Recently aired on Netflix, The Social Dilemma aims to make us reflect on the impacts, often hidden, that the constant use of social medias have on our lives. Countless times - with cigarettes, oil, meat and many others products - history has demonstrated that, if there is something that can be used by companies to make money, there will be someone that will try to sell that product to people, no matter how dangerous it can be for the health of the consumers.
If technology, in general, can be, and often is, extremely useful, the same cannot be said for social medias: the reason of this is explained, in this compelling documentary, by the people that helped creating the platforms that we use for countless hours. These are people that, at some point of their lives, realized that what they were helping building wasn't ethically right, and stepped back from their jobs, dedicating the rest of their carreers to build something more useful and healthy for people, like Tristan Harris, Jeff Seibert, and Tim Kendall.
But why Social Medias are so bad for us?
There's a quote on the movie that says something like: if they don't try to sell you a product, that means that you are the product.
The value of our data
We all know that the companies beyond the biggest social platforms are multi-millionaire. How do they make all that money? The short answer is: selling our data. The infinite amount of data that they collect on us, each and every time that we use their platforms. Because the data about us is precious: the algorithms beyond these softwares use all the informations that they have on us to reach one goal: make us more and more addicted to their products. The more time we spend on Facebook, the more Facebook is gonna earn from publishers, showing us their ads.
Even more dangerous, if I wanna find, let's say, 1000 people that can believe in flat earth, all I have to do is to pay Facebook, and Facebook is gonna give me the names of these people, so that I can reach them, and show them other conspiracy theories, like the danger of 5G, or Pizzagate, or whatever I want.
That appears to be the technique used in 2016 by Russia to affect the presidential elections in America, using fake news to converge the votes of the undecided voters towards Donald Trump, a person that, according to many, is probably the worst President in the history of the US.
That's how the populists all over the world are rising in the modern age. So, Is that how we want to spend our time, being manipulated, not being able to discern what is fake news from what is true? Is 2020, and maybe, is time to wake up.
