Directors: Matthew O’Neill and Perri Peltz
It’s probably no surprise to anyone that social media affects mental health, but for big international firms who run the most used platforms, they claim plausible deniability, citing an outdated law that in the US deems they are not responsible for the content of their users. Olivia Carville’s new documentary Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media is a very hard watch indeed, the story of countless teenagers driven to taken their own lives or dying from drug-related causes after being hounded by content and contacts fed to them by their social media platforms, and this 75-minute film is their parents’ fight for justice.
It opens with footage of the congressional hearings of 2024 where Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Shou Zi Chew (TikTok) among others were grilled about their platforms and their safeguarding measures. Director Carville weaves this into a segment following lawyers as they try to convince a judge that the law needs to change – in existence before many of these firms were founded – and this gives the documentary its architecture, provides the expositional detail and offers a dramatic narrative as the team discover whether a social media firm can be sued.
But Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media is primarily about telling the stories of the children who died and the ongoing suffering of their parents. Through talking head interviews along with some video footage, audio recordings, photographs and chat data from their accounts, Carville reveals the horrifying details, from teens fed suicide-focused content through the algorithms including instructions and filmed accounts of deaths, to instances of cyber bullying through threats to share private photos and drug dealers using platforms to target and hook teenage users to buy unregulated and often misbranded pills. The weight of this evidence that Carville puts together is a clear case of negligence by these companies.
And that is only heightened when Carville talks to whistleblowers from inside the companies who spot the algorithmic templates as well as externals analysing data trends from children’s feeds that are then ignored by the company founders. These are used judiciously throughout the documentary which starts with a clear point of view and then lays out its case. The perspective includes the arguments employed by social media companies to deflect their responsibilities and Carville’s film is in no doubt who is culpable for the deaths – part of its activism is in getting America and other nations to recognise and regulate it.
The final part of the film focuses back on the congressional hearings and a local courtroom where a judge must decide if cases can be bought. There is drama in this but the outcomes remain uncertain and this is not an easy film (nor should it be). It takes a very traditional approach to documentary, but one designed to educate and to understand the real implications of huge multinational firms designing social media feeds that affect behaviour. As one devastated parent points out, they’re in your children’s rooms and in their heads, making it impossible for their families to protect them.
Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media is in cinemas from 8 August.
