The digital possibilities of social control in China have led to an unprecedented level of state surveillance. Through self-censorship or spying on neighbors, surveillance covers not only those perceived as a threat by the government, but increasingly and ever more totally the ordinary citizen: whether buying flowers, taking your child to school, or taking out the trash at night. Big Data and digital technologies are already being used as weapons to curtail freedoms. Step by step, the social and political behavior of the Chinese is changing.
The documentary explores, in intimate detail, digital social control in China by following the experiences of two families and a journalist. Film-maker Jialing Zhang gives an exclusive and previously impossible intimate insight into the interior of China and tells a deeply disturbing story of how the state uses technology to control its citizens as well as propaganda to convince its people to trust it. She tells a deeply disturbing story about technology, (self-) censorship and abuse of power.

Jacob Ward travels the globe to investigate Decision Science. We imagine our conscious minds make most decisions but in reality we go through much of our lives on 'Autopilot'. And marketers and social media companies rely on it.
The first part offers you the owner’s manual for this autopilot. The second part, 'Weapons of Influence', explores how politicians, social media companies and corporate marketers use big data to hack decision-making system. The third part, 'Us vs. Them', shows how this autopilot biases fuel the nation's divisions and how to overcome them. The last part, 'The Wings of Angels', explores why hacking for good is an important scientific discovery; how people can hack their own minds to improve their lives and change the world for the better.

From the first transistor to deep learning networks, the rise of computing power over the last 50 years has been so phenomenal it's changed everything from the way we communicate to how our appliances interact. Fuelled by giant leaps forward in computer technology, the race is on. As the progress of machines continues to accelerate, so will the pace of change.

Set in the dark underbelly of Silicon Valley, The Social Dilemma fuses investigative documentary with enlightening narrative drama. Expert testimony from tech whistle-blowers exposes our disturbing predicament: the services Big Tech provides-search engines, networks, instant information, etc.-are merely the candy that lures us to bite. Once we're hooked and coming back for more, the real commodity they sell is their prowess to influence and manipulate us.

Where big data meets big brother -- The story of how governments manipulate the internet to censor and monitor their citizens, and how those citizens are fighting back. This battle for control of cyberspace will challenge our ideas of privacy, citizenship and democracy to the very core. The film is a look at the global impact the internet has on free speech, privacy and activism.

Everywhere you go, you generate a cloud of data. You're trailing data, everything that you do is producing data. And then there are computers looking at that data that are learning, and these computers are essentially trying to serve you better. They're trying to personalize things to you. They're trying to adapt the world to you. So on the one hand, this is great, because the world will get adapted to you without you even having to explicitly adapt it. There's also a danger, because the entities in the companies that are in control of those algorithms don't necessarily have the same goals as you, and this is where I think people need to be aware that, what's going on, so they can have more control over it.
We came into this new world thinking that we were users of social media and search engines. It didn't occur to us that social media and search engines were actually using us.