solving this issue? Some of the leading tech companies assert that Artificial Intelligence should resolve this problem since Artificial Intelligence created it. This solution is driven by the fact that tech companies are for-profit, and their business models rely on them generating profit. So why not suggest that they are the ones that can solve the problem?
Much like the documentary, the ending of this article is unsatisfying and disappointing. Aside from a vague solution of creating and enforcing more regulations and holding tech companies accountable, the documentary interviewees do not provide any tangible solutions. Perhaps that’s a good thing. Instead of taking their word, we can go out and do our own research while fighting the urge to rely on related content.