The Social Dilemma

[Youfreeme]

Did anyone watch this documentary put out by Netflix? It centers around the algorithms used by social media platforms, and how they have come to increase political unrest, polarization in politics, acceptance of conspiracy theories fake news, as well as increased suicide rates in teen-aged youth. If anyone watched it, I would love to hear their thoughts.

[Audiogen]

I have not seen the documentary but I saw Tristan Harris who is apparently featured in it, on the Joe Rogan podcast. I don't recall him talking much about increased suicide rates among teens but he addressed all the other issues. From that podcast, my take away was that social media sites are competing in the "Attention Economy" or trying to get users to stay glued to their apps for the most amount of time.

Some of the other issues alluded to I was already aware of, such as how Big Tech is trying to act as both Platform and Publisher. This has lead to a fair amount of people pointing out Big Tech's biases in implementing bans and censorship, fueling a lot of polarization imo. On the topic, I recently heard that this is affecting many small businesses that advertise on Facebook. Ads have been increasingly censored by algorithms and small businesses have been prevented from continuing to advertise unless they go through an appeal process, which is colloquially being called Facebook jail.

Harris mentioned that in the early days of Youtube, the algorithms basically solely operated on the Attention Economy principle and so there was a lot of Conspiracy Theory content that got boosted to recommend videos due to their popularity even if they had little to no relation to whatever particular video a user would initially seek out. In recent years, apparently the algorithms have been tweaked to prevent that content from being so easily accessible which may sound good on the surface but I don't really like the idea of apps which have demonstrated pretty blatant biases censoring or curating content like that.

[Jessica]

I half want to watch and and half know it'll overload my brain with the expansive picture of things it'll show me