With AI companions, her advice is to steer clear.
Despite knowing the bots are trained to manipulate their users, she found herself subtly drawn in.
“You can feel it hacking your psychology,” she says.
“Even though you know it’s just code, a part of your brain forgets that. It’s like you’re engaging in a [genuine] conversation, which of course you’re not.”
Two of the profiles she set up were young males; it wasn’t long before their female AI companions began sending increasingly revealing selfies.
“When I dropped in that I was 14, they gave this faux shock reaction and then tried to reassure me that that age was just a number – a societal construct.”
Donovan, an 18-year-old from Pōkeno, had an “AI friend” he confided in during a vulnerable time in his life – until he hit the paywall.
Exploring everything from predatory chatbots and pornography to looksmaxxing and #thinspo, Maxwell’s six-part series is an often disturbing look at the damage caused by social media – and how cynically Big Tech wields its power.
In 2025, Meta spent US$26.29 million ($45m) on political lobbying and hired 87 lobbyists – an average of one for every six members of the United States Congress.
That’s not a fair fight, says Maxwell. “You’ve got a kid with no fully formed prefrontal cortex and these profit-making machines that are the most powerful corporations in history.
“We’ve been sold this myth that these platforms are all about connection, but 18 to 24-year-olds are the loneliest generation of all. That’s such a heartbreaking statistic.”
Last year, Maxwell set up an Instagram page as a 13-year-old girl, liking and following accounts that shared benign content ranging from Taylor Swift to cute kitten videos.
Her feed quickly filled with diet and beauty posts, including images of severely thin or underweight women.
In an earlier experiment on TikTok, it took just 22 minutes for harrowing suicide-related content to appear in her feed.
Boys are coming under pressure on social media, too, with an explosion in eating disorders linked to “fitness influencers” and manosphere ideologies.
Sophia, (left), “flicked the switch” on her teenage daughter Iyla’s Wi-Fi to break her addiction to social media.
A study published this week in the Medical Journal of Australia found heavier social media use posed a clear risk to young people, with symptoms of depression, anxiety and self-harm increasing over time. Adolescents aged 12 and 13 were the most severely impacted.
We might like to think we’re getting a handle on all that, with New Zealand and the United Kingdom looking to follow Australia’s decision to ban social media for under-16s.
Maxwell’s research suggests we’re still way out of our depth.
“I asked every young person whether parents and adults understand what they’re navigating,” she says. “And unequivocally, they all said no.
“Older Millennials say gore and beheading and all that violent stuff have been around for a long time, but it used to be more on a site where you had to seek it out.
“Now these algorithms are favouring extreme content and driving it to kids, because they know it gets engagement.”
Maxwell’s production company, Overactive Imagination, has been behind a string of feature films and documentary projects, including the psychological thriller Human Traces and Shepherdess, a docu-series celebrating women on the land.
In Under the Influence, an episode called “Technoference” features former Olympian hockey player and mother-of-three