The Social Dilemma
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The Social Dilemma is a 2020 Netflix documentary, directed by Jeff Orlowski, that combines interviews with former tech-industry insiders and addiction and behavior researchers with a dramatized family storyline to examine how social media platforms are designed to hold attention. Anna Lembke appears as one of the film's clinical voices, describing social media as functioning like a drug because features such as endless feeds, notifications, and like counts are engineered to trigger repeated reward-seeking. The film links heavy platform use among teenagers to warning signs including anxiety and depression, and, citing outside research, to a rise in self-harm-related hospitalizations among teen girls since 2009. TechKids Foundation cites the film for its influential framing of platform design as a warning-sign driver, while noting that suicide and self-harm are never attributable to any single factor, including screen use.
The film cites outside research showing a rise in self-harm-related hospitalizations among teen girls since 2009 (62% for ages 15–19, 189% for ages 10–14) to frame the stakes of the platform-design practices it discusses; this is the film's own cited figure, not a TechKids-verified statistic.
The Social Dilemma. Directed by Jeff Orlowski, Exposure Labs, 2020. Netflix, 9 Sept. 2020.