{"id":918495,"date":"2026-10-06T18:54:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T18:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/918495\/"},"modified":"2026-10-06T18:54:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T18:54:10","slug":"were-not-going-to-go-away-the-mom-fighting-for-social-media-reform-after-her-sons-suicide-documentary-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/918495\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We\u2019re not going to go away\u2019: the mom fighting for social media reform after her son\u2019s suicide | Documentary films"},"content":{"rendered":"

At this point in time, going anywhere without your smartphone feels almost like leaving behind a limb. Whether it\u2019s for directions, distraction or the discourse on social media, our phones have become both a necessity and a crutch in our everyday lives, with our bodies literally evolving <\/a>around the glow of the screen.<\/p>\n

But no matter how much we think we need all the bells and whistles of the attention economy, the attention economy actually needs us more than we need it.<\/p>\n

This is the overarching message of the documentary Your Attention Please, available to rent or own on 6 October. The film explores the human cost of our technology addiction \u2013 as well as the very human efforts to combat it \u2013 driving home how social media companies like Meta<\/a> and TikTok<\/a> benefit financially in rewiring our brains in order to keep us scrolling.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re dealing with a business model that encourages extreme behaviors because those have been proven to be more attention-grabbing,\u201d director Sara Robin says in an interview.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The documentary follows Kristin Bride in her fight for social media reform<\/a>, traveling to Capitol Hill to push for legislation and testifying before Congress. Bride was thrust into online safety advocacy after her 16-year-old son, Carson, was cyberbullied and took his own life in 2020 \u2013 even after she thought she took all the right steps to safeguard him from the dangers of the internet.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe waited until Carson was through middle school to give him his first very old iPhone with no apps on it, and we had really hoped that it would stay that way,\u201d she says. \u201cBut when he got to 10th grade, he begged for Snapchat because that was the way that all the kids were connecting \u2026 he didn\u2019t make it to 11th grade.\u201d<\/p>\n

But social media is not just dangerous for kids, which the documentary makes a point of highlighting through interviews with experts like the former US surgeon general Vivek Murthy<\/a>, who has called for tobacco-style warning labels on social media platforms, as well as Frances Haugen<\/a>, the Facebook whistleblower who will be portrayed by Mikey Madison in The Social Reckoning<\/a> out this week.<\/p>\n

Robin likes to quote Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, in describing social media as \u201cdesigned to feel as if you are slipping into a warm bath\u201d. \u201cYou go on there and then you forget why you got on there and you forget what you\u2019re doing while you\u2019re on there and then two hours have passed,\u201d she says. The bath in this analogy, however, is actually more a pot \u2013 and we are the frogs being slowly boiled alive without realizing it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a time where social media is still designed to actively disrupt our lives, it\u2019s really up to us now to say: \u2018My goal today is to get more out of social media than it will get out of me,\u2019\u201d Robin says. \u201cThat\u2019s quite hard to do. But I think in the interim, when we\u2019re still dealing with these, highly addictive, very imperfect platforms that are designed to exploit our attention, that\u2019s to an extent what we have to do while we\u2019re transitioning to something healthier.\u201d<\/p>\n

A still from Your Attention Please. Photograph: Yahna Harris\/Attention Rebellion<\/p>\n

While both Bride and Robin hope the documentary will make people confront their phone addictions and social media usage, they also see it as a call to action \u2013 whether in Bride\u2019s continued fight to get Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act<\/a> or in being part of a cultural shift to get off your phone. The documentary features interviews with the founders of the Offline Club in Amsterdam, where attenders must check their phones at the door before events, and with the principal and a teacher of Brockton high school in Massachusetts, where students are required to keep their devices locked in secure pouches for the entire school day, as examples of how this is possible.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not anti-tech \u2013 we\u2019re pro-better tech and we\u2019re pro a more balanced relationship with tech,\u201d Robin says. She acknowledges the irony that with the promotion of the film, she is more on social media than she\u2019s ever been before. \u201cA lot of the conversation critical of the attention economy is happening on these attention economy platforms,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

But she is not denying that social media has been a society-changing tool in how it has allowed people to connect and organize and self-promote \u2013 it\u2019s just that the companies behind these platforms have designed their algorithms to keep its users on there as long as possible, beyond their original purpose. \u201cIf monetary value trumps everything else, then we naturally land in a situation where the human being is forgotten,\u201d Robin says.<\/p>\n

The way to combat this on an individual level is to be intentional with your usage. \u201cBe very clear what you\u2019re looking to get out of the platform,\u201d Robin says. \u201cGo in and do that. Know the moment you open it, it\u2019ll throw the most distracting thing at you. Pull yourself back out. Do the thing that you intended to do, and then get out.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a larger scale, the fight will be even more challenging. Bride says two years later that she is back to where she was in the documentary with the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act<\/a> \u2013 the bill stalled after passing in the Senate in 2024. Seeing Donald Trump buddying up with the tech billionaires behind these platforms has been particularly disheartening, Bride says.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut how can we not keep fighting?\u201d Bride says. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to go away, and we\u2019re going to keep being loud and vocal.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline<\/a> at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org<\/a>. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans<\/a> can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline<\/a> is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At this point in time, going anywhere without your smartphone feels almost like leaving behind a limb. Whether…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":918496,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":["post-918495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=918495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918495\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/918496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=918495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=918495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=918495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}