The Social Dilemma

Narrative

The documentary uses a fictional dramatized narrative to illustrate the issues discussed, centering around "a middle-class, average American family"[2] whose members each interface with the internet differently: Ben, a teenager who falls deeper into social media addiction and online radicalization; Isla, an adolescent who develops depression and low self-esteem from social media's unrealistic beauty standards;[3] Cassandra, an older teenager who does not have a mobile phone and is depicted as being free from online manipulation; and their mother and stepfather, who try to curb their children's screen time but do not fully understand the factors of the situation. The narrative depicts Ben and Isla as they are increasingly affected by social media and internet addictions, driven by the Engagement, Growth, and Advertisement AIs, represented by anthropomorphized tech executives in a "behind-the-screen" control room who find ways to keep their users as addicted to social media as possible while only viewing them as depersonalized avatars, with little concern for theirs or society's well-being.[2]

The narrative starts with Isla ignoring her mother's requests to set the table, followed by her becoming depressed after her appearance is criticized on social media. After Cassandra criticizes Isla and Ben's problematic smartphone use, their mother proposes locking everyone's phones in a safe so they can have dinner together, but when one phone receives a notification, Isla tries to open the safe and ultimately breaks it open with a tool, damaging Ben's phone screen. In return for a new phone screen, Ben promises his mother he will not use his phone for a week, but the AIs, confused as to why he is suddenly inactive, draw him back in by sending him a notification that his ex has started a new relationship, prompting Ben to break his promise and doomscroll in an attempt to cope. The AIs begin recommending him radical centrist content to keep him engaged, which quickly devolve into propaganda and conspiracy theories by the anti-democratic "Extreme Center" movement, radicalizing Ben and affecting his daily life to the point of near-isolation. Ultimately, Ben attends an Extreme Center rally that escalates when similarly radicalized counter-protestors arrive. Cassandra learns Ben is there and searches for him, but both are detained by riot police. At the end of the narrative, the AIs merge into one entity while Ben's avatar becomes a human representation of himself, and they stare at each other.[2]

Interviewees

• Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist,[4] co-founder and CEO of Apture (2007),[5] and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology;[6] co-host of the podcast Your Undivided Attention with Aza Raskin[7]
• Tim Kendall, former director of monetization at Facebook,[8] former president of Pinterest, and CEO of Moment (a mobile application that tracks screen time)[9]
• Jaron Lanier, computer philosophy writer, computer scientist, visual artist, and composer of contemporary classical music; author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018)[10]
• Roger McNamee, early investor at Facebook,[11] author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe (2019), and cofounder of the venture capital firm Elevation Partners[12]
• Aza Raskin, former head of user experience at Mozilla Labs and creative lead for Firefox;[13] co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology[6] and founder of Massive Health;[14] inventor of the infinite scroll[15]
• Justin Rosenstein, former Facebook engineering manager,[16] former Google product manager,[17] and co-founder of Asana[18] and One Project
• Shoshana Zuboff, Professor Emeritus at the Harvard Business School, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)[19]
• Jeff Seibert, former head of product at Twitter,[20] serial tech entrepreneur, and co-founder of Digits[21]
• Anna Lembke, medical director of addiction medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine[22]
• Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist at the New York University Stern School of Business,[23] author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) and coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018)[24]
• Sandy Parakilas, former platform operations manager at Facebook[25] and former product manager at Uber[26][27]
• Cathy O'Neil, data scientist and author of Weapons of Math Destruction (2016)[28]
• Randima Fernando, former product manager at Nvidia, former executive director at Mindful Schools, and co-founder and executive director of the Center for Humane Technology[29]
• Joe Toscano, former experience design consultant at Google and author of Automating Humanity (2018)[30]
• Bailey Richardson, early team member of Instagram and partner at People & Company[31]
• Rashida Richardson, assistant professor of law and political science at Northeastern University School of Law[32] and former director of policy research at AI Now Institute[33][34]
• Guillaume Chaslot, former software engineer at Google (YouTube) and founder of AlgoTransparency[35]
• Renée DiResta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory[36] and former head of policy at Data for Democracy
• Cynthia M. Wong, former senior internet researcher at Human Rights Watch[37]
• Alex Roetter, former senior vice president of engineering at Twitter[38]
• Lynn Fox, former director of corporate PR and Mac PR at Apple,[39] former executive of corporate communications at Google[40]

Actors

Narrative casting was led by Jenny Jue.[42]

• Skyler Gisondo as Ben[41]
• Kara Hayward as Cassandra[41]
• Sophia Hammons as Isla[41]
• Chris Grundy as Stepdad
• Barbara Gehring as Mother[42]
• Vincent Kartheiser as Artificial Intelligence[41]
• Catalina Garayoa as Rebecca
• Sergio Villarreal as Luiz
• Laura Obiols as Vendetta
• Vic Alejandro as Police officer

