 Last time on this series we started an in-depth discussion about the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. If you didn't see that video, I'd strongly encourage you to check it out. But for those who haven't gotten to it yet, or who forgot what we talked about, here's a quick recap. The Social Dilemma features a bunch of big tech insiders who have become afraid of their own creations, and believe that in spite of their best intentions, social media is destroying society. First, they say that advertising and commercial incentives compel social media companies to disregard people's privacy and create systems that manipulate their own users for nefarious ends. Next, they claim that these same incentives push social networks to intentionally trap people in bubbles of information that promote political tribalism and give groups of people completely different sets of facts about the world. And throughout all of this, they equate social media to a drug that users can't escape from. In short, thanks to capitalism, social media companies have created an addictive product that is ruining everyone's lives, making them feel bad about themselves, forcing them to buy products they don't actually want, and radicalizing our politics. It's all very scary stuff. And the film makes sure you never stop feeling terrified by intercutting the interview footage with melodramatic scripted scenes, and by reinforcing the tone with a score that sounds like it's been ripped from a horror movie. Unfortunately, even when some of its points seem to have merit on the surface, the film is actually terrible. The filmmakers butcher facts and make hyperbolic arguments in order to hawk a narrative that's terrifying and sensational, but also mostly false. Meanwhile, it completely glosses over much more important issues like censorship and the ideological biases encoded in the very algorithms that define what users all over the world are allowed to see and discuss on these platforms. In part one, we talked about the first two themes of advertising and political tribalism. I'm not going to waste any time rehashing all of that here, though, because there's still a ton more wrong with the film to cover in part two. We still have to talk about the effects social media actually has on people's psychological well-being, and more importantly, we need to deal with the half-baked platitudes and catchy soundbites that the social dilemma offers as the solution to every problem. There is a lot to be concerned about with the way most social media companies operate right now, but deceptive documentaries that mislead people into worrying about the wrong issues won't help us fix anything. So hit that subscribe button, ring the bell icon, and stick with me for the second half of our two-part discussion of the social dilemma on this episode of Out of Frame. One of the most important subjects that the social dilemma tries to deal with is the potentially damaging psychological effects of social media. Unlike the film's horror movie depiction of advertising, there's way more truth to the idea that social media is a drug, but it still manages to wildly oversimplify the problem and utterly falls apart around the challenge of what to do about it. To really understand what's going on here, we're going to need to pause for a second and talk about the human brain. There's a cluster of neurons in your midbrain called the ventral tegmental area. It's associated with reward prediction and recognition, and it produces dopamine whenever we feel certain kinds of positive stimuli, such as gaining approval from our friends. Dopamine is perhaps most popularly associated with pleasure, but more accurately, it's a neurotransmitter that compels us to do more or less of whatever we associated with. For example, when a ton of people like our posts on social media, we're getting positive feedback and gaining social status, which our VTA recognizes as a reward. The VTA releases dopamine and we feel like repeating the behavior that got us that result. But it's possible to become addicted to that dopamine rush and keep trying to do more and more of the thing that's making you feel good, even if it's not actually good for you. In other words, the same neurological system that helps people navigate social situations and make better decisions can be co-opted by drugs and alcohol or even social media and become harmful. Persuasive technology is just sort of designed intentionally applied to the extreme where we really want to modify someone's behavior. We want them to take this action. We want them to keep doing this with their finger. So you don't know when you're gonna get it and you don't know if you're gonna get something, which operates just like the slot machines in Vegas. Every time you see it there on the counter, you know if you reach over it, it just might have something for you. And so you play that slot machine to see what you got, right? That's not by accident, that's a design technique. When you don't get the reward you're hoping for, it can be physically painful. In one of the main stories from the scripted drama part of the social dilemma, the family's youngest daughter posts a photo of herself to this universe's version of Instagram. Her friends make fun of her ears. It hurts. Of course it does. This is a huge danger of social media. As rock star social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains a few minutes later. There has been