The Social Dilemma - Review

The Social Dilemma - Review

I want to tell you that this is the best documentary I have watched recently that reveals not only the risks of technology but more specifically social media, I highly recommend you watch it, and now I will try to explain the documentary to you a bit without giving any spoilers.

In Social Dilemma, which is called Social Dilemma in Turkish, the documentary proceeds in an interview format where employees of some of the biggest social media companies like engineers and business management experts explain how social media works, how it locks people to their phone screens with artificial intelligence, and also explains with examples the phrase "If a product is free, you are the product."

Among those interviewed in the documentary are people who have worked and even continue to work in the staff of major and almost monopolistic tools in their fields like Google, Twitter, Instagram. In addition, social media theorists and similar experts are also featured.

Social Dilemma is an approximately 1 hour and 30 minute documentary and, in my opinion, it is a documentary that manages to explain the phenomena of social media very well with examples and visual support, highlights the risks, and which I recommend everyone who uses social media to watch at least once in their life.

Although the main subject of the documentary is the harms of social media and how it manipulates people using artificial intelligence, it also has an aspect where it explains why we are directed to strange videos when we watch something on platforms like YouTube.

You can also understand from some small parts how recommended posts on Instagram work, what criteria are used to show you ads, or based on what you get notifications.

The issues consciously or unconsciously caused by the designers of social media are also briefly touched upon. For example, from the documentary:

It is mentioned that the like button on Facebook was initially introduced to show people something positive, but over time, when people could not get enough likes, they fell into depression and it had a negative impact.

Frankly, I cannot say that the promotional video of the documentary interested me much, but when I started watching, I was quite drawn in and watched it all the way to the end without getting bored, which I also wanted to share with you.