The first time I tried to watch Netflix’sĀ The Social Dilemma, a documentary about the ill effects of social media on both individuals and society, I wasn’t in the right mind frame and only made it halfway through. But tonight I got around to watching it all.

All I can say is, “WOW.” The reality of what is being engineered with our mass consumption of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc. is beyond disturbing. I had some idea of how we were being manipulated, and I noticed how easy it was to lose hours of your life to these apps. What I didn’t fully realize was the degree to which A.I. and its algorithms are manipulating our very thoughts and actions as individuals. It was also disturbing to come to terms with the fact that we are the product being sold to advertisers.

The fact that the very people who engineered these apps to make them as addictive as possible are losing control, is frankly terrifying. Jaron Lanier and Tristan Harris both explained that these algorithms have the ability to polarize our society even more than it already is. They predicted the potential for civil war in the United States if the extreme polarization, which is a direct result of targeted echo-chambers on social media, is not addressed and disrupted.

These effects have already been felt in the real world, and real people have died as a result. Without even going into detail about the 151% increase in suicides in girls between the ages of 10-14, it’s clear how much harm these applications are inflicting on our society. It seems these apps are here to stay, as they are too financially powerful to go anywhere. But our democracy may be at risk if there ceases to be some base level of shared truth, which these algorithms seem determined to undermine.