The Social Dilemma

The people talking here designed the products they now criticise. Tristan Harris lays out the industry's three objectives, increase usage, keep users coming back, and grow ad revenue, and delivers the film's most quoted line: if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. Tim Kendall, Facebook's first director of monetisation, appears alongside Jaron Lanier and addiction specialist Anna Lembke. The contested part is not the interviews but the fictional family woven between them. One child becomes depressed over beauty standards, another is radicalised by recommendation algorithms. Some critics found these scenes silly; others argued there is no other way to make an invisible system legible. Facebook issued a statement calling the documentary a distorted view of how its platform works. Netflix reported 38 million households in the first month, and the film won two Emmys in 2021. Who it is for: anyone willing to look at their own phone habits. Who it is not for: viewers who want nuance. The film reduces the problem almost entirely to algorithm design.