Is Social Media Deciding our Daily Lives?

During one of the many insomniac evenings 2020 has caused me, I stumbled upon The Social Dilemma on Netflix. While studying Criminology, surveillance technology and the bad and good results of our dependency on technology became my favourite subject. The Social Dilemma sparked my interest immediately because the idea of how we are being watched, controlled, and distracted by social media and technology in the XXI century was already of great interest to me since Wikileaks and Edward Snowden blew the proverbial whistle.

Forgetting about my insomnia, I hit play while a sleepy puppy laid next to me on the couch. Watching the full documentary was not an eye-opener but a confirmation of all that I already knew: not only are we exposed, through algorithms to dangerous articles, videos and blog posts that simply confirm our biases, but we are also controlled and manipulated into remaining engaged online, sharing our very precious personal data and becoming the product that is traded between powerful companies.

We trade our privacy, our sense of self, and even our self-esteem to be able to hail a taxi in record time or get delivery of a product in less than 24 hours after ordering. We are comfortable, and at first instances, we seem to be willing participants in this trade. After all, most of us say “I have nothing to hide, so I don’t mind”. But we need to ask ourselves, is the trade that simple; that black and white? You allow your phone to know exactly where you are, to notify you of new content at all times, and recommend ‘news’ articles that you might like ‘since you searched for something similar’.

In Surveillance Studies, we discussed, among other things, terms like ‘surveillance capitalism’ coined by Shoshana Zuboff who is one of the interviewees in The Social Dilemma. ‘Racialised surveillance’ and ‘the failure of biometrics’; all these terms have been defined to point out the dark side of our current technologies. Surveillance capitalism, simply put, translates your searches and interactions online and in social media to behavioural data for the purpose of creating predictive products that anticipate what you would want to see, purchase and do online to keep you engaged.

This is where we become the product, and our activities online and private data is the capital that has enriched companies like Facebook and Google when trading with companies looking to advertise to you based on predictive behaviour.

But is the fact that they get to predict our behaviour and show us targeted ads and news (without any fact-checking or verification) that awful? You still get to find what you need, when you need it, online avoiding the old fashioned search through pages of irrelevant content. Well, I question then, what about when technologies like biometrics alienate minorities since the technology is designed to focus on white cisgender features in the faces being scanned? Another writer on the topic, Shoshana Magnet, points out in her book When Biometrics Fail how Trans people can be misgendered by biometrics and how these technologies assist in racial profiling which can, of course, relate to Simone Browne’s idea of racialised surveillance via these technologies that discriminate and limit the possibilities for black and other minority communities to improve their way of life.

But what do all the above terms have to do with being online scrolling through Facebook and Instagram, searching on Google, watching a YouTube video (or 20+) and for the younger generation or creating and sharing content on TikTok? Well, for starters, facial recognition used by Facebook and Google has been found to play a major role in the policing and surveillance affecting people of colour, members of the LGBT communities and other minorities, and although the technology has been used by these two giants for many years, they only started to ask permission in 2019 after Facebook faced a lot of criticism over their practices.

We can add the dangerous practice of many social media apps of presenting us with content we might find interesting: let’s say you watch a video theorising about how Covid-19 was created by Bill Gates to thin out the herd, and after you finish that video you decide to check Facebook and find several more posts with the same ‘news’ confirming the conspiracy. You then read several poorly written and poorly researched articles that have a very compelling story that will explain the evil plan of evil millionaires to make bad things happen. Most of us can easily fall for these “theories” because they make more sense than understanding that life can be chaotic, and that diseases and natural disasters can happen without a clear explanation that makes sense to us. Eventually you are convinced and decide to join the yellow vests in Ireland or any other group around the world protesting the use of masks during the pandemic. Or you truly believe Veganism is the only way to survive and you assault a butcher shop calling the owner a murderer, or perhaps you end up believing that Australia doesn’t exist and the earth is flat.

Social media apps have the capacity to place you inside a bubble where you see articles and news that agree with you and prevent you from understanding the other side; and although this has happened in the past when you read one kind of newspaper, only liberal, or right-wing for example, but social media and online information have a wider and bigger reach that has been shown to affect political elections, civil unrest, cyberbullying, radicalisation and plenty more.

Of course, it is not all bad. Social media is not an evil ogre that wants to destroy us. I am one of those people that have connected with long lost friends thanks to social media, and there are many more that receive support and encouragement through these apps and technologies as well as using them for successful businesses and artistic careers.

Surveillance and biometrics have also been used to protect us and protect where we live. There is no doubt that these technologies have improved our lives in many ways. But The Social Dilemma and people like Shoshana Zuboff and Simone Browne expose the dangers not to prevent you from going online, but to make you reconsider the amount of time and effort spent using these technologies and the faith and trust we place in them without wondering what bias and intention lie behind their creation and “free of charge” availability. And perhaps most importantly, how much control these technologies exert on our free will and our daily decisions. Perhaps, like in The Matrix, we need to avoid becoming Cypher who forsook freedom for the illusion of money and the taste of an imaginary steak and be more like Neo refusing to completely bow to the will of machines and their controllers.

Yahaira L. Reyes, October 2020.