The Social Delimma on Netflix
If you haven't seen this on Netflix it is worth a look, and should be mandatory viewing for anyone with kids - as well as their kids. Apologies if this has been discussed. Just got around to watching it last night. Interesting.
https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/
October 2nd, 2020 at 9:52 AM ^
Well I did cut Zuckerburg/FB... too much intrusion, gobbles up your data/info like a Zamboni !
October 2nd, 2020 at 10:05 AM ^
I don't plan to watch it, but I did cancel my facebook mostly unrelated a few days ago.
October 2nd, 2020 at 10:07 AM ^
My kids are 11, 11 and 9. They don't have facebook. Is this still a good watch for them or is this more facebook centered?
All my kids do is wrestle each other and play fortnite.
October 2nd, 2020 at 10:13 AM ^
Facebook is a part of it but it also talks about all of the different social media platforms. Not just those but also google and google news in general. A lot of people aren't aware of how information is tailored for you based on information collected from your internet traffic. I think it starts a good conversation with kids about how to be aware of what's going on around you, not to believe everything you see or read, etc...
Scary that most of the people involved with creating various parts of it see it leading to civil war...
October 2nd, 2020 at 10:33 AM ^
This past year i have been talking about a civil war coming many of times. I'm an independent, 'slightly' leaning one way - but this year has been murderous from both sides. I am seeing splits on social media, long time friends not even speaking anymore (actually hating each other) - there is a major, major political divide that either i was too naive to see before, or is exponentially exploding.
October 2nd, 2020 at 10:43 AM ^
I've been a free market type for the past 40 years. But can we allow huge, multi-national corporations divide us for profit? Irresponsibility does not begin to describe it.
October 2nd, 2020 at 11:37 AM ^
Well darn, if it ain't the logical outcome of my own beliefs.
October 2nd, 2020 at 2:02 PM ^
You are missing the point. It’s not the corporations that you have to worry the most about. A technology intended for good and that started that way ends up becoming an incredibly efficient platform for any politician or dictator with reasonable resources to divide any nation, theirs or ours, for whatever objective they may have. Lies and conspiracy goes viral by 6X the truth. It’s easier to do divide than unite.
October 2nd, 2020 at 4:45 PM ^
Wait, you mean a technology that was intended to be good was used by some people for evil? That's the first time that has ever happened. /s Well, maybe since the slingshot.
October 2nd, 2020 at 4:05 PM ^
The notion that a free market actually exists in America is a myth. It has always been socialism for the rich and wealthy and cold, hard capitalism for everyone else.
October 2nd, 2020 at 11:00 AM ^
One issue with Twitter is that a lot of it’s users follow people that think just like they do. In addition to this, they block people who don’t think like they do. This creates an echo chamber and allows people to live in this one sided world that isn’t very healthy.
October 2nd, 2020 at 11:40 AM ^
Understood. But the social media and news corporations deliberately set up the system to promote the behavior you describe. And they were aware of the likely consequences and proceeded anyway. For money. For the almighty dollar. Greed, plain and simple.
And it was all predicted in the movie Network in 1976.
October 3rd, 2020 at 10:11 AM ^
It was predicted way earlier than that.
We're in the midst of an Orwellian dystopian nightmare that's going to prove disastrous in the end.
October 2nd, 2020 at 12:14 PM ^
This isn't limited to social media as anyone with Boomer parents running fox news 24/7 can attest.
October 2nd, 2020 at 12:23 PM ^
lol as if it’s limited to Fox. Please. All cable news is that way.
October 2nd, 2020 at 12:50 PM ^
True, he should have included OANN
October 2nd, 2020 at 2:01 PM ^
Not nearly to the degree that Fox goes to. There really is no comparison, with any other network when it comes to blatant misinformation, and outright lies repeated daily. Yes, other networks bend and stretch the truth, fit things to their preferred narratives, but that's not even in the same ballpark as Fox. The only people who believe they're doing the same thing, are those only exposing themselves to one, or the other.
