Netflix's “The Social Dilemma” has been, without a doubt, the most controversial documentary in recent weeks. Here at Guidedoc we take a look at the documentary that upset Mark Zuckenberg so much that it prompted Facebook to issue an official response to the allegations of “virtual surveillance” that the documentary says are exercised not only by Zuckenberg's platform but by all other competitors.
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Much has been said about the abilities of the famous "algorithms" of facebook, instagram, youtube, twitter and other social networks to track and predict our interests and behaviors and to use this information for marketing or even political purposes.
The scandal of the controversial “sale” of information by Facebook to Cambridge Analytical after Trump's triumph and the denunciations of Fake News spread by the social network meant the most public scenario of this problem.
The Social Dilemma, a documentary released at the Sundance Film Festival this 2020, continues to remove layers in the complex list of repercussions that our participation in social networks has in our lives. But this time, this particular documentary does it from the point of view of the minds of the engineers who helped design how these platforms work, and this is perhaps its greatest virtue.
These engineers, former workers of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other sites tell us, after a kind of "revelation", why they regret having created, for example, the "Like" button. Consequences such as depression, political polarization, hatred and addiction are recurrently related to our interactions on these platforms, which, ironically, continue to add more and more users worldwide.
And despite the fact that users have more and more information about the marketing practices that social networks implement using the information in our trail through their pages, for some reason we cannot stop using these spaces for social interaction.
Experts in sociology and social psychology are also part of the panel of faces that comment on this gray reality, a kind of depressive world that social networks have created.
Obviously this is the "mood" raised by the film, openly biased on the subject, but the documentary does succeeds in revealing the most dangerous side of these innovative internet sites that are shaping us minute by minute.
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