re: Have you watched The Social Dilemma

This documentary is giving Scruffy anxiety.

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most people are too stupid to understand social media

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And they also don’t care. That is the more frightening takeaway to me.

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However they probably will call this fake news and turn it back to WWE and drink more mountain dews.

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frick you dude.

I’ll be at a classy restaurant drinking a dewgarita

I watched it tonight. Stumbled across this thread halfway through it, actually. I have to admit, I came away feeling differently about big tech which surprised me.

I’ve felt pretty strongly that there is a need to regulate big tech’s use of personal data for a long time. But my reasons mostly centered around how increasingly difficult it is to function in today’s society with any semblance of privacy rights. But they don’t really talk about privacy rights at all. In fact, they make a very good point - the last thing any of these firms want to do is hand over their cash cow (your data) to someone else.

They do, however, make a pretty compelling case about how big tech is stoking division, manipulating behavior, and ultimately harming society through their current business models. None of this is terribly surprising. I guess it just opened my eyes to the extent of it all.

Their comparison to news media was especially apt, IMO. The comparison suggested that these tech business models are basically the equivalent of taking your biased media outlet of choice, analyzing your individual emotional response to stories using using AI, then curating each additional story, advertisement, and community response - carefully framing everything to maximize your engagement. And then repeating this process for each of the other 300 million people in this country. Honestly, it makes me worry about our society when you consider this is only the beginning.

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I do most of my stuff in private browsing with blockers,

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Google still tracks you even if you’re in Incognito.

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I don't post shite on social media. I will post in groups and on others timelines, but if you look at my timeline it is other people tagging me on birthdays, fathers day, first day of school, etc. I share a meme about once ever 3 years, never a personal post.

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Facebook cares more about what you view than what you post.

I say both of this things because the point is more about how Google and Facebook manipulate the content that you see than it is about targeted ads. The only way to avoid that content manipulation is to.. well.. not search for anything on Google or look at anything on Facebook.

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Their comparison to news media was especially apt, IMO.

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I agree. The whole time I was thinking we regulate TV and radio through the FCC. We need some regulatory body that inserts some ethics and public protection into their business models.

The engineering to make these tools addictive was interesting, but not surprising. I liked the quote about only two groups call their customers “users.” Drug dealers and software companies.

I also thought the correlation to teen mental health and societal divide was troubling. We need to push for better regulation of this
(And I’m typically anti regulation).

Isn’t that the one about how terrible social media is?

This is why you use adblocking and plugins to block this stuff. And don't post or pay attention to Facebook. You have zero anonymity really thanks to browser fingerprinting, but you can still block all their ads. You'd have to use tor to get really anonymous and escape.

Propaganda

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Maybe this documentary will be the shot in the arm the public needs to start demanding their representatives hold these companies accountable.

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