THE SOCIAL DILEMMA

Syeda Abeera Ahmed

Q1) List your key learnings from this documentary.

The documentary has a lot of information that we somehow feel on regular basis when we look
around ourselves but we still fail to understand the reasons behind, and the information is to be
processed to understand how it is affecting our lives. The world is a huge place but social
dilemma is succeeding in making it a small ball.

The social media connectivity was primarily made to serve goodness. It has certainly gained
greater things like connecting those who lost their connections once, or helping people find
donors, sponsors and supporters, spreading positivity in other’s life and shredding light on
important aspects or topics around. But now the system is working on a flip side, the main goal is
lost. Social media is being used as a source of gaining customer insights like a money machine.
And that is a big concern.

Our data is being used against us and we are the products for these businesses now. Nothing is
for free; if we are giving them more attention for which these social media applications are
competing they get closer to create our needs. They advertise things in a way that results in us
being the product that is being sold. A new market place that trades in human future. Every
single thing we do is being monitored and that is frightening. They are being better in predicting
human reactions. The whole social system in set on keeping us attracted to the sites, encourages
us to grow with a variation of people in our lives and help them generate huge revenues.

The engineers behind the social sites are digging in our minds, influencing our psychology to get
engaged with it no matter what. Methods like Growth Hacking, Massive Scale Contagion
Experiment and using algorithms to predict our behavior and target us accordingly. They are
making us addictive so that they can make more money and we are just their lab experiments.
They are using our own psychology against us.

The social addiction makes us feel incomplete, chaotic, isolated when we don’t use it. We think
artificial intelligence will come in future and destroy things but what we don’t realize is it is
already around us and is slowly affecting us all. There are good and bad people which AI cannot
differentiate because it is not a human brain it just works on a set of instructions and algorithms.
How can we stop the negativity or the bad people? We certainly cannot. We are deeply indulged
in others life through social media that we are no more interested in knowing the real person in
front of us but rather be influenced by its social life presentation.

The negativity spreads faster than positivity. We often see these fake news having more viewers
than the actual truth because it’s boring and false news are interesting. Misconception or fake
rumors or misinformation spreads with more social pressure for others to follow regardless of
knowing the truth. The technology is capable enough to bring out the worse in society which is a
threat indeed.

Q2)To what extent is the use of Surveillance Capital and Data Mining for business purposes
ethical?

What I believe is the use of surveillance capital and data mining for business purposes can only be ethical
if it is done with customer’s choice. Rules and regulations should be imposed by government on such
corporations same way they do with other businesses. Like Phone companies or social media should be
restricted on usage of our sensitive data without our consent.

Privacy rights should be prioritized more than business interests and profits. These corporations should be
forced to be more transparent about our data collection and they need to slow down in pulling our
attention. These corporations need to work more humanely and not use us as extractable resource.

If the businesses stop exploiting us it will become ethical otherwise unregulated use of surveillance
capital and data mining will have adverse impact on our society which is already happening.