a gigantic increase in depression and anxiety for American teenagers, which began right around between 2011 and 2013. The number of teenage girls out of 100,000 in this country who are admitted to a hospital every year because they cut themselves or otherwise harm themselves. That number was pretty stable until around 2010, 2011. And then it begins going way up. It's up 62% for older teen girls. It's up 189% for the preteen girls. Of all the things in this documentary, this is the most genuinely scary. So yeah, it's pretty clear that social media plays a role here. But correlation isn't causation. So what exactly is the extent of its role? And more importantly, what can we actually do about it? I think it's super important to be realistic about this. Just because we see a correlation between social media use and an increase in teenage depression doesn't mean that the actual causes or solutions are simple. The whole point of social media is to allow us to connect with other people by sharing our personal thoughts and experiences with the world. When we do that, we're opening ourselves up to the possibility of negative reactions. But we're also opening ourselves up to a lot of good things as well. It's easy today to lose sight of the fact that these tools actually have created some wonderful things in the world. They've reunited, lost family members, they've found organ donors. I mean, there were meaningful systemic changes happening around the world because of these platforms that were positive. A recent study that tracked almost 600 adolescents for two years and over 1100 college undergraduate students for six years found no causal relationship between rates of social media usage and depression. If anything, it found that especially girls who already showed signs of clinical depression were more likely to use social media later on, most likely as a way of reaching out for help to make themselves feel better. Researchers are still studying these things, but I think it's a mistake to assume that the existence of social media inherently leads to bad outcomes. To the contrary, I think it has the power to be immensely positive and help people find connection and reduce feelings of isolation. On a personal note, I've met some of my best friends through these networks. I even met my wife on Facebook. That wouldn't have been possible if lawmakers or the tech bros in San Francisco made it harder for content and ideas to be shared with other people because folks like Tristan Harris are afraid that some of them won't be able to handle it. Ila, the girl in the social dilemmas melodrama, wasn't hurt because social media apps exist, or because they showed the photo she voluntarily chose to post to all her friends. She wanted to share the photo. Her friends and followers want to see her content. She was hurt both because one of her friends was mean about it and because as a young girl she's not yet prepared to handle critical comments. Learning to deal with criticism takes time. It also takes going through some pain and ego bruising. The thing is, when you're trying to carve out a unique identity, you're going to start putting more of yourself out there. And as you do that, you inherently risk other people not liking what they see. Figuring out how to graciously accept legitimate criticism and ignore the stuff that isn't constructive is a skill you've got to earn. Ila hasn't done that yet, but her pain wasn't caused by social media. Her classmates could just as easily have been mean to her in school. Growing up before social media existed, I can promise you kids weren't any less horrible to each other back then. Now, the one thing that does make social media different today is that when the whole world can see what you post, the whole world can comment on it. And just as a flood of overly complementary reactions can drive some people toward a narcissistic need for attention, a flood of negative reactions can be devastating. The problem is, there's nothing social media companies can do about this without breaking the core thing that's actually good about their product. We want to be able to share our content with the world. But in doing that, we all need to be strong enough as individuals to accept that this might result in criticism. Unfortunately, this isn't something any change in policy at the corporate or state level can solve. Contrary to what Tristan Harris and his Center for Humane Technology would have you believe, government regulation isn't going to fix any of this. All the soundbites in the social dilemma are fine slogans, but let's not confuse catchphrases with the complexity of reality. The running theme throughout the film is that none of you has any agency over your own lives or choices. You're easily brainwashed by companies looking to sell yoga pants. You can't help yourself but to become obsessed with other people's opinion of you. You can't even put your phones down when the stress of social media gets overwhelming. You're all just the unsuspecting victims of evil advertisers, algorithms, and powers beyond your control. And the solutions they offer are either to smash your phone and throw it into the ocean, or to have the federal government regulate social media companies. It's pretty sad to see how many people think this is a great idea, but y'all need to remember that we've seen how much Congress knows about the internet. Have you considered having an online school that people could