The Social Dilemma

The Social Dilemma is a Netflix released film which was released on 2020 with 7.62 IMDb rating. It was premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2020. The Director of the film is Jeff Orlowski. It is a American docudrama based on the social media and how it is influencing people, manipulating people’s mind. It also shows how social media effecting the mental health of a person.

The film starts with the interview of various former employees from the renowned tech companies and social media platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube and Mozila. They discussed their experience regarding social media during their work in this companies.The film focuses on the rising issue of social media’s problem on a person’s life. The documentary describes how an excessive amount of media consumption can have a negative impact on a person’s mental health. The social media also leads to many suicidal problems like misinformation of conspiracy theory, mental health consequences. It also give more focus on addiction, anxiety, depression, etc. Last area of the film was data privacy. The overall message of this film was to be aware about the potential dangers of the technology and also reducing the time on social media. There have been other documentaries on this topic but it gather the attention of the viewer. Our life nowadays is controlled by the social media, although some of us tried to hide this things from it but somehow we are unable to stop ourselves. For example, Justin Rosenstein, inventor of the “like button” feature on facebook. He invented this feature just to encourage people for posting something on facebook but it turns out that people got affected whenever they get less likes it hurts their sentiment, they become depressed. This leads to mental illness usually among the teenagers, they even attempt suicide. The social media allows the targeted audience a large number of misinformation. For example, a person may share his/her interest in something which is may be misinformation and it will lead to conspiracy theory. The social media makes it much easier to spread fake news among the audience. Political activity is also greatly affected by social media users. The interview of the employees was the most interested part of the film. They describe how a technology can simply manipulates a person and his psyche. Despite their so many confessions, they lastly suggestion was that tech customer are disappointingly conventional. Their suggestions were turn off notifications, deactivate apps which are time consuming. The film “The Social Dilemma” is greatly possess an empirical threat to digital business. Despite all this criticisms against social media, facebook has again reached a new highs this current year. 

Mark Zuckerberg rightly predicted, advertisers boycott driven by discontent with the company’s hate speech did not affected. The last scene of the film was the interviewees asking viewers to “change the debate” about technology. Lastly we need to control ourselves from the excessive use of social media. The tech developers needs to recreate their privacy, set some limits, keep a fact check filter. And also the users must be aware of the fact before sharing anything on social media.