See What FB responded to 'The Social Dilemma'

We discussed three aspects of 'The Social dilemma' in class: mental health, polarization, discrimination. But the way this film conveys ideas is a bit extreme, which makes the ideas seems not neutral. 

To understand this issue better, it will be beneficial to see what Facebook said about it. Facebook has published an official response to this film, stating from seven perspectives to explain why this film is wrong:

(Source: https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/What-The-Social-Dilemma-Gets-Wrong.pdf)

1, Addiction: FB's main goal is to provide value for users, not let people spend more time on FB. FB is working actively on spreading meaningful social interactions instead of the viral videos that make you addictive.

--can't agree. FB will definitely assign a great weight on the indicator of user's online time, and FB wants you to be addicted to them. They may do something to make this point not that obvious, but that's it.

2, YOU ARE NOT THE PRODUCT: FB is funded by advertisement, but that allows you to get access to FB free. Moreover, FB will not provide your personal information to advertisers.

--can't agree. 'YOU'  are extremely valuable to FB, without 'YOU', their platform worths nothing. How to make 'YOU' more valuable is the product. (But I do think this deviates from the initial goal of FB.) FB spent tons of efforts to study how the users will be easily influenced by the ads, so that brands can achieve business success because of your changing-minds. But do they care the changing of users' behaviors is good or bad?

 

 

3, ALGORITHMS: Algorithms are used to improve users' experiences, just like all other platforms do.

--can't agree to some extent. Algorithms will also create side effects, like mentioned in the film, polarization. It's not always good. FB just avoided talking about this part of view.

 

 

4, DATA: FB states their efforts on data privacy, and FB emphasizes they don't get data about the users from other businesses.

-- agree to some extent. Pressure about data privacy also comes from Apple, so they have to comply. But they will exploit the data they collected about you on their app to an extreme, which is also horrifying to think about either.

 

5, POLARIZATION: Polarization exists long before the FB and other online platforms were created. And political topics are tiny percentage of contents spread on FB. Now FB is working on decreasing the number of political content and studying the mechanism of FB's influence on polarization.

-- can't comment. I didn't grow up and live for long time under this environment, so I don't have real experiences. 

6, ELECTIONS: FB has put lots of efforts on secure the integrity of elections from 2016, in which year FB did do wrong on elections, by improving the security (prevent attacks), making ads more transparent, spreading more reliable information.

-- can't comment either. But their methods seems reasonable and should have positive effects.

7, MISINFORMATION: FB has fact-checking partners to identify fake news, misinformation and harmful contents. The content will be down-ranked once it's identified as 'bad' information.

-- I believe FB has done their part of job for this issue.