I was at a preview screening of Molly vs. The Machines this week. It’s an incredibly moving, heart-breaking film about Molly Russell, the 14-year-old who took her own life in 2017. The coroner stated ‘the negative effects of online content’ as a cause.
Molly’s father, Ian, spoke at the screening. His strength, bravery, and heart are a lesson to everyone. I honestly don’t know how he carries on in the shadow of such a tragedy.
Everyone in that room left feeling distressed but galvanised not to give up trying to hold companies, like Meta, to account and to change their damaging ways. I went to sleep thinking about it. I woke up thinking about it.
Then one of the first things I read the morning after was an op-ed in MediaCat with the title ‘Social media deserves a fair trial’.
It was hard to stomach and I disagreed with quite a bit of it. I know I wasn’t alone. Thanks to MediaCat for letting me explain why here.
Yes, everyone deserves a fair trial. Social media in fact will soon be on actual trial for being intentionally addictive. TikTok and Snapchat have settled out of court, which some take as a sign of guilt.
But I struggle to feel much sympathy for platforms now facing legal and regulatory scrutiny. Much of it stems from choices they have made and defended for years.
Nor does the debate around their impact deserve to be characterised as ‘panic’; criticism framed as part of a historical pattern where new technologies are blamed for social ills; and ‘vested interest’ suggested as driving the narrative – it’s much bigger than that.
The piece also suggested that ‘the marketing industry has accepted this narrative about platforms’ – the narrative being that they have a detrimental effect on teenagers’ wellbeing. I find this an incredible claim that doesn’t reflect the industry I see around me.
If the marketing industry had accepted it then social media companies surely wouldn’t be massively over-invested in by…marketers. Unless, that is, marketers have accepted that social media harms children and are happy to carry on regardless.
The piece highlights two studies questioning whether social media harms young people’s wellbeing. There are also studies showing they do. So that doesn’t really get us anywhere. It’s reminiscent of the research that swirled round Big Tobacco, until the smokescreens cleared and government acted.
None of this dims the author’s powerful personal testimony about how social media benefitted her and the positive experiences she has had there. I just wish that was all that social media offered.
I have nothing against social media as a concept, and don’t naively think it can ever be some idyllic haven of positivity and support.
But I have everything against the current reality of social media: the profit-before-user-safety business model, the ‘topic agnostic’ algorithms, the lack of regulation enforcing safety guardrails.
This is not a debate about isolated experiences, positive or negative. It is about systems that now shape the daily reality of hundreds of millions of young people.
The list of allegations, investigations, and documented failures is already extensive. Take [XAI chatbot] Grok being investigated for reports of creating sexual imagery of children, as an illustrative recent example. Or Meta allegedly allowing children to access sex-talking chatbots.
The sheer amount of harm these companies stand accused of is overwhelming. Even if a fraction is proven to be true, it’s outrageous. And that’s before you get to the $16 billion they reportedly make from ads for scams and prohibited goods, charging scammers more when they discover them.
So a fair trial, yes. But let’s be clear about what is being criticised: not the idea of social media, but the business models and design choices that have allowed harm to trample on responsibility.
You can read the MediaCat article to which this column is responding, here.