go to with a Google rep and you could kind of log in and kind of ask questions? And Tristan Harris' organization offers surprisingly little in the way of concrete solutions. Instead, it seems a lot like Gavin Belson's Tethics from Silicon Valley. For too long, these large tech companies have harvested our data, they have violated our privacy, they have tracked our every move. They is you, you hypocrite. You did that. He did that. Starting today, I will be asking prominent members of the tech community to sign their name onto this. Tech Ethics, or Tethics for short. I've scoured the Center for Humane Technology's website, and I've found nothing that even comes close to being a coherent policy proposal. Instead, I've found platitudes like Put People First, and vague questions built on irrational ideas like the precautionary principle that would have killed just about every innovation in human history if they were actually part of the law. The closest thing to a complete argument the site provides is a link to a Financial Times article where Harris demands that the government regulate internet companies like public utilities. But he never really goes into detail about the specifics of what that would mean. And if you think this will make social media companies better, you're going to be massively disappointed. Our public utilities are awful precisely because of the way they're regulated. They're slow-moving localized monopolies that provide horrible customer experiences and resist innovation because the rules prevent competition, and nothing about their products and business models can change without state approval. One-size-fits-all regulations almost always put a huge burden on smaller, newer companies, while barely affecting the billion dollar giants that have teams of lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists on their payroll already. And you know what? Even though the social dilemma makes it seem like demanding more regulation is a heroic outsider's quixotic quest, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have all repeatedly demanded more government control over their industry. But giving the government more regulatory power over the internet is a recipe for disaster. For one thing, unlike companies that use anonymous, aggregated data to create better products and improve user experiences, governments all over the world have found ways to get access to individuals' personal information, and they've used it to track people and put them in jail. So it's not like we can trust the state with protecting anyone's privacy. Likewise, a lot of people think we should repeal section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which ensures that social media companies aren't liable for speech on their platforms the same way publishers are. But this would almost certainly push them to censor users even more than they do now. If they're liable for what other people say, and if they're open to being sued the same way publishers are, then just like any major magazine or newspaper, they're going to have to hire editors, set standards, write style guides, and restrict the subjects people can talk about and what words or phrases can be used in order to reduce their risk. And there's no law that will ever be written that will stop trolls from being mean on the internet. None of this stuff solves the actual problems with social media. In part one, I talked about the silly claim that capitalism and advertising, the business model that keeps social media companies afloat, is to blame for the harmful effects these services may have on people's lives. Both Tristan Harris and Justin Rosenstein claim that if these companies were actually making their products to benefit their users instead of their advertisers, they would be better. But curiously, they never actually explain what they mean or how social media would be different. If you actually understand the business model, social media companies, and a lot of other online services, function exactly like broadcast TV or terrestrial radio stations. The relationship between product and advertisers is actually symbiotic, not dictatorial. TV studios both innovate original creative ideas, finding willing advertisers to support them, and respond to advertiser preferences, producing content that appeals to broad audiences. Either way, TV networks are competing with each other to distribute the most entertaining shows and constantly serve people content that they actually like. If they don't, there's no audience. If there's no audience, there will be no advertisers. People who advertise their stuff online are paying for the privilege of reaching the massive audiences that spend their time on the social media platforms. But that only works when the social companies do everything in their power to make as good a user experience as possible. So rather obviously, their goal is to benefit their users. The commercial incentives of social media are precisely what has continually driven improvements in online social connection from Usenet groups and ICQ chat to MySpace to Facebook and YouTube, and they're what will drive the next wave of innovation with emerging services like Twitch, Discord, and who knows, Miwi, Parler, or something else that doesn't even exist yet. It's the users themselves who will decide which services they most value, and social media companies will have to respond to user preferences because they want to attract advertisers. Or