A reaction to “Social Dilemma” from NETFLIX

I recently watched “Social Dilemma” on Netflix. Although I think they hit upon a key issue, “disinformation-for-profit”, I take several issues with the other points, and how they were presented.

My first grievance is that they didn’t really hit at the heart of the issue that has led to this “misalignment” in society.

Why is alignment important? Jack Welch explained this much better and more thoroughly than I could in his book, the real-life MBA.

So what is the root cause of this societal-misalignment?

We have substituted “fact” for “opinion”.

Think Kellyanne Conway’s, “Alternative Facts” statement. This is what has led to things like anti-vaxers, flat earthers, anti-masks and other movements that are at odds with the scientific method, data, supporting evidence and overall truth.

How did we get here?

If you have watched VICE the movie, not the channel you’ll have seen that opinion news was repopularised on the back of a key change in how the news could be presented to the public in the US. This was due to the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine, which you can read more about here. This gave way to the motherload of opinion-stated-as-fact news, FOX.

Opinion news was actually the norm back in the day (Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton for instance), until we learned from those lessons, made it unbiased and then decided to make the same mistakes again.

This has resulted in the destructive force in our society of not being able to separate fiction from fact, resulting in parallel narratives. That’s the thing about opinion, it forces a chose for the consumer of that information — do I agree, or disagree? Previously if a thing was a fact, to disagree with it was nonsensical, now with ad hominem attacks becoming commonplace groups can dismiss others as either sheep or loons. Here is a good piece that outlines some recent examples.

The next issue I had was confusing “tech” with social media.

At the beginning of the movie, they spoke a lot about the problems with “tech” when really their main problems are with social media and out of social media, their main problem was really with Facebook. They didn’t speak at all about Linkedin for contrast.

What’s the difference between Linkedin and Facebook? Some even refer to Linkedin as the work-facebook; however, I don’t see anyone dragging Reid Hoffman in front of congress to testify on Linkedin’s meddling in the 2016 elections.

I think this is due to one big difference, the type of content that is on the platforms. All social media platforms are going to have similar metrics: engagement, session duration, ad revenue, etc. So all will try to compete for your eyeballs — but that is nothing new.

Social Media as a dystopian evil that is trying to manipulate you.

This is a ridiculous premise when you put into the context of what social media is….MEDIA. Media is manipulative by design, it’s a perspective and a narrative. For instance, I’m trying to manipulate you right now.

This is why in the 1950s film became a target for anti-communist strategies, because of the perceived influence it could have on people’s attitudes. Before that books were targets (think book burnings) and propaganda posters were influential tools of governments.

Media has always been a source of contention, it didn’t start with Tech, which has only built a better mousetrap.

Let’s step back to look at TV. When TV started to become popularised, advertisers realised they could inform an audience of their products, and the content creators could keep their sources of entertainment free of charge, therefore, removing some of the friction to scale. That equation still exists today — you don’t pay for social media in most cases. TV as it matured started to try to segment and analyse for better advertising through targetting — sound familiar?

Social media is just better at this process than “traditional media”, which is why cable is now losing out to Hulu, TV by Google, and other competitors.

Also, on a tangent, if you’re going to see an Ad, wouldn’t you rather it be for something you would actually want to buy rather than something totally unrelated to you? That’s not evil, that’s useful and personally a better use of my time/attention.

So going back to the film — what’s the real problem that this film should have conveyed in a much better and more compelling message because I do think they were on to something.

Facebook knows that their political content has the best engagement because it triggers people’s closely held beliefs and moral outrage and they are cashing in big.

So? Well, combine this with opinion as opposed to fact and the lack of liability on the side of the content creators and you end up with the sh*t-storm we’re in now, globally.

You can’t propose a solution until you have accurately diagnosed the issue (don’t get me started on prevention versus treatment in medicine).

Ok, so let’s talk solutions. I’m not going to pretend to have the best solution to this problem, but I do think that if anyone could come up with something, it would be the oodles of brainiacs that work at facebook. Social Media firms have some of the smartest people in the world working there, so surely they’re aware of what the issue is, and how they could change it.

But I’ll take a swing at it:

1. Tie advertisers to real identities. If you’ve never tried to advertise on social media, it is ridiculously easy. With nothing stopping you from setting up a fake profile or business as a page, and then advertising it’s no wonder bad actors can easily influence public opinion. Of course, making it harder to advertise would not align with Facebook’s goals of maximising ad revenue.
2. Ban political content all together (extreme) or at least put fair/accuracy responsibilities on content publishers.
3. How can these companies be living up to their anti-money laundering obligations if they accept money from anyone and everyone?

By the way, while we’re talking about changes to social media, please implement a bully-score that leads to suspensions. We can obviously do this with NLP tech and they’ve been building up the capacity due to fake-news labelling initiatives.

Also, let’s return back to the FCC Fairness Doctrine, or some version of it. For society to get back on track, heal the wounds and all that good stuff we need to be on similar pages and that starts with facts and a narrative that is bipartisan.

Ultimately this shows the importance of ESG at corporations and how society pays for a weak policy. So the question is:

Has the bill finally come due to Social Media’s lack of ESG with regards to its content?

Also — a note to the director of the Social Dilemma:

Personally I think the real-world dramatisations actually pulled away from your message and was generally over-the-top/lame. It’s hypercritical to bang on about how manipulative social media is for half the film and then use a dramatised reality to scare people. I thought the scene where the camera zooms-out onto a matrix-esque horrorscape perfect encapsulated my point on this.