BRATTLEBORO-The battle against children's addiction to social media is coming to town.
After a special screening of the film Can't Look Away: The Case Against Social Media at 4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 5, at the Latchis Theatre in Brattleboro, Sen. Wendy Harrison (D-Windham), the lead supporter of this year's Act 63, a law that puts restrictions on the way social media companies can interact with Vermont students, will be leading a panel discussion.
Admission is by donation ($10 suggested), but all are welcome.
Can't Look Away describes itself as "a gripping documentary that exposes the dark side of social media and its devastating impact on young users."
The problem is not simply that teenagers are addicted to the internet - many adults are, as well - but that awful things can potentially happen to young people in particular while they are online.
And awful means awful. Teenagers have been raped, taught how to kill themselves and encouraged to do so, blackmailed, bullied, held up to widespread scorn, isolated, sold drugs by mail - including some laced with fentanyl - and prevented from learning how to socialize, all while staring at a smartphone and scrolling relentlessly through social media.
The term "social media" encompasses sites like Meta's Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Discord, X (formerly Twitter), and certain games specifically designed for younger people.
Harrison will be joined on the panel by Ricky Davidson, the student assistant program counselor at Brattleboro Union High School.
"One of the things that social media has done is it's put all the worst parts of humanity in the hands of every person in the world that has access to a cell phone or a computer," Davidson told The Commons.
"There are also positive things about social media, but all the negative things - whether it's human trafficking, whether it's sexual assaults, whether it's drug selling, whether it's suicidality, all those worst things about our society - are now in people's hands," he continued.
The positive aspects, Davidson said, relate to finding a community online - "for instance, with LGBTQ students."
"There are those who maybe live in places that are very rural, where they are the only person they know that fits into the LGBTQ category. They need to have connection," he said.
Social media, Davidson continued, "allows them to connect with others like themselves. So there's some positive things that can come from it. But it's important to be cautious, to be aware of the potential, and then make good choices."
While the idea of putting a health warning label - like the ones put on tobacco products - on social media might seem quixotic, amusing, impossible, or downright ridiculous, that is not what the data say. Or, for that matter, what two new Vermont laws demand.
Act 63, for example, requires social media companies to put in safeguards to protect underage online users' personal data and identity. The bill passed - 25–5 in the Senate and 133–9 in the House - and was signed into law by Gov. Phil Scott.
"I'm very proud of this," Harrison told The Commons. "We tried to do a similar bill in the last session, and it didn't make it through the Legislature because of concerns to Vermont businesses. But this legislation is focused on the large internet companies like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. Those are the ones that are promoting serious harm to underage individuals, to our kids.
"Last session, we heard stories about young middle school girls getting assaulted and raped because Snapchat gave their information to an older man. He pretended to be a middle school kid. This session we heard also about assaults on young girls, and also learned about the suicides that are happening, mostly to older, high school-age boys in Vermont."
Snapchat, particularly, is aimed at middle-school kids, Harrison said.
"It has, like, balloons and things where you get points [only] if you connect with your friends a certain number of times in a week," Harrison said.
Kids are really susceptible to being popular and having friends in middle school and in high school, Harrison pointed out.
"So the companies exploit that and get them literally addicted," she said. "And the kids seriously can't sleep. They stop caring about the things they were doing. If they were into dance or sports or something, they stop caring. They don't want to do it anymore. We've had testimony that was just heartrending. It's just so so sad."
Harrison wants to open a discussion of the problem here in Windham County, which is why she has arranged for the film to be shown.
"I'm showing the film because I want parents and the kids themselves and all adults to know about the harms that are happening from social media," Harrison said. "It's not evident. It isn't like watching your child skin their knee. These harms are actually much more damaging than a skinned knee. But they happen when the kids are not supervised in accessing social media."
Cellphone-free schools
Act 72, a bill that makes a number of changes to state education law, includes another measure designed to protect schoolchildren: It bans cell phones in schools by the 2026–27 school year.
Vermont is the first state to implement a statewide "bell-to-bell" ban on cell phones in schools.
