Haunting Realities: Why We Can’t Look Away from Big Tech
I recently watched the Bloomberg Originals documentary, Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media directed by Matthew O’Neill and Perri Peltz. The film cost $7 to rent, and it’s just under 90 minutes. It’s a haunting and alarmingly eye-opening must see for any parent, but it is not easy to watch.
At the center of the documentary is the legal battle to hold tech companies accountable for harm caused by their negligence and dangerous algorithms. That years-long battle has been led by the Social Media Victims Law Center who are fighting for families whose children suffered tragic consequences linked to social media use. But it is the stories of the victims and their families that really hit home. The losses are heartbreaking—families whose children died in large part because of social media companies like Snap!, Instagram, and TikTok—some of the biggest social media platforms that seemingly prioritized profit over the well-being of their young users.
The documentary is a representation of capitalistic hubris. When the cost of making money is human life, companies most often choose to grow their earnings. There’s no greater example of that truth than the Sackler family who were responsible for the opioid crisis.
The allegations against these platforms claim that they repeatedly served American teenagers content covering sextortion, suicide scenarios, unwanted sexual advances, and illicit drug networks.
Legal Battle and Section 230
“They know the levels of addiction. They know the levels of suicide, but they have no legal brakes on their behavior,” said Matthew Bergman, Founding Attorney of the law center. Bergman’s quest is to apply some legal brakes, which requires changing a long-standing interpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.
Section 230 extends protection to these platform providers because it exempts them from liability for content created by third-parties, which was the decision in the 2024 John Doe vs. Snap. The US Supreme Court wrote, “The courts concluded that §230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 bars Doe’s claims” and declined to hear the appeal of the lower court’s decision that Snap was not liable. To date, the law has been interpreted to mean that the platforms are merely service providers, akin to a telephone company, and are therefore exempt from liability.
The very idea that Snap’s ability to directly connect sexual predators or drug dealers to children is somehow tantamount to Verizon or T-Mobile is on its face ludicrous. As the documentary exposes, the data shows a staggering number of children who self-harm after being encouraged to take their lives on social media platforms.
Snap! is more than the intermediary between the drug dealer who is the creator of the content and the user of the platform, which is why its legal team does not want the case to go to discovery—the process of bringing forth factual records where the court receives evidence from witnesses and documents. In contrast, the Social Media Victims Law Center attorneys argued that, “we need discovery. The harm is dependent on the content.”
But the Social Media Victim Law Center approached Section 230 differently and argued that the design of the Snap! product is what facilitates drug dealers to evade responsibility. Snap! is not a passive intermediary. As Senator Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut said, “when the product design kills people, and they know it kills people, they need to be held accountable.”
Victim Stories and Testimonies
While eye-opening for parents, the documentary is also hard to watch because it doesn’t shy away from the very real loss that families suffered after their children died. We meet a mom and dad from New Iberia, Louisiana whose daughter Englyn Roberts died after she had seen someone demonstrating self-strangulation videos on social media platforms.
Wrongful death is the largest category of harm, and by the grace of God, that is a reality the parents of Michael Brewer will not know, but their lives have been forever changed. In one scene we meet Brewer, a teenager who is now wheelchair-bound after sustaining a brain injury from fentanyl poisoning. Brewer started using Snap at 12 years old. By the time he was 13, he (like many other young users) accepted connections from people he didn’t know. Several of his newest connections were drug dealers. Brewer explained that one person reached out with a simple question, “What do you want?” Confused, Brewer responded asking what the person meant. Then he received a drug menu. “Every hour there were new drug menus.”
Eventually curiosity won out, and Brewer went looking for adderall. “I asked one guy, and he said he had percocet. I took it late on Christmas Eve,” Brewer explained. Fortunately, his mother woke in the middle of the night, which saved his life, but she found her son cold to the touch and foaming at the mouth.
The threats are not exclusive to a single platform, but there are multiple examples of internal whistleblowers who tried to establish safer guardrails. Arturo Bejar, a former Facebook employee, made it his job to make executives aware of the harm to teens on the Instagram platform.
Charles Bahr, former TikTok employee, tried contacting someone high up in the hierarchy of the company. He wrote, “What I see is that the platform is really not safe for a young audience.” His email went unanswered, but he was eventually fired.
The documentary also introduced the parents of a young man, Mason, who took his own life after watching TikTok videos promoting or normalizing suicide. His mom explained, “Mason never searched for suicidal content.” He instead noted, “I’m feeling rejected, broken hearted.”
Social media is how kids communicate. They don’t have each other’s phone numbers, which is how Jordan DeMay became a victim of a sextortion scam that led to his taking his own life. Only six hours after believing he had met and shared pictures with a girl, he learned that it was actually a cybercriminal. “I’m killing myself because of you,” was the last thing Jordan wrote. The only modicum of solace for the family is that in September 2024, two men were sentenced to 17 years in prison for a sextortion scam that killed Jordan DeMay and targeted more than 100 others.
Parents are left navigating the complexities of raising kids in a digital age where neither adult nor child completely understands the risks users are exposed to. Adults aren’t native users of the technologies, and kids are incentivized to accept friend requests or winnow through their feeds that are sometimes cluttered with harmful content that they weren’t seeking out. As a result, many parents and legislators are questioning whether a complete ban is the best way to keep kids safe.
According to Timothy Cook of The Algorithmic Mind, a complete ban could also be harmful to a child’s development. Rather, a health advisory on social media limits in adolescents published by the American Psychological Association suggests, “Preliminary research suggests that a combination of 1) social media limits and boundaries, and 2) adult–child discussion and coaching around social media use, leads to the best outcomes for youth.”
The Path Forward
Ultimately, Can’t Look Away is most powerful as a film for parents and policymakers. It is an important documentary, though at times very difficult to watch, but it’s incomparable in that it so effectively highlights the dangers of social media for young users.
While the bellwether case against Meta and YouTube found both liable for negligence because they failed to warn about the risks of use, the fight is far from over. These platforms have a lot of money to spare, so the best that we can hope for is reputational damage to the their brand if we keep spreading the word.
Until the policies and decisions that inform the product development process are brought into the limelight, the platform providers can hide behind an arbitrary law and the money they pay out in settlements. Sarah Gardner, CEO of Heat Initiative wrote on LinkedIn, “The first school district case against Big Tech was supposed to go to trial on June 15, but the companies evaded the courtroom this time…Meta, YouTube, Snap Inc., and TikTok settled the Breathitt County School District case.” They avoided the discovery process that unearthed the damning truths that the public deserves to know, so perhaps a good use of these platforms is to spread the message of how they can do more to keep kids safe. We can’t look away.
*this post was previous published on my Substack https://penspalsprose.substack.com/p/haunting-realities-why-we-cant-look