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.

The documentary uses a fictional dramatized narrative to illustrate the issues discussed, centering around "a middle-class, average American family"[2] whose members each interface with the internet differently: Ben, a teenage high school student who falls deeper into social media addiction and online radicalization; Isla, an adolescent who develops depression and low self-esteem from social media's unrealistic beauty standards;[3] Cassandra, an older teenager who does not have a mobile phone and is depicted as being free from online manipulation; and their mother and stepfather, who try to curb their children's screen time but do not fully understand the factors of the situation.

[43] One interviewee, Tim Kendall, a former director of Facebook, spoke up on the alarming goal of the company: updating the app with increased addictiveness for a consistent boost in engagement.

The documentary reports statistics on depression, self-harm, and suicide leading to hospitalization, specifically in American teen girls, resulting from social media use.

According to Haidt's interview, people born after 1996 have grown up in a society where social media usage is the norm, thus resulting in consistent exposure to overwhelming content from a young age.

When asked where his inspiration came from during the film's panel at Deadline Hollywood's Contenders Documentary event, Orlowski said that he has "always been curious about big systemic and societal challenges".

Our hope has always been to work on big issues, and we now see the "social dilemma" as a problem beneath all our other problems.The film's graphics, animation, and visual effects were made by Mass FX Media and produced by Netflix.

[55] Devika Girish from The New York Times gave the film a positive review, stating it was "remarkably effective in sounding the alarm about the incursion of data mining and manipulative technology into our social lives and beyond".

[56] Mark Kennedy of ABC News called the film "an eye-opening look into the way social media is designed to create addiction and manipulate our behaviour, told by some of the very people who supervised the systems at places like Facebook, Google, and Twitter".

[57] Nell Minow of RogerEbert.com noted that the film "asks fundamental and existential questions" of humanity's potential self-destruction through its own use of computer technology, and praised its "exceptional" use of confessions from leaders and key players in the social media industry.

[61] Nell Minow stated that "even the wonderfully talented Skyler Gisondo cannot make a sequence work where he plays a teenager seduced by extremist disinformation, and the scenes with Vincent Kartheiser embodying the formulas that fight our efforts to pay attention to anything outside of the online world are just silly.

[60] In a rare defense of the film's oft-denounced dramatizations, John Naughton of The Guardian commented on the narrative's focus, stating that "the fictional strand is necessary because the biggest difficulty facing critics of an industry that treats users as lab rats is that of explaining to the rats what's happening to them while they are continually diverted by the treats (in this case dopamine highs) being delivered by the smartphones that the experimenters control.

"[62] Facebook released a statement on its About page, stating that the film "gives a distorted view of how social media platforms work to create a convenient scapegoat for what are difficult and complex societal problems".