‘We’re not going to disappear’: Mother fights for social media reform after son’s suicide | Documentary films

AThese days, going anywhere without your smartphone is almost like leaving a limb behind. Whether it’s directions, distraction, or social media discourse, our phones have become both a necessity and a crutch in our daily lives, our bodies literally moving around the glow of the screen.

But no matter how much we think we need all the features of the attention economy, the attention economy actually needs us more than we need it.

This is the general message of the documentary Your Attention Please, available for rental or sale on October 6. The film explores the human cost of our addiction to technology – as well as the very human efforts to combat it – by showing how social media companies like Meta and TikTok benefit financially from rewiring our brains to allow us to keep scrolling.

“We’re dealing with a business model that encourages extreme behavior because extreme behavior has proven to be more eye-catching,” director Sara Robin said in an interview.

The documentary follows Kristin Bride as she fights for social media reform, traveling to Capitol Hill to lobby for legislation and testify before Congress. Bride was thrust into online safety advocacy after her 16-year-old son, Carson, was cyberbullied and committed suicide in 2020 — even after she thought she had taken all the necessary steps to protect him from the dangers of the internet.

“We waited until Carson graduated high school to give him his first really old iPhone without an app, and we really hoped it would stay that way,” she says. “But when he got to 10th grade, he begged to use Snapchat because that was how all the kids connected… he didn’t make it to 11th grade.”

But social media isn’t just dangerous for children, something the documentary makes a point of highlighting through interviews with experts like former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who has called for tobacco-like warning labels on social media platforms, as well as Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower who will be played by Mikey Madison in this week’s The Social Reckoning.

Robin likes to quote Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, when describing social media as “designed to feel like slipping into a hot bath.” “You keep going there and you forget why you got there and you forget what you’re doing while you’re there and then two hours have passed,” she said. The bath in this analogy, however, is actually more of a pot – and we are frogs being slowly boiled alive without realizing it.

“In an age where social media is still designed to actively disrupt our lives, it’s up to us now to say, ‘My goal today is to get more out of social media than it will give me,’” says Robin. “It’s pretty hard to do. But I think in the meantime, while we’re still dealing with these very addictive, very imperfect platforms designed to exploit our attention, that’s to some extent what we need to do as we transition to something healthier.”

While Bride and Robin hope the documentary will make people confront their phone addiction and social media use, they also see it as a call to action — whether in Bride’s ongoing fight to get Congress to pass the Children’s Online Safety and Privacy Act or to be part of a cultural shift to stop calling. The documentary features interviews with the founders of the Offline Club in Amsterdam, where participants are required to check their phones at the door before events, as well as the principal and a teacher at Brockton High School in Massachusetts, where students are required to keep their devices locked in secure pouches throughout the school day, as examples of how this is possible.

“We’re not anti-tech – we’re in favor of better technology and a more balanced relationship with technology,” says Robin. She recognizes the irony that with the promotion of the film, she is more present on social media than she ever has been before. “A lot of the critical discussions about the attention economy are happening on these attention economy platforms,” she says.

But she doesn’t deny that social media has been a tool that has changed society in that it has allowed people to connect, organize, and self-promote – it’s just that the companies behind these platforms have designed their algorithms to keep their users there as long as possible, beyond their original goal. “If monetary value trumps everything else, we naturally find ourselves in a situation where the human being is forgotten,” explains Robin.

The way to combat this on an individual level is to be intentional in your use. “Be very clear about what you are looking to get out of the platform,” says Robin. “Go in and do this. Know that the moment you open it, it will throw the most distracting thing at you. Get out. Do the thing you were planning to do, then get out.”

On a larger scale, the fight will be even more difficult. Bride says that two years later, she returned to where she left off in the documentary with the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act — the bill stalled after it passed the Senate in 2024. Seeing Donald Trump associate himself with the tech billionaires behind these platforms was particularly disheartening, Bride says.

“But how can we not continue to fight? said the bride. “We’re not going to disappear and we’re going to continue to be loud and boisterous.”