Windham County schools that have already implemented such policies are reporting significant positive changes in students' behavior. Last year, for example, Putney Central School went bell-to-bell without cellphones as an experiment. According to Rep. Mike Mrowicki (D-Putney), it has been a resounding success.
"Students drop their phones off at the office when they come in and can pick them up later," Mrowicki said. "The students don't seem to have a problem with this, and teachers report the students are more engaged with classes and each other.
"You don't see students standing on the playground staring at their phones and doomscrolling," Mrowicki continued. "You see them engaging with each other. Same in the cafeteria at lunch time. I feel it shows that technology can be a vital tool, but with limits. It doesn't have to rule our existence 24/7. Perhaps that's a good lesson for some adults?"
BUHS went bell-to-bell this year.
"One thing is that the cafeteria is loud now," Davidson said. "Kids are sitting having lunch, and they're socializing with each other face to face. They're having conversations with each other, where last year, or the year before, you would go into the cafeteria and there would be a bunch of kids sitting there and they're just all looking at their phones. They're not having a conversation with the person sitting across the table from them."
The same thing is happening in the hallways, he said.
"The hallways were quiet during passing time," he said. "Now people are talking about how loud the hallways are during passing time between classes. It's because people are talking to each other. They're not whipping their phones out and looking at them as they're walking down the hallway going to their next class."
This also helps with learning, Davidson said.
"One of the things that they've found is that even if somebody is totally focused and locked in on a project, an activity, or a job, whatever it is they're doing, and they say to themselves, 'I'm going to take a minute to stop doing what I'm doing and just check my phone,' it takes up to 20 minutes for their brain to get back to the same level of attention and focus as it had before."
A film to start conversations
As described by Can't Look Away's website, directors Matthew O'Neill and Perri Peltz "take viewers inside the high-stakes legal battle to hold tech companies accountable for the harm caused by their negligence and dangerous algorithms."
The film follows attorneys from the Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC), who define themselves as "representing families whose kids have been harmed by social media."
SMVLC has over 4,000 clients. According to the attorneys in the film, children's social media addiction is an almost unknown problem that currently leaves a "lost generation of kids."
Nearly 95% of teenagers in the U.S. are now on social media, they say, with no legal brakes on the behavior of corporations that create the content and sell its users to advertisers for profit.
"This is a perfect storm of corporate greed for maximum profitability," says SMVLC founder, attorney Matthew Bergman, in the film.
The film follows the attorneys as they attempt to end big tech's protection under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act (CDA), which protects online platforms from liability for user-generated content.
The film ends with the attorneys winning the rights for families to sue Meta, Snapchat, and others for damages to individual teenagers.
"We've made history," says Bergman.
Because the damage that social media creates has become an international problem, the film is now being translated into Spanish, French and German.
Designed to be dangerous
Harrison said during the debate on Act 63, the State House had more than 100 lobbyists working against the bill. Social media, she said, is a silent addiction.
"There's a lot that we don't know about because kids don't tell their parents," Harrison said. "It's understandable, right? Middle school kids don't necessarily even know that they're in trouble until they really are.
"If it's a physical situation, like a rape, the parents will likely know," she continued. "But when kids become addicted, when they can't sleep, the companies know this. The algorithms result in the kids not being able to sleep, not being able to eat, not being able to look people in the eye. And that description is from a TikTok employee."
Act 63 - the Vermont Age-Appropriate Design Code Act - "emphasizes the protection of minors' data and outlines the responsibilities of businesses in handling this information, including the implementation of age assurance methods to verify user age and restrict access to certain features based on age," according to a summary of the law by the Campaign for Vermont.
"Furthermore, the legislation mandates that covered businesses adhere to a minimum duty of care towards minors, ensuring their online experiences do not lead to emotional distress or compulsive use," the synopsis says.
"It establishes requirements for default privacy settings that prioritize high levels of privacy for minors, including limitations on visibility and interactions with adult users. The bill also imposes transparency obligations on businesses regarding their privacy practices and prohibits certain data collection practices, such as gathering unnecessary personal data from minors."
The act gives the state attorney general the power to enforce these provisions.
