| You’ve seen investigative reporter Olivia Carville’s work on teens and social media on the cover and in the pages of Bloomberg Businessweek. Now you can see it on the screen. Read on about a new Bloomberg documentary. Plus: Read more about the rise of the chipmaker Nvidia, and elaborate Indian weddings go abroad. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. “We need to stop buying the BS that these social media companies are telling us, and take back the power from them,” Amy Neville, who’s suing Snap Inc. over the death of her 14-year-old son, says in Bloomberg’s new documentary Can’t Look Away. The film, which is streaming today on Jolt, is about a generation of children who have become so addicted to social media they quite literally can’t look away from their screens. It follows a small and scrappy group of attorneys fighting to hold social media companies accountable for causing devastating harm to kids. They represent cases where teens have killed themselves after being fed suicidal methods by algorithms or subjected to ruthless blackmail by international gangs of cyber-sextortionists or—like Neville’s son—sold deadly counterfeit pills by drug dealers who market to them online and deliver through bedroom windows. For the past three years, I’ve been traveling the country investigating the dangers of the digital world for Bloomberg Businessweek. I’ve interviewed hundreds of people—from the trust and safety professionals who work inside these companies to teachers, police, prosecutors, lawmakers and experts. I’ve met families who’ve lost children in Arkansas, California, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, New York and Wisconsin. I’ve read too many suicide notes on smartphones. Can’t Look Away is based on that body of work. The documentary takes viewers inside the high-stakes battle for corporate accountability—and while parts of the film can be difficult to watch, it chronicles one of the most essential issues of our time. “We are going through a digital crisis for our kids,” says Laura Ordoñez, the head of digital content at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that advocates for kids’ digital well-being. “It’s a real public health crisis.”  Parents of social media victims attend a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis,” in January 2024. Source: Can’t Look Away To bring this story to the screen, we filmed dozens of grieving parents rallying outside Snap. Inc’s headquarters, congressional hearings where Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was accused of having blood on his hands, teen depositions, whistleblower interviews and legal strategy meetings at the Social Media Victims Law Center. In the film, the center’s founding attorney, Matthew Bergman, says the recommendation algorithms powering the world’s biggest social media apps “are not showing our kids what they want to see; they’re showing you what they can’t look away from.” None of these cases has gone to trial yet. Defendants Meta, Snap and TikTok dispute the allegations in the lawsuits and have filed multiple motions to dismiss the cases, saying they’ve spent billions of dollars safeguarding their platforms from digital dangers. The companies have updated their products to better protect kids in recent years, including rolling out more advanced parental control tools, stricter safety settings on teen accounts and features encouraging kids to wind down and log off at night. But, with billions of users worldwide—including 95% of teens in the US—it’s impossible for these companies to catch everything, even harmful content that violates their own rules. As experts, attorneys, parents and teens point out in the film, the dangers persist—and they can be deadly. Watch the film here
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Social Media Victims Are Ready to Be Heard
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