Xander Gallup- Staff Writer
Me and my sister decided to watch a movie together called, “The Social Dilemma”. It’s basically a dramatized documentary about social media companies like Instagram, YouTube, Google, Twitter, etc. and the problem with them. They basically have the same problem, they purposefully make you addicted to your phone by making the smallest of tweaks to their software.
Have you ever wondered why social media platforms send you a notification saying that your friend just made a comment, and yet they don’t just show it to you on the notification itself? That’s because they purposefully made that a feature to get you onto the platform so you can stay on it for longer. Another one of the things that you might have never noticed is how you subconsciously pick up your phone when you look at it. These big companies have purposefully made their apps so addictive that you will almost always pick up your phone when you get a notification.
One of the other things that the Social Dilemma stated was the idea of misinformation being spread more today than it ever has. They said that fake news spreads six times faster than the truth. Not to mention that the platforms give different people different recommendations, which means that you will be getting different information than other people. This is the main reason why polarization has become such a problem, because people get only one side of the story and can’t get the other side because these big companies don’t recommend the other side to them.
Overall, the Social Dilemma can’t be described in a single article, but I would recommend it to anyone who wants the truth about these big monopolies. It was an interesting watch, and it is creepy to think that these companies are compiling data on every one of their customers.
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