Step out of the bubble, man, it's better out here.
October 2nd, 2020 at 2:08 PM ^
Really? CNN and Fox are both fucking trash.
October 2nd, 2020 at 4:05 PM ^
There is nuance in my words above, that I don't think you picked up. Equating the two is entirely unfair. Yes, CNN is trash, I agree. Fox is about six levels down from that.
October 2nd, 2020 at 4:08 PM ^
So Timmmaay. Be honest now...you're politics leans left. Right?
October 2nd, 2020 at 6:16 PM ^
People are way too tied up in to "identity" politics. It's pretty stupid, IMO. You should vote for what matters, period. My politics change as conditions change, as should everyone. I don't lump myself in with either party, I am independent.
As far as voting... I'm pretty "down the middle", this past several years leaning slightly left of center. My big issues are health care (we're doing it wrong), the environment, and the growing disparity in wealth in this country (and the world in general). Those few things drive most of my voting choices these days. Over the past 20 or so years, I have voted for more Republicans than Democrats. But not in the past couple of election cycles.
Oh, another big thing for me is character, and all that goes along with that grab bag type of word. I try to call things as they are, not as I want them to be. Simply being honest would clear up so many issues in the world, but everyone wants to be "right". Toss in social media, and corporate "news", with a little Russian influence tossed in... and here we are.
October 2nd, 2020 at 4:06 PM ^
CNN is the absolute worst. The entire network is opinion all day every day, not just the nightly shows.
October 2nd, 2020 at 5:11 PM ^
Maybe, I don't watch cable news. But do you think many Boomer parents out there are watching a different station?
October 2nd, 2020 at 2:50 PM ^
When it comes to getting people in my parents' generation to believe batshit crazy things, Facebook has been like Fox News on steroids. Conspiracy theories flood their feeds, they engage with the conspiracy theories, and the algorithm feeds them more and crazier conspiracy theories to keep them engaged. Facebook has straight-up radicalized a lot of people with (actual) fake news that gradually cranks up the insanity over time.
Everyone is susceptible to it, but research has shown that older generations are much more likely to share fake news on Facebook. They lived most of their lives in a different era, when articles had to go through reputable publishers or newspaper editors to reach the masses. Now the sludge is dialed up x1000 and anyone can throw hot garbage out there.
October 2nd, 2020 at 3:27 PM ^
See: Aces account. ?
October 2nd, 2020 at 12:48 PM ^
"murderous from both sides"
Hmm...while technically true, that's a supreme effort at "both sidesing it" (literally). Maybe your "slight lean" isn't so slight after all.
October 2nd, 2020 at 4:10 PM ^
Yea, this is a terrible "both sides" argument. I'm a Democrat. Been a registered Democrat as far back as I can remember. My party isn't perfect. My party is also not the party coalescing around Donald Trump and excusing every half-assed attempt he makes at playing dictator. The modern Republican party is so far outside of the mainstream.
October 2nd, 2020 at 10:48 AM ^
Yes this should be a conversation with kids. In my opinion though it's the older people who didn't grow up with technology that need to be taught about this more than anything.
October 2nd, 2020 at 12:52 PM ^
I thought so too, but there was a study that just came out indicating that Gen Z / young Millennials were more susceptible to Coronavirus misinformation than other generations. Could be something specific to coronavirus misinformation, but still surpised me.
October 2nd, 2020 at 11:19 AM ^
Talk to them relatively soon (would say around 13) about:
1) Online propaganda. It's easy to fall down a Youtube wormhole into hate groups really fast. I've had students with all kinds of white supremacist propaganda that they spout to me (also drawing SS logos on their math homework, wheeeeeee). Monitor their usage of sites with autoplay features and recommended lists.
2) Nudes. There is a ton of revenge porn that happens after middle/high school breakups. It's bad. And also a federal crime because it's child porn. You would not believe how common this is. Once asked a victim of revenge porn what percentage of kids we could convict of production, distribution, or possession of child porn and guessed 33%. She laughed at me because it was such a low guess.
