THE SOCIAL DILEMMA.

• Author: Soave, Robby
• Position: Television program review

During this moment of intense tech skepticism, the conversation about the downsides of social media could benefit from nuance and expertise. The Social Dilemma--a Netflix documentary about technology addiction-has plenty of the latter but almost none of the former. The result is a paranoid film that treats virtually all people as helpless puppets of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google head Sundar Pichai, and the nefarious systems they oversee.

Though this is a documentary, it attempts to tell a representative, fictional story, casting the eccentric actor Vincent Kartheiser (Mad Men's Pete Campbell) as the voice of a nefarious algorithm that has brainwashed a typical American teenager. These scenes are uniformly bad, making Reefer Madness look subtle by comparison.

The rest of the film, which consists of conversations with various...