I put a spell on you….. because your MINE
“I Put a Spell On You” by: Annie Lennox (1956)
For this weeks blog post, I chose to watch the documentary “The Social Dilemma” which was created in 2020, directed by Jeff Orlowski. We are introduced to many creators of social media and different aspects of social media, such as Tristan Harris (former design Ethicist for Google), Tim Kendall (former Executive for Facebook and former President for Pinterest), Roger McNamee (an Early Investor Venture Capitalist for Facebook), Justin Rosenstein (former Engineer for Facebook and Google), Aza Raskin (a former employee of Forefox and Mozilla Labs, and the inventor of the infinite scroll) and Sandy Parakilas (former Operations Manager for Facebook and former Product Manager for Uber) among many others, but to name a few. The most common thread that all of these people said was the negatives to what they created, or helped create and run. They did not agree and were against how the creations were being used and how behind the scenes they were creating a situation for people to have the “spell” casted upon them so to say and were sucked into the never-ending mind control game that social media plays.
This documentary had the second side where actors acted out scenes of a family and showed the people being dragged into the “greatness” that social media is. We saw the youngest daughter become so dependant on the phone she nearly was beside herself when their mother locked it up into a locking food container, in order for them to have a screen-free supper. (33:48 – 33:55) This part of the documentary really showed the real life implications, professionals who are surrounded by the knowledge of what is happening sometimes say things that, sure we agree with, but we don’t really understand it. In the acting portions we are able to physically see what it looks like.
Another part of the documentary that stood out to me was when they talked about fake news. In the acting, the older sister tries to warn her brother that the information he is seeing is propaganda. When driving by the protest, he gets curious because it is supported by the things he saw on social media. Then we learn about #PizzaGate and how some people believed so strongly that it existed that they started showing up to pizza shops to raid them (fully equipped with guns) to save the children – when there wasn’t any! This just shows throughout time that people lack the skills they need to decipher real and fake news. It was even mentioned in the documentary about how Zuckerburge wanted to created AI to search out the Fake news and correct it, but Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist who wrote “Weapons of Math Destruction”, made a comment that stood out to me. “People talk about AI as if it will know truth. AI will not solve this problems. AI can not solve the problems of fake news. Google doesn’t have the option of saying is this conspiracy? Is this truth? because they don’t know what truth is. They don’t have a proxy for truth thats better than a click.”
After watching this documentary, the points that were brought forth really had an impact on my thoughts regarding social media and the internet. The points just reinforced the ideas that were already engrained in my head, but they just deepened the worth of the ideas. I highly recommend everyone take a chance to sit and watch it.
Kelsey Potoma 
Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I have watched this documentary (albeit a few years ago) and I remember being struck by the comments of the creators and how animate they were that their children would never be allowed to use this technology as a child. The aspect of fake news and its dissemination through social media is alarmingly efficient. I know I have had to correct my mother (who is a senior) about some of the things she has read on social media. I feel it isn’t just our students and future students that need to learn about the dangers of social media, but the older generations who tend to believe text as fact.
LikeLike