if they all move to a direct pay model, they'll have to respond because they want to attract user subscriptions. No matter what, it's us, the users of these platforms, who are actually in control. And while that can be sort of scary seeing what some people post on the internet, it's also why there's plenty we can do about the real problems of censorship and psychological harm without getting the state involved. Firstly, we need to do a much better job of protecting kids and helping them navigate the risks of social media addiction, but probably not the way most people seem to think. Kids don't need to be coddled or canceled. Everybody has to learn how to deal with criticism and figure out how to navigate an ultra-connected digital world because that's definitely not going away. You could shut down the service and destroy 20 billion dollars of shareholder value, but you can't in practice put the genie back in the bottle. In my view, the only way this is ever going to happen without creating more problems is if parents and influential figures help young people understand that even though they'll never be able to control what other people say about them, they can learn to control how they react. At the same time, cancel culture needs to die. Harassing people for saying something unpopular or making jokes that don't land is a good way to make it a lot scarier for young people to figure out who they are. Creating a culture that actively tries to destroy people for things they say in their adolescence isn't the same thing as providing constructive criticism. We want kids to learn to be less fragile, not crush them before they've had a chance to develop their own identity. And if you're a parent whose kids are too young to handle social media, don't just hand them a phone or a tablet as if it's a pacifier. It's up to you to show your kids how to be responsible with this technology. Secondly, I want to reiterate something I said in part one. Companies using better, more accurate data to connect people with the content and products that they might actually want is a good thing, as long as everyone is allowed to compete on a level playing field and the social media companies don't tip the scales too much. But too often that's exactly what they're doing. We all should have a ton of serious concerns about the amount of control a handful of coders and executives at Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have over the ideas we're all allowed to talk about. But the way we stop them from dictating the limits of people's speech isn't to let the government control what we're allowed to say or decide how the platforms are allowed to operate instead. That's much more dangerous than what we have now and it will ultimately destroy entrepreneurial freedom for the emerging competitors who will eventually take over. We can push back against social media censorship without abandoning the First Amendment or giving the state power over a huge segment of our mass communication industry. The best way to solve these problems is by expressing our criticism in videos like this and by voting with our time and our wallets. If a social network becomes too censorious, speak up on the platform and try to make your voice heard. Defend people who have been unjustly banned. Choose not to hit the block button at the first sign of a comment or content that makes you uncomfortable. And if worse comes to worse, move to alternative platforms and reduce the time you spend on the networks that don't support free speech. When their daily user numbers start to fall and advertisers move their dollars to new platforms, the complacent giants that dominate the social media industry today will take notice. Finally, don't listen to the social dilemma on any of this stuff. There's a lot to criticize about the effects social media has had on our society, but those issues can't and won't be fixed by the fear-mongering nonsense passed off as truth in this documentary. When you think about technology and it being an existential threat, you know, that's a big claim. It is a big claim and it's wrong. We need a healthy dose of reality, not Luddite charlatans from the social dilemma freaking people out about stuff that isn't really a problem. So I hope you don't take it seriously. Let's all come together to fix what's wrong with social media, not break what's actually working. Hey everybody, thanks for watching this episode of Out of Frame. As I said on the last video, the state of social media is an incredibly important subject and I'm really looking forward to talking with you all about it in the comments. Go ahead and tag me down there and I'll do my best to reply as much as I can. Also, I'd like to send some love to all of our patrons with an extra special thank you to our associate producers. To Connor McGowan, Dallin Case, Hemang Tana, King Delirious, Matt Tabor, and Victoria Manchart. Thank you. I suppose now would be as good a time as any to also mention that in the coming weeks, we're going to be expanding some of our platforms by starting a discord and adding opportunities to support the show on Subscribestar for those who aren't comfortable with Patreon. In the meantime, please be sure to like this video and subscribe to the channel. Hit that bell icon so you get notifications when we release new content. Listen to our behind the scenes podcast and follow our Out of Frame accounts on Twitter and Instagram. See you next time.