As the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) continues to make its way through the implementation process – with a deadline of 24 July for affected companies to complete their child safety assessments – I’ve been thinking a lot about a quote from the US natural scientist E.O. Wilson: “The real problem of humanity is we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technologies.”
I’m not inferring that Ofcom, the regulatory body for overseeing the implementation of OSA, is medieval, just making the point about whether it will be agile enough to really call the god-like technology companies to account.
Time after time the social media giants have avoided censure or legal challenges by citing Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act, which prevents companies from being held liable for content posted on their platforms.
But there may be sunshine on the horizon – although in tragic circumstances – with a groundbreaking legal challenge in the US.
Don’t look away
The progress of the case is the subject of a compelling documentary by Bloomberg Originals, Can’t look away: The case against social media.
Bloomberg followed the work of the Social Media Victims Law Centre (SMVLC) led by lawyer Matthew Bergman and his colleagues in the lead-up to their first court appearance to try to move the case to the discovery phase.
On one side of the courthouse were the amassed families who had lost their children to suicide, self-harm, drugs and sexual exploitation through their use of social media. On the other, Jessica Grant, the legal representative for Snap Inc, owner of Snapchat.
The bereaved families held up pictures of their dead children while Grant took to the floor and addressed the judge with some chilling remarks: “Section 230 immunises internet service providers like Snap from any claim whether product liability, negligence or any other public nuisance”.
Given that the SMVLC had described the case as representing “the voices of the children coming back from the grave holding these companies to account,” her statement seemed particularly hostile, cloth-eared and egregious.
But the reason this case is groundbreaking and historic is that it’s the first time a case is being brought not on the grounds of platform versus content and Section 230, but rather on the grounds of product design – that is, that these companies are not just publishing user-generated content but are actively designing algorithms to push harmful content at pre-teens and adolescents to deliver greater engagement and growth.
These child victims are not searching for this content, it is being pushed into their feeds and streams with disastrous consequences. Their parents are completely unaware of what their children are consuming.
Add followers, get Adderall
One of the cases being represented by the SMVLC is that of Michael Brewer, who was 11 when he joined Snapchat. Snapchat has a feature called Quick Add which incentivises young people to add as many followers as possible. Of course, they have no idea who any of these new followers are.
At age 13, shortly after using Quick Add, Michael was contacted by an individual who asked, “What do you want?” When Michael asked, “What do you mean?” within an hour he was sent a photograph of a comprehensive drug menu.
Thereafter he testified he was receiving these drug menus in six out of 10 of his stories on the hour. He eventually went looking for Adderall, but was told by the drug dealer he could have Percocet instead. The pill was delivered by the dealers straight to his home courtesy of SnapMap which allows followers to see your location in real time.
Except it was not Percocet, it was a fake pill laced with fentanyl. The consequences were tragic. Within an hour of consuming the pill he was in a life-threatening situation – he eventually died but was resuscitated with unbearable consequences. Michael is now wheelchair bound with a significant brain injury. Even more heartbreaking is hearing from SMVLC lawyers that Michael is unique in their fentanyl-related social media cases – he is the only one still alive.
During the course of the Bloomberg documentary, it also charts evidence given by the CEOs of the social media giants in a landmark Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on 31 January 2024.
Meta, TikTok and Snap all gave evidence on the impact of social media on young people. With the bereaved families in attendance, it was astounding to hear Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg say, “There is no scientific evidence that use of social media has any impact on mental health”.
This was quite something given evidence to the contrary from within his own company. We know this from documents revealed by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, who confirmed that Facebook prioritised engagement and profit over safety and hid these facts from legislators and the public.
Mental health explosion
But if Zuckerberg needed any more information on the havoc his products and those of the other social media giants are wreaking on young people, he might do well to spend time reading the excellent book The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has done intensive research in this area.
His book links the explosion in mental health problems for young people today to the launch of smartphones and the rise of social media, particularly Instagram in 2012. But his book is not just about individual harms – it’s about the complete cognitive rewiring of young people’s minds, particularly as they are joining before the age of 13 when their pre-frontal cortex (PFC) has not yet fully developed.
The PFC governs a huge range of essential areas for normal brain development such as decision making and reasoning, executive functions, personality and social behaviour, working memory and attention, speech and language, emotional processing and motor control.
To put all that in context, the PFC manages complex cognitive processes including decision-making, impulse control, emotional regulation, social behaviour and working memory to name but a few.
This means that parents who are totally unaware of what their children are witnessing on their phones are allowing a complete rewiring of their children’s cognitive abilities at their most vulnerable developmental stages. Or to use Haidt’s words: “Children born in the late 1990s were the first generation in history who went through puberty in the virtual world. It’s as though we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars when we gave them smartphones in the early 2010s in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children.”
People power
In the US there has been an attempt to introduce a similar bill to the UK OSA, but the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) has stalled. Despite passing the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2024, it has been blocked from progressing further by Republicans worried social media companies might censor conservative viewpoints.
So in the end it looks like good-old people power might be the only thing that will force a change. As of now the SMVLC is representing 4000 US families with a growing number joining the fight every day. Their resources are completely limited compared to the vast and endless resources of the tech companies, but it is the justice system not the regulatory frameworks that is levelling the playing field so these ordinary families can be heard in a court of law.
A decision to proceed to discovery phase was granted to the SMVLC and the families in January with a ruling confirming that social media companies like Meta, YouTube, Snap and TikTok could not use Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to shield themselves from liability, allowing discovery and the lawsuits to move forward. All being well this will lead to bellwether trials later this year.
In Anxious generation, Haidt comments on the fact that so many parents he talks to are resigned to their adolescents’ use of social media, given that all their friends are on social media and to restrict their child’s use would make them socially isolated. His response is wisely a societal one not an individual one. We need to work together to change these norms and to re-establish the real-life, real-world conditions necessary for the healthy cognitive development of young people that’s essential for them to grow into happy and thriving adults.
If you are a parent, an aunt, uncle, a friend or employer I strongly urge you to watch Can’t look away at a cost of $12 – which goes to the film-makers. It’s nothing in terms of the vitally important knowledge the documentary imparts. And buy a copy of The anxious generation and give as many away as you can to as many parents as you know – or refer them here to the official website of the book which has lots of free resources and insights.
The cavalry is not coming to save our children from these serious and life-threatening harms on social media, so it’s time we began looking out for each other – working collectively as the societal custodians of the next generation. Together we can resist and fight back with the help of the strong arm of the law.
