Reflective Essay:The Social Dilemma

The internet is a vast community of opinions, theories, facts, and news. It is a great tool
that has helped people of all ages come together and do great things. However, not all of the
things on the internet can do good for the user. It can also bring harm to you and the people
around you. We will be talking about our realizations after watching the documentary. There are
many things to be talked about, but we will just focus on three main points. Here, we will talk
about how we are being affected as a person by social media, us being the users or the product,
and how society can be affected by social media.

Nowadays, people are knowledgeable about different social media platforms. It is all
because of the vast influence of new technologies which is the highlight of the documentary film.
This established that we live in an algorithmic era where machine learning models have made
approaches far more powerful, and these techniques may be even more addictive than drugs. The
Social Dilemma discusses how large social media corporations utilize algorithms to influence
consumers and create an addiction to their services. Manipulating the system, capitalism, and
competitive markets are the concepts circulating in this type of industry. We can see it from the
interviews with technology professionals, including many former workers of Silicon Valley
tycoons, who are interspersed throughout the video. It exemplifies a tool that can be used to
manipulate large groups of people using information control. This matrix has been pulled over
our heads in order to keep us from seeing reality. Besides, machine learning algorithms are quite
advanced, influential, and they're tremendously powerful right now. It has a wide range of
impacts on how we see the world. This also explains that social media does not mirror our actual
society. This film zooms out the social media realm to reveal the greater internet landscape that
social media platforms operate inside. There are a lot of things going through behind the screen
and this is where the problem starts wherein our attention is the product. Just like Tristan Harris
said, “If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product”. This statement reveals that
if something online is free, we are not the customer, we are the products for the reason that these
machines have brainwashed us. It depicts numerous outbursts and outcries at every point in our
lives, and we can see it in less than 15 years, where internet communities have moved from zero
to catastrophe.

"The tools that we have created today are starting to erode the social fabric of how society
works.” As we watched the documentary, we saw how social media affected all of our lives,
especially our behaviors and how we perceive life. In the past, we can see Social Media as a
beneficial tool to help us communicate faster with each other, bring us entertainment and give us
profit, but now we don’t even realize that it becomes a spell that ruins our lives. The greatest
effect of social media on our lives is that we feel that we are enclosed in a bubble where we can’t
be free. We become more depressed, we rely our lives on how other people see us, we always
want to be perfect in other people’s eyes, we are easily perceived by false information or fake
news, and we tend to forget how to communicate and interact in a way that we strengthen the
social fabric.

“If we cannot agree on what is true, then we can’t navigate out any of our problems.” We
have come to a point where identifying the truth or facts have become challenging, since social
media helps promote the growth of propaganda and unverified news as long as it is profitable to
them. Our freedom to post anything on social media is behind why fake news is rapidly
distributed; although this allows expression and creativity, it is alarming when a post contains
false information. With the help of these platforms, manipulation of almost everything like
public opinion and elections became effortless and uncostly. The worst part is that we might have
been a victim of misinformation and still have no clue about it. The government, military, and
others have weaponized social media and used it for their personal gain that resulted in serious
harm to our society. Implementation of regulations on misinformation online and the cooperation
of both government and tech companies can possibly put an end to this issue. For now, the best
thing to do is to properly check the validity and credibility of posts or articles to avoid being
misled.

We can conclude that social media is a double-edged sword. It can help us in different
kinds of ways, but at the same time, it changes our lifestyle and affects our mental, emotional,
and social health. After learning the dark truth behind social network marketing, it became clear
to us that the creators of these applications or networks intended that people should be entrapped
in their networks for them to earn money. This helps us realize that we’re the one on the short
side of the stick. The more time we spend on social media, the more reality becomes meaningless
for us. Staying connected with friends and loved ones through the internet isn’t a bad thing; we
should just balance the time we spend surfing the internet and social interaction between one
another. Coping up with the present state of the world without being connected to other people
virtually isn’t easy. Living a lifestyle without being connected to the internet can be sometimes
inconvenient, especially now, amidst this pandemic. But, we should not base our reality on social
networks and still be connected socially. And the more we learn and open our eyes from the
documentary about the insidious nature that underpins social media, the more it appears that we
truly care about the things happening in the world of media.

Quotation References:
"The tools that we have created today are starting to erode the social fabric of how society
works,"- Chamath Palihapitiya (Former Facebook Executive)

“If we cannot agree on what is true, then we can’t navigate out any of our problems.” - Tristan
Harris (Former Google Design Ethicist)
“If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product” - Tristan Harris