'Sick' and 'unethical'
The algorithms that run social media are designed to keep eyeballs attached. This is called "user engagement" and requires an endless stream of interesting subject matter. The longer kids watch the screen, the more advertisements they can be shown. And it is through advertisements that the platforms make their money.
Laura Derrendinger is a former public health nurse, a national anti-social-media activist, and a leader of the VT Coalition for Phone and Social Media Free Schools. Her group was the driving force behind Act 72. She described to The Commons how social media is designed to be dangerous.
"This entire industry of the social media companies, they hired professional psychologists that were trained in behavioral addiction, and those psychologists helped them design these products to be addictive," Derrendinger said.
One of the things these professionals discovered was that sensationalism captured more attention than "happy" content, she said.
"The more negative and sensational and gross and vulgar the content is, the more likely it is [...] to keep users and children, especially, online for even longer," Derrendinger said. "It is sick, it's unethical, and these companies should not be in business."
When big tech CEOs testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C. in 2024, the audience was filled with parents who had lost their children to social media scams. Many held up pictures of their children.
All the CEOs denied that their platforms could lead to addiction or sexual predation, although Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Meta, apologized to the survivors and parents who had lost children.
The internet and Windham County
Windham County has not yet had to deal with the purer horrors of the internet, Davidson said. So far, social media here cannot be tied to anyone having been raped or having died from drugs laced with fentanyl - at least not on his watch. But he agrees that social media is definitely an addiction.
"People talk about cell phones as being addictive, and they are, but it's really the social media that students can access on their smartphone," Davidson said. "That's where the real addiction piece comes in, because the phone is the tool to get them to the social media, and the algorithms involved in social media have really helped the addiction."
Addiction is now defined as a disease, but does that mean every adolescent has it?
"Everybody has the ability to get to overuse their social media, or to misuse their social media," Davidson said. "It's very easy for anybody, even if they don't have addiction issues, even if they don't have a history of being addicted to things, to spend too much time scrolling on social media. It sucks you in, and the time frame between things is so intense that it's constantly stimulating your brain."
Some call it "doomscrolling."
"Doomscrolling is just constantly watching short videos over and over," Davidson said. "You just keep rolling through a reel of short videos that are like 30 seconds to a minute." TikTok pioneered this style of video, and YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram have since adopted the form.
"So you're just constantly watching these short videos, and you watch one, and you watch another one, and then you watch a couple with the same theme, and the algorithm feeds you more in that theme," he added. "So you're constantly getting a hit."
Our brains are not designed for constant stimulation, Davidson said.
"Your brain needs downtime to settle, to calm, to not be constantly inundated with information, so you can process the information you've taken in, so that you can function," he said.
An addiction to social media can damage a young person's sense of self, Davidson said.
"When you become so dependent on the connection through social media, your self-worth gets tied" in to how many likes one has on a particular post or how many people are following you on a social media platform, he said.
"Also, you are constantly comparing yourself to other people by what they post on their social media feed," Davidson said. Students find themselves with internal uncertainties, like "Is my life good enough? Am I exciting enough? Do I have enough? Am I doing enough cool things compared to these other people?"
"Many of these people the doomscroller doesn't even know, because they're just somebody who's following them, or who they're following, or who's in another state or another city. They've never met them, but it's a constant state of feeding that over and over and over again."
It has been well-established that the human brain does not fully develop until around the age of 25.
"The longer we can protect children, the better," Derrendinger said. "And then, honestly, once they become adults, nobody will say that that's healthy for adults to use, but adults have a better chance at resisting the addictive pull of the algorithm because their brain has had a chance to fully develop."
Teenagers must be taught to make better choices. That is one reason why Davidson is happy that Can't Look Away is having a Brattleboro screening.
"When Wendy Harrison reached out to say that she wanted to try to bring the movie here, part of the reason I was glad about it was because hopefully this will be the beginning of some discussions around 'How do we educate and help our young people to make better choices?'" Davidson said. "That's the big thing."
He said teachers and staff of Vermont schools have to help students "because they're going to make their choices."
"But if they're understanding the bigger picture, maybe they'll make a better choice," Davidson said.
This News item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.