Social media's 'Big Tobacco moment’ is coming

By Parmy Olson

The new Bloomberg Originals documentary Can’t Look Away, which follows parents suing tech companies after the deaths of their children, is difficult to watch. It should be. The film lays bare what many parents already know: Social media is rewiring their children’s brains, creating a generation of short attention spans and social anxiety. While viewing the film, what became clear is that tech platforms aren’t doing nearly enough to stop it — and probably never will.

It’s apparent simply in Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s shift in tone. In January 2024, he stood before some of these parents at a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing and said, “I’m sorry for everything you’ve gone through.” Before the year was out, the Facebook creator’s rhetoric had changed. Donning a gold chain and longer hair, he told an audience of technologists “I don’t apologize anymore.”

So much for remorse. “I think Zuckerberg feels unfairly personally attacked,” Jim Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media, tells me. Steyer’s company, long a thorn in the tech mogul’s side, promotes safer tech for children. “It's the billionaire's victim mentality, and it's truly disappointing.”

“He basically gave the middle finger to the world and said, ‘I’m done,’” Steyer adds. “But the real thing is, he wasn’t driven by the same imperatives as some of the more responsible tech leaders, and quite frankly neither were many of his colleagues at the top of the company.”

Realistically, Zuckerberg isn’t going to dive into making Instagram safer for teenagers. He seems more willing to do the opposite, having just reined in fact-checking and content moderation on Facebook in an obvious appeasement effort toward President Donald Trump, to help improve relations with the administration. (Republicans have accused Meta of censorship for years, while Trump has threatened Zuckerberg with life in prison.)

Sure, social media firms have made some helpful changes until now, but they’ve been laughably minor. In 2020, TikTok added special controls to help parents manage screen time on the app, and in 2021 Instagram made teen accounts private by default. Meta expanded that program this week, but campaigners have said the effectiveness of teen accounts is still unclear.

These were like band-aids on bullet wounds. Neither Meta nor TikTok have addressed the algorithmic design that promotes engagement through emotionally triggering content, keeping millions of kids hooked on their sites and vulnerable to being steered down misogynistic ”manosphere” rabbit holes or to “thinfluencers” on Instagram who promote eating disorders. And they haven’t addressed the scale and speed at which harmful content can spread before any kind of moderation can counteract it.

Despite bipartisan enthusiasm to address online harms, congressional gridlock has continued for years, meaning that lawsuits like the ones featured in Can’t Look Away might be a more effective remedy. Litigation was instrumental in damaging Big Tobacco’s grip on the market in 1990s. When cases showed, through detailed documents and witnesses, how cigarette makers were engineering products to be addictive and concealing the health risks, public trust collapsed. Smoking became stigmatized.

A similar approach is probably needed to stigmatize social media for under-16s. A cultural movement of sorts is already moving in that direction. Books like The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt and Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who gave Senate testimony on Wednesday, along with television shows like Netflix’s Adolescence have sparked a louder conversation despite the vacuum of legislation, which may be helping to accelerate changes.

A grassroots movement in the UK, formed on WhatsApp groups, has encouraged parents grouped by school classes across the country to delay smartphone use until secondary school. Australia has passed legislation that will ban under-16s from having social media accounts by the end of this year, a law that could be copied elsewhere. And UK policy experts say that the country won’t back down from fining tech firms that breach its new Online Safety Act despite Trump’s recent tariff melee. Meanwhile, several US states are enacting laws to push for phone-free schools. And a trial begins Monday that could force Meta to divest Instagram, following Federal Trade Commission allegations of illegal acquisitions.

Device makers could do more here too. Parental control settings on iPhones and Android phones are notoriously complicated, with options scattered across different menus and unclear technical terminology. Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc. could streamline all that with a dedicated app instead of burying options in screen-time menus where they're easily circumvented.

But if they don’t, the option of removing phones and social media from kids is becoming more plausible, even if the idea of tearing anyone away from their tiny screens is still hard to imagine. It may be the only alternative to help future generations break the cycle of nonstop scrolling.

Silicon Valley won't save kids from products designed to be addictive, so perhaps the goal should be to make social media as uncool for kids as cigarettes became in the ‘90s and 2000s. When parents, schools and eventually teens themselves reject these platforms, Big Tech will have no choice but to adapt.