October 2nd, 2020 at 12:32 PM ^
So as a dad of three (15, 12 and 9), I would say there is some great value in the documentary, but also would suggest you might want to preview it. For kids the ages of yours and they way you've described them, the last half hour in particular has potentially-disturbing messages from these VERY credible people including:
- "AI has already gotten beyond us ... it isn't the Terminator scenario, but it's already manipulating us" (with an almost overt message that the companies themselves couldn't even stop the AI if they wanted to).
- The very matter-of-fact discussion that said adults (who almost any child could easily process as a normal mom or dad type, but with lots of authority established throughout the film) have about how they view near-term societal collapse as something they consider to be likely.
It is powerful. Our 15 year old chose to delete all her social media the next day without us even asking.
October 2nd, 2020 at 2:14 PM ^
I guess I didn't get the same sense of credibility from a lot of the people in the documentary. They obviously are smart people but it felt so trite to see these people who made lots of money and enjoyed lots of advantages from their work in these spaces "suddenly" have epiphanies and then sitting down with a crew to somberly discuss the slippery slopes we're now on. The parts where they talked about how AI was funneling people into echo chambers in particular felt like individuals ignoring history; people have always sorted themselves into groups with like-minded beliefs. Hell, I remember growing up and people only read the Free Press or the News because they viewed the other one as "biased". Integration to this day remains a fraught political and social issue that started generations ago, and redlining isn't some new problem in society.
Yes, if you only want to read about certain topics a media company is going to funnel those stories toward you. That's not a particularly new piece of manipulation. Companies have known about shopping habits from credit card receipts, user surveys, demographic info, etc. for a long time. We as a society turn over a ton of identifiable information basically for free, and it gets used in a variety of ways. But deleting TikTok and Instagram isn't going to change that, and frankly I found the documentary's subjects seemingly trying to one-up each other with their doom and gloom scenarios mostly lazy attempts to absolve themselves of bad decisions they made.
October 2nd, 2020 at 2:32 PM ^
I agree with all you said, but I think the point (or one of them) that was being made was that if you are using the technology a lot, and that technology is funneling info to you that is being promoted by individuals with ill intent and disguising it as facts that you sought out, a less discerning mind (child, your parent) might not even pick up on the fact that they did not seek out that group but rather were funneled to it and would therefore be more likely to believe it.
I think the point was the speed and efficiency that this happening. Making it more dangerous than the past.
October 2nd, 2020 at 3:02 PM ^
I agree with all of this. The speed is the scariest part, though in my experience younger people seem to have a better handle at sniffing out the BS than older people because kids are, in some ways, more attuned to look for it than adults.
I guess I find these documentaries a bit vapid; I know people who have and still do work at the FAANG-type companies and the ones who sorta drink the Kool-Aid because of the pay and the perks read like these people, just a couple years earlier. Companies like Twitter, Facebook, etc. do a really good job of insulating the white-collar workers from all the shit that flows through their systems, and so if you aren't inclined to recognize that a bunch of hate groups and pedophiles like to use your platforms in the same ways church groups and people who want to follow the news do, that's more a problem with you than the product itself. And so years after people knew a lot of this was going on these individuals, fresh off of getting their last bonus check or stock dividend, suddenly remove the scales from their eyes and see what they've been working on and want to warn us all, I get annoyed and dismissive.
October 2nd, 2020 at 10:07 AM ^
I got rid of FB in 2011 and never looked back. That thing is a cancer on society.
October 2nd, 2020 at 10:16 AM ^
It was cool when it was limited to .edu accounts, but was immediately garbage when opened to everyone else.
October 2nd, 2020 at 3:00 PM ^
IMO the great turning point was the creation of the news feed.