Inspiration

Jeff Orlowski, who is mostly known for his work in Chasing Coral and Chasing Ice, began production on The Social Dilemma in 2018 and concluded it in 2019. When asked where his inspiration came from during the film's panel at Deadline Hollywood's Contenders Documentary event, Orlowski said that he has "always been curious about big systemic and societal challenges".[45] He came to believe that "invisibly, a handful of designers in Silicon Valley are writing code that is shaping the lives of billions of people around the planet".[45]

Orlowski, on the film's FAQ page, states:[46]

"We were drawn to tell the stories of our changing glaciers and changing coral reefs because they were powerful signs of a huge global issue facing humanity: climate change. When we started talking with Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology, we saw a direct parallel between the threat posed by the fossil fuel industry and the threat posed by our technology platforms. Harris calls this 'the climate change of culture', an invisible force that is shaping how the world gets its information and understands truth. Our hope has always been to work on big issues, and we now see the 'social dilemma' as a problem beneath all our other problems."

The film's graphics, animation, and visual effects were made by Mass FX Media and produced by Netflix.[47]

Soundtrack

The film's music is composed by Mark Crawford, "a Primetime Emmy-nominated composer and filmmaker" who was nominated for an ASCAP Award for his work on The Social Dilemma.[48] With the use of "human-produced" and mechanical sounds, as Crawford explained in The Social Dilemma interview, he displayed the alarming impacts of social media through this soundtrack.[49]

Critical response

The Social Dilemma received generally positive reviews. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of, based on reviews, with an average rating of. The website's critics consensus reads, "Clear-eyed and comprehensive, The Social Dilemma presents a sobering analysis of our data-mined present."[54] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 78 out of 100, based on nine critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[55]

Devika Girish from The New York Times gave the film a positive review, stating it was "remarkably effective in sounding the alarm about the incursion of data mining and manipulative technology into our social lives and beyond".[56] Mark Kennedy of ABC News called the film "an eye-opening look into the way social media is designed to create addiction and manipulate our behaviour, told by some of the very people who supervised the systems at places like Facebook, Google, and Twitter".[57] Nell Minow of RogerEbert.com noted that the film "asks fundamental and existential questions" of humanity's potential self-destruction through its own use of computer technology, and praised its "exceptional" use of confessions from leaders and key players in the social media industry.[58]

Elizabeth Pankova of The New Republic noted "none of the information in the film is particularly new" but argued what made The Social Dilemma effective was "the purveyors of this information: the remorseful, self-aware warriors turned conscientious objectors of Silicon Valley".[59] Pranav Malhotra of Slate stated the film "plays up well-worn dystopian narratives surrounding technology" and "depend[s] on tired (and not helpful) tropes about technology as the sole cause of harm, especially to children", while also failing to acknowledge activists and commentators who have long criticized social media, citing scholars such as Safiya Noble, Sarah T. Roberts, and Siva Vaidhyanathan.[60] In an analysis of the film's persuasive techniques, Laura Alvarez Trigo of PopMecC stated, "The Social Dilemma manages to construct a Manichean narrative with a very elusive and misconstrued evil side" but pointed to the film's own resemblance to the propaganda and manipulation it criticizes, stating the film could have benefited from "providing the audience with the necessary tools to engage with the platforms that they use in a more critical way" and "a nuanced explanation of the present ethical problems [to] help people benefit from new technologies without having to completely shut them down or ban them for their teenage children".[2]

Notable criticism was directed toward the fictional narrative surrounding the family and the AIs. Casey Newton at The Verge pointed to certain directorial decisions, such as "the ominous piano score that pervades every scene" as giving it "the feeling of camp".[61] Nell Minow stated that "even the wonderfully talented Skyler Gisondo cannot make a sequence work where he plays a teenager seduced by extremist disinformation, and the scenes with Vincent Kartheiser embodying the formulas that fight our efforts to pay attention to anything outside of the online world are just silly."[58] Pranav Malhotra called the narratives an "uncritical" presentation of a dystopia lacking nuance.[60] In a rare defense of the film's oft-denounced dramatizations, John Naughton of The Guardian commented on the narrative's focus, stating that "the fictional strand is necessary because the biggest difficulty facing critics of an industry that treats users as lab rats is that of explaining to the rats what's happening to them while they are continually diverted by the treats (in this case dopamine highs) being delivered by the smartphones that the experimenters control."[62]

Industry response

Facebook released a statement on its About page, stating that the film "gives a distorted view of how social media platforms work to create a convenient scapegoat for what are difficult and complex societal problems".[63]

CNBC reported that social media users were doubting if they should continue using Facebook or Instagram after watching The Social Dilemma. However, when asked about the possibility of a decline in its users, Facebook refused to answer or give any comment on the subject.[64]

Mozilla employees Ashley Boyd and Audrey Hingle noted that while the "making, release and popularity of The Social Dilemma represents a major milestone towards [the goal of] building a movement of internet users who understand social media's impact and who demand better from platforms", the film would have benefited from featuring more diverse voices.[65]

Accolades