The Social Dilemma, Netflix original
Scary, but probably everyone should watch this.
A documentary on the rise of surveillance and behavior modification at google, facebook, instagram, twitter, etc. The movie is mostly interviews with some of the very people who created these terrifying realities, and have had an awakening of conscience, hence they are speaking out. The people have shockingly similar trajectories: young bright minds who really understand cell phone, media, psychology, and how to make money. They all started with good intentions. As one of the people says,
"no one working on this was wanting that the suicide rate of teenager would double, or the pre-teen suicide rate to go up 5 times. No one wanted to create platforms that would allow a few powerful actors to topple governments, or interfere in elections. We wanted to give people what they wanted from the internet and their devices. We really did not see this coming."
The algorithms are now so complex that only a handful of people in the world still understand them, since they are now written in a way where the computer itself can modify the algorithm without needing to check any changes with a human. The intended goal of these algorithms? To increase time you spend on your device, to modify your behavior, to increase advertising revenue. This was a reasonable enough goal. What was unexpected was that the best way to achieve this is to create violence, to create hate, to create more division and fear among people. The best way to do this is to make young women feel they are worthless.
And then it went beyond simply money. The same algorithms could be used not only to make you buy more stuff, but could also be used to make you vote a certain way. The publicized story of Russian interference is just the tip of the iceberg. Whole governments have been turned over, intentionally, by a few people who knew how to tweak the algorithms.
Very scary stuff, all very real, all very clearly described in the movie.
Unfortunately the people speaking had very little hopeful suggestions - they all pretty much agreed that the monster they helped create is much, much stronger than humans, because it has been honed to work on us at a sub-conscious level - we do not, cannot know that we are being manipulated because our analytical, rational minds work too slowly, and are too weak.