October 2nd, 2020 at 11:21 AM ^
I agree facebook sucks, but I also think people are too quick to assume the problems are just facebook-related. If you wiped facebook off the face of the earth tomorrow, people would still gossip elsewhere, share misleading information/news elsewhere, get their sense of self-satisfaction via likes elsewhere. Because there's a lot of money involved, it seems like there's always going to be some type of social media out there that is optimized to draw you in as much as possible. If you haven't seen the Black Mirror episode 'Nosedive' it's another theoretical future (on social media this time) that is uncomfortably plausible
October 2nd, 2020 at 12:04 PM ^
I think my biggest issue is that the social media websites do not do a very good job of making sure the information spread on there is even mildly correct. Each day, half of the most shared stories are straight from the loony bin. This kind of shit used to be contained to somewhat obscure websites like 4chan, Daily Stormer and other whacko outlets. Facebook and other mainstream social media empires allow this stuff to be shared quite a bit before they put a stop to it - even if they do. There's a guy on twitter that has falsely accused innocent people of murder and almost gotten them killed multiple times. Why is he still allowed on there? Seems pretty cut and dry to me. It's not that hard to monitor. It just takes manpower and money, which places like Facebook don't want to utilize.
October 2nd, 2020 at 1:34 PM ^
I saw a post this morning from one of my FB friends. It was obviously false and inflammatory. It got pulled down in minutes, so just maybe they're starting to do better.
October 2nd, 2020 at 2:35 PM ^
Yeah, there's obvious conflict of interest with facebook and the like. More usage = more money for them and policing it all costs them money, so without external pressure they are not incentivized to care one bit about what happens as long as people keep using their platform
October 2nd, 2020 at 10:08 AM ^
I'm kind of glad I only have a Facebook and not any other social media accounts.
In this day and age I mean.
October 2nd, 2020 at 10:13 AM ^
I didn’t need a documentary to inform me that social media is toxic, addictive and manipulative.
October 3rd, 2020 at 1:18 PM ^
Good for you. Unfortunately most people are not as well informed as you seem to be. Who knew that the reason the Yeti are so hard to photograph is because they are holed up inside somewhere researching topics relevant to social science, so they can be well informed.
October 2nd, 2020 at 10:16 AM ^
Netflix throwing shade at Facebook? Both are trash.
October 2nd, 2020 at 10:29 AM ^
I'm not sure what makes Netflix so horrible. The key problem with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., is the perverse incentive structure that is associated with the advertising revenue model.
Facebook profits by selling our attention to advertisers. To make the most efficient use of advertisers' money, Facebook's focus is essentially to best understand how to keep our eyes on the screen to give us a few more ads. Without knowing what the outcome would be, machine-learning was set loose on this problem, and it turns out the best way to keep our eyes on the screen is to outrage us with stories about how our outgroup is bad, etc. The net result here is an increase of polarization, distrust, conspiracy thinking, etc. As a concrete example, it is empirically true that fake news stories have higher velocity (sharing, etc.) than real ones. This is because it is easier to write an outrage-inducing headline that is fiction than a real one. Because these stories are more likely to keep our attention on-screen, the *platform* is more likely to amplify these messages as well.
On the other hand, the revenue model employed by Netflix, Wikipedia, etc., is one where they only profit by giving people a good product that they want. These companies survive by patronage, so they are incentivized to make people want to maintain their membership. Netflix does not care if we watch TV one, zero, or ten hours a day. They just want us to maintain our patronage. There is no advertiser to satisfy.
October 2nd, 2020 at 10:37 AM ^
I didn’t put much thought into what I said. Less screen time the better but with so many people being stuck at home screen time is only increasing. I’m glad my iPhone tells me my daily screen time so I can keep it at bay. I work with a younger girl who has over 9 hours of screen time a day and that’s just on her phone. How is that even possible? Facebook is a growing business and just like amazon may enter the movie space like Netflix. The FAANG stocks are all competing but also move up together.
October 2nd, 2020 at 12:50 PM ^
Give Cuties a watch.
October 2nd, 2020 at 1:35 PM ^
What about it? The overblown and grossly exaggerated negative review of it?