I watched the documentary last night, it is really worth watching.
Here is the link to the trailer and description.
[
netflix.com...]
The film attempts to exposes the way the various social media platforms manipulate and deceive their users. It interviews a wide variety of industry insiders from across the industry including all the big players. The film mostly focuses on "Social Media" but it lumps Google into that.
One of the most interesting parts was when they explain how each "user" see his on version of reality. The feed or search results of two similar individuals will return two unique sets of results. Their point is that this has obvious implications for society as whole, in that each individual's perception of reality or truth will be different. The film doesn't addresses this from the content providers, but as webmasters concerned with SEO and rankings this has a similar implication. This confirms what I have said many time before, the one to one relationship between keyword and search result no longer holds. As a result, and as in the case of society as whole, there is no way for any outsider to no where one ranks. There is now way to measure or gauge reality. This information asymmetry means we as publisher's have lost any and all power and are completely beholden to Google, FB and any other platform we choose to play on.
This same information asymmetry holds for advertisers, but the dynamic is some what different. For advertisers it ends up being a double edge sword, because on the one hand they use this to their advantage, as they can server ads customized on a near individual level, but since only a very few people see those ads, it becomes impossible for an outsider to determine, scrutinize or regulate what is being shown in the ads and to who it is shown. This means that advertisers can advertiser with impunity. But there is the other edge of the sword, a point not raised in the film, like publishers advertisers have know way of knowing their "ranking" is. Is the advertiser seeing all relevant impressions, what is the supply really? Only the platform can know, and thus it can manipulate the market to its advantage adding supply in the face of strong demand and reducing supply in order to keep prices up. No other market operates in this way.
The film doesn't really reveal anything new, at least not the WW community, but it does great job of explaining the dynamic in way that is entertaining and that people not in the industry can understand and appreciate. I will be watching it with my kids in the coming days.
