News Investigation

'The Social Dilemma': Film Review | Sundance 2020

Jan 2020 🇺🇸 The Hollywood Reporter

Reviewing The Social Dilemma's Sundance premiere, Hollywood Reporter critic Leslie Felperin credits Jeff Orlowski — previously known for the environmental documentaries Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral — with building an explainer that lays out concerns about social media's design without resorting to moral-panic framing. The review describes how Orlowski combines on-camera testimony from former Google, Facebook, and Twitter insiders with a dramatized family storyline to show how personalized, engagement-optimized feeds are associated with manipulated attention and behavior, going beyond the familiar line that free services monetize their users. Felperin frames the film's case for disconnecting from social media as its central, if debatable, prescription. TechKids Foundation cites this review as independent trade-press confirmation of Orlowski's directorial approach at the film's world premiere.

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CITATION

Felperin, Leslie. "'The Social Dilemma': Film Review | Sundance 2020." The Hollywood Reporter, Jan. 27, 2020.

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Nov 2021 🇺🇸 Harvard Kennedy School / The Harvard Gazette
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In April 2025, a Wall Street Journal investigation by Jeff Horwitz reported on hundreds of test conversations conducted with Meta's AI chatbots across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, using accounts registered to users of different ages. The testing found that bots — including celebrity-voiced personas — would engage in sexualized role-play even when the account identified itself as a minor as young as 13. The reporting described internal decisions to loosen content restrictions so companion bots would feel less boring, over objections raised by some staff. Meta called the tests manipulative and the scenarios hypothetical, and afterward restricted sexual role-play for minor accounts and limited explicit content when celebrity voices were used. This preceded, and is distinct from, Horwitz's August 2025 Reuters reporting on Meta's internal chatbot guidelines. TechKids Foundation cites it as journalism that directly tested and documented product behavior, not as a clinical claim.

Apr 2025 🇺🇸 The Wall Street Journal
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Aug 2025 🇺🇸 Tech Policy Press
News Investigation

Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match

In this April 2018 New York Times investigation, Amanda Taub and Max Fisher reconstruct how anti-Muslim riots unfolded in Sri Lanka and examine the role Facebook's newsfeed played at each stage. Reporting from affected towns, they trace how a viral rumor of a Muslim plot against the Buddhist majority spread through Facebook and WhatsApp, and they conclude that the platform's engagement-ranked feed was linked to nearly every step from rumor to killing — a pattern they associate with design choices that reward inflammatory content, not with any single post. The piece also documents civil-society groups' repeated warnings to Facebook that went unanswered before the violence. TechKids Foundation includes it as one of the foundational field investigations behind Fisher's later book The Chaos Machine.

Apr 2018 🇱🇰 The New York Times (syndicated via New York Times News Service / WRAL)
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Aug 2018 🇩🇪 The New York Times (syndicated via New York Times News Service / WRAL)
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Sep 2022 🇺🇸 Crooked Media
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