What is Persuasive Technology and How Does it Work

The Social Dilemma is a 2020 American docudrama film directed by Jeff Orlowski and written by Orlowski, Davis Coombe, and Vickie Curtis. The documentary examines how social media's design nurtures addiction to maximize profit, and its ability to manipulate people's views, emotions, and behavior and spread conspiracy theories and disinformation. The film also examines social media's effect on mental health, in particular, the mental health of adolescents and rising teen suicide rates.The film features interviews with many former employees of social media companies along with academic researchers. Some of the interviews also note that social media platforms and big tech companies have provided some positive change for society as well.
Using Technology to Make Work More Human
The next wave of digital tech, or “smart tech,” has the potential and power to help us rehumanize work. Rather than doing the same work faster and with fewer people, smart tech creates an opportunity to redesign jobs and reengineer workflows to enable people to focus on the parts of work that humans are particularly well-suited for, such as relationship building, intuitive decision making, empathy, and problem solving. But it will require organizational leaders to make informed, careful, strategic decisions to ensure the technology is used to enhance our humanity and enable people to do the kinds of relational, empathetic, problem-solving activities we do best. This article offers some initial steps to get started introducing smart tech within your own organization.
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The Social Dilemma features the voices of technologists, researchers and activists working to align technology with the interests of humanity.

Tristan Harris

Former Google Design Ethicist; Co-Founder & President of The Center for Humane Technology

Jaron Lanier

Computer scientist and founding father of virtual reality

Shoshana Zuboff

Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School; Author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”

Jeff Seibert

Former Senior Director of Product at Twitter

Roger McNamee

Early Facebook investor; Author of “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe”

Aza Raskin

Former Head of User Experience at Mozilla; Inventor of the Infinite Scroll

Sandy Parakilas

Former Operations Manager at Facebook; Former Product Manager at Uber

Joe Toscano

Former Experience Design Consultant at Google; Author of “Automating Humanity”

Cynthia Wong

Former Senior Internet Researcher at Human Rights Watch

Tim Kendall

CEO of Moment; Former Director of Monetization at Facebook; Former President of Pinterest

Dr. Anna Lembke

Medical Director of Addiction Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine

Justin Rosenstein

Co-Founder of Asana and One Project; Former engineering lead at Facebook; Former product manager at Google

Cathy O’Neil

Data scientist; Author of “Weapons of Math Destruction”

Rashida Richardson

Rutgers Law School, Visiting Scholar; German Marshall Fund, Senior Fellow; A.I. Now Institute, Former Director of Policy Research

Randima (Randy) Fernando

Randima (Randy) Fernando, Co-Founder & Executive Director at The Center for Humane Technology

Guillaume Chaslot

Former software engineer at Google (YouTube); CEO at IntuitiveAI

Renée DiResta

Research Manager at Stanford Internet Observatory; Former Head of Policy at Data for Democracy

Alex Roetter

Former Senior VP of Engineering at Twitter

Bailey Richardson

Early Instagram employee; Partner at People & Company

Jonathan Haidt

Social psychologist at New York University; author of “The Righteous Mind”

Lynn Fox

Former Director of Corporate PR at Apple; Former Corporate Communications at Google

“Ghost work” is anthropologist Mary L. Gray’s term for the invisible labor that powers our technology platforms. When Gray, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, first arrived at the company, she learned that building artificial intelligence requires people to manage and clean up data to feed to the training algorithms. “I basically started asking the engineers and computer scientists around me, ‘Who are the people you pay to do this task work of labeling images and classification tasks and cleaning up databases?’” says Gray.
There are so many startups and businesses out there, anything that calls itself “business insights” or “intelligence and analytics.” That’s using crowdsourcing or collective intelligence, and that’s relying on ghost work. There is no way around the need for people to sift through the piles of what’s called unstructured data.

The Social Dilemma centers on the social and cultural impact of social media usage on regular users, with a focus on algorithmically enabled forms of behavior modification and psychological manipulation.


The film dives into the psychological underpinnings and the manipulation techniques by which, it claims, social media and technology companies addict users. People's online activity is watched, tracked, and measured by these companies, who then use this data to build artificial intelligence models that predict the actions of their users. Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, explains in the documentary that there are three main goals of tech companies:
  1. The engagement goal: to increase usage and to make sure users continue scrolling.
  2. The growth goal: to ensure users are coming back and inviting friends that invite even more friends.
  3. The advertisement goal: to make sure that while the above two goals are happening, the companies are also making as much money as possible from advertisements.
Harris summed this up with the warning: "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product", The interviewees restate their fear about the role of artificial intelligence in social media and the influence these platforms have on society, arguing that "something needs to change." Aza Raskin, a former employee at Firefox and Mozilla and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, explains that Silicon Valley started around the "idea of humane technology," but companies have strayed away from the original intentions of technology.
Tristan Harris Former Google Design Ethicist; Co-Founder & President of The Center for Humane Technology

The technology powering many apps and services seems automatic. But anthropologist Mary L. Gray explains how there are millions of hidden workers behind the screen who are key to making it all work. Mary L. Gray is a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research and a faculty associate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She also holds a faculty position at Indiana University.

In 2019, Mary co-wrote with computer scientist Siddharth Suri the book Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass.
The Social Dilemma features the voices of technologists, researchers and activists working to align technology with the interests of humanity.

This film explores the work of media designers at big tech companies such as Facebook and Google and their role in recalibrating the human brain. Documentary footage exposes the pervasive influence social media has over everyday life through the testimonies of those who create these digital platforms. What are the consequences of our growing dependence on social media? This documentary-drama hybrid reveals how social media is reprogramming civilization with tech.
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