The kids are not all right.
That fact is abundantly clear watching “Social Studies,” FX’s five-part documentary series about how social media has impacted the current generation of teens (now streaming on Hulu). Sex. Drugs. Alcohol. Bullying. Skipping school. These are all the things every teenager is exposed to and goes through, so things can’t be that different in 2024 than they were in 2004, right?
Well, today’s teens have all of those difficulties, but they are magnified through the lens of social media. And then a whole host of other horrors is heaped on top by the unregulated internet: “Pro-anorexic” TikTok accounts, “trending” and potentially dangerous sexual fetishes, cyberbullying to unheard-of extremes.
It’s been happening for years, but “Social” shines a new and shocking light on the realities of social media for today’s teens, as the kids open up their lives, and most crucially, provide the producers with unfettered access to their phones. The documentary follows a group of adolescents from Los Angeles starting in 2021, filming them at school, at home and out with their friends while simultaneously recording their screens. That means the cameras go to their bedrooms and parties, but also to their For You pages on TikTok and their Snapchat direct messages, much more secretive and dangerous places. “Social” is a full picture of modern young adulthood that seemingly no one has painted before. What is revealed should terrify parents. It should terrify all of us.
“I knew that there were, for instance, issues with body image, but to see the scale of it,” is alarming, says documentary director Lauren Greenfield (“The Queen of Versailles”). “One kid said to me, ‘Half my friends say they have eating disorders from TikTok. And the other half are lying.'”
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And how could these poor kids avoid it when they are assaulted, not only with images and videos that glorify diet culture and thinness but accounts that actively encourage viewers to develop an eating disorder? The teens and their screens show how creators with bad intentions easily circumvent social platforms’ rules banning accounts like this, and how the vicious algorithms seem to send the most harmful content to the most vulnerable. The same kind of dangerous content can be found when Greenfield talks to her subjects about another teen taboo: Sex.
“So many kids said they learned about sex from (online) pornography,” Greenfield says. In a recurring segment, the director sits in a focus group with her subjects. When Greenfield asks them at what age they first saw porn, one girl said she was 5. “The ages are getting younger and younger,” Greenfield says. The docuseries also highlights the dangers of sexual proclivities that “trend” on apps like TikTok. “People are sharing that BDSM and choking is a trend, and it’s not cool if you like ‘vanilla sex.'” Teens in the documentary said they see this content and can develop dangerously warped views about what normal sex is, including the idea that women must endure pain to please their male partners.
“I think you can’t log into TikTok and be safe,” one subject, 17-year-old Stella, says. But Stella and the other kids repeatedly say that though they may not actually like being online, logging off means losing social connections with their peers almost entirely. So they keep scrolling.
What ‘Social Studies’ can teach parents, teens and lawmakers
“I think this is a documentary that every parent and their children should watch,” says Alison Yeung, a family doctor in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, who advises families about screen time. “Teens are living entirely different lives than their parents did. These kids have grown up with this technology, this is all ‘normal’ to them, and yet the consequences on their mental and physical health are not normal.”
Greenfield set out to make “Social” from the perspective of a parent with the same screen time struggles all parents face in our messed-up modern world. She hopes the docuseries will help parents understand what it’s really like for kids these days.
The director’s advice for parents: “Watch the series and listen to the teenagers. I have heard a lot of parents say, ‘I’m scared to watch it.’ That’s exactly the issue that we’re dealing with − parents don’t want to know what’s going on.” But “Social” proves parents really need to know. “There was one mother (in the series) who lost her son to suicide. She said, ‘We need to stop talking and start listening.'”
Greenfield found that the kids she spoke with “really wanted to discuss these issues that were weighing on them.” She urged parents to listen to their kids when they say the apps are addictive and harmful. It can be hard to take teens seriously, but they’re “both the subjects and the experts.”
The director has developed a curriculum for parents and educators based on the series. But she also believes the problems of social media won’t be solved by one family or teacher.
“We need regulations from the government, schools and also from the tech companies,” Greenfield says. “We have the research to know that (social media) is actually addictive. I don’t think it’s fair to expect kids to self-regulate, or the parent to be able to keep them off.”
“The more we have discussion about it, the more we see things like schools starting to ban phones,” she says. “I think having this be part of the cultural conversation will make change.”
Yeung, the family doctor, agrees. “If there were any product targeted at children that had compelling evidence of harm, that product would be removed from the shelves immediately, out of an abundance of caution,” she says. “But because these tech companies hold an immense amount of power, they are continuing to harm children.
“I think we will look back in a decade or two and wonder how we ever allowed these companies to operate such harmful and unregulated technology for so long.”
