The Social Dilemma Is Dangerously Wrong... Part I – Transcript

00:00when it came out on netflix in september a bunch of my friends told me to watch the social dilemma for those who haven't heard of it it's a documentary about the inner workings of facebook twitter and the other social media networks that explores the question of whether or not these companies are actually doing more harm than good even though this is a subject i've spent a lot of time thinking about and discussing and in spite of the fact that most of my adult life has been spent

00:26producing and distributing content on these platforms i really wasn't in any rush to check it out part of my apathy was just that i was busy with other projects but to be honest i had a suspicion that i was going to be disappointed with the film but everybody kept talking about it and they all seemed to be terrified some people said they were going to delete their facebook accounts others started demanding major policy

00:52changes i was told i had to see it so i did and it was awful i know a lot of you probably saw it and thought it was good maybe because of it you're really concerned and before we get into it you should know that i do think there are a ton of things to be worried about with the way most of these companies operate it's just that instead of focusing its attention on genuine problems

01:20the social dilemma is actually a manipulative infomercial that presents dubious arguments deceptive information and terrible conclusions as mellow dramatically as possible so before you get too worked up by this documentary stop what you're doing like this video hit that subscribe button and arm yourself with better ideas by watching part one of this two-part episode of out of frame on first blush it seems like the social

01:49dilemma is an earnest documentary about the dangers of social media and from my perspective it makes three main arguments all of which are summed up in sound bites the most prominent of which as stated by the film's central protagonist tristan harris is this the classic saying is if you're not paying for the product then you are the product this idea is reinforced by the fact that the primary

02:16villain of the story is capitalism specifically the commercial incentives of social media companies our attention is the product being sold to advertisers this is what the people i know who got upset watching the social dilemma seem to be most concerned about the second major theme is that the selective information we see online reshapes what we think is true about the world or as venture capitalist roger mcnamee said the way to think about it is it's 2.7

02:45billion truman shows each person has their own reality with their own facts over time you have the false sense that everyone agrees with you because everyone in your news feed sounds just like you this is one of my biggest concerns but the documentary ultimately does a terrible job of really grappling with the problem and viewers end up with what i think is a severe misunderstanding of the whole issue

03:13lastly the film has one really important major theme that runs through its parallel narrative simply expressed by psychologist anna lemke social media is a drug this is one of those things that almost everybody implicitly believes and there is some truth to the idea that getting likes on social media creates dopamine reactions that can be addictive but alas the social dilemma both overstates its claims and glosses over the complexity of this

03:41subject as well fair warning i hated this film there's no way i'm going to be able to get through everything that's wrong with it even in two videos but i think it's at least worth talking about these three themes in as much depth as i can ready let's go the first claim if you're not paying you're the product is a fine tagline but what exactly does it mean for the answer we'll immediately turn to one of the film's

04:10most ridiculous speakers shoshana zubov who coined the term surveillance capitalism according to her our private information has become a commodity used by evil corporations to control our lives influence elections and amass a terrifying level of power this is a new kind of marketplace now and it's a marketplace that trades exclusively in human futures just like there are

04:38markets that trade in pork belly futures or oil futures we now have markets that trade in human futures at scale wait human futures trading what first of all futures trading is not a bad thing secondly it makes no sense to use as a metaphor for social media advertising for those who don't know what it is which i'm assuming is most people who

05:05felt anxiety hearing the term futures are essentially just stocks that people agree to trade at some point in the future at a price the buyer and seller commit to today they do this because nobody actually knows what different companies are going to be worth months or years from now and different people disagree on what the future value is likely to be sellers think they're locking in a higher price today than they get if they wait and sell later

05:34buyers think they're going to get a discount on stocks that will be worth more over time not only is there literally nothing wrong with this futures trading has some broader economic benefits like stabilizing stock prices but the question i had to stop the movie to shout at the screen and ask is what does any of this have to do with social media no one is trading futures at all in this context let alone human futures which is

06:01actually gibberish digital advertising doesn't control what people do and advertisers don't even pay higher or lower prices based on what they expect to happen in months or years down the road they bid against other potential advertisers for the ability to get their content in front of people today this line is only about 15 minutes into the film and it should raise a big red flag for viewers for all her supposed qualifications it

06:29was immediately apparent to me that zuboff wasn't a credible speaker this is a former harvard business school professor who doesn't seem to understand basic financial concepts and her credibility isn't the only one you should question here a bit later in the film tristan harris whose sole job at this point seems to be to promote his worldview everywhere he can assures us that his anti-technology crusade is unique

06:53to modern history no one got upset when bicycles showed up right like if everyone's starting to go around on bicycles no one said oh my god we've just ruined society but actually yeah that's exactly what people said when bicycles were invented a lot of people did make ominous claims about how they were destroying society mostly because they gave women independent mobility

07:19and allowed them to travel without male company this may not seem like a huge deal to the overall point of the film but i think in some ways it's a decent metaphor for the fear of social media as a concept like the bicycle this technology has empowered individuals to connect and communicate with each other without a gatekeeper telling them what they're allowed to do the people who made the social dilemma don't seem to like that in reality all these sound bites

07:46are actually meant to terrify you not in form in fact everything about the way it's produced is designed to make you afraid from its creepy horror-like score to its montage sequences of sensational news stories to the fact that there are literally no contradictory voices presented anywhere on screen to the ridiculous scripted family drama that presents social media algorithms as

08:12a trio of sentient clones maliciously manipulating the dials of an individual's user experience you know we talked about having mark have those dials i mean at all these companies there is that level of precision for a film that talks a lot about psychological manipulation it might be the most crudely manipulative documentary i've ever watched and i've seen almost everything michael moore's ever produced honestly half of it just felt like

08:40watching an after-school special from the 90s we don't need our phones to eat dinner i get what you're saying is just not that big a deal it's not but moving past the style and into the substance of the documentary so much of this film is centered around the idea that advertising and the commercial function of social media is evil in and of itself because we don't pay for the products that we use advertisers pay for the products that we use

09:06advertisers are the customers we're the thing being sold i sincerely doubt this is news to anyone but the film devotes a ton of attention to the point there are all these services on the internet that we think of as free but they're not free they're paid for by advertisers why do advertisers pay those companies they pay in exchange for showing their ads to us and of course that's bad it's the gradual slight imperceptible

09:33change in your own behavior and perception that is the product so let me get this straight advertisers are trying to change our behavior who knew apart from everybody i mean but it gets worse apparently these ads are supernaturally effective many people call this surveillance capitalism capitalism profiting off of the infinite tracking of everywhere everyone goes by large technology companies whose business model is to

10:01make sure that advertisers are as successful as possible the argument here is that since social media companies have so much data about what we do what we like and who we are they're able to create nearly perfect prediction models that constantly serve organic content and advertising to people who have no control over how they react returning to our resident hyperbolist shoshan azubov this is what every business has always

10:28dreamt of to have a guarantee that if it places an ad it will be successful i'm honestly struggling not to be really sarcastic here but just no these are words that can only have been spoken by someone who has never run a business created a marketing campaign or even placed a single ad on social media unlike most people who told me to watch the movie and certainly most of the journalists

10:56tweeting hot takes and writing think pieces praising it i have run ad campaigns on some of these platforms in addition to my work writing and producing videos like this one i also oversee the foundation for economic education's marketing team and i think a lot about how to get more awareness around all our content and events and i can tell you one thing with absolute certainty zuboff is

11:22wrong it may seem like these companies have all the data in the world but that guarantee she talked about doesn't exist just because you can aggregate massive data sets and uncover some generalities about huge groups of people individual human behavior isn't nearly as predictable as the social dilemma would have you believe turns out you're not a mindless robot being programmed by your phone to just buy whatever gets put in front of you

11:50you don't even click on a fraction of the stuff that comes up in your feed want to know the average click-through rate for a facebook ad in 2017 it was 0.9 percent so for all the talk in this movie about data models flawlessly predicting user behavior and allowing companies to easily manipulate people with advertising the truth is that the algorithms aren't actually that good and people always have a choice not to click on ads that

12:17don't interest them anyway and they don't i don't you don't either we all blow by ads and sponsored posts all day long without clicking on them and even when we do click how much we engage with the actual content has to do with how good it is and how much it appeals to our unique preferences speaking as an occasional advertiser or just as a content creator even when i know what audience i'm trying to target producing engaging

12:45media is still really hard just think about how you watch videos on youtube it just doesn't work the way the social dilemma says it does yes perfect the most epic fails of the year perfect that worked following with another video beautiful let's squeeze in a sneaker head before it starts yes the algorithm played a major role in showing you that this

13:13video exists but why did you choose to start watching it the algorithm can't force you to click and assuming you've made it this far what's keeping you here are you powerless to leave no you're not in fact for most videos a ton of viewers drop off after the first few seconds if a majority keep watching over half of any video that's pretty good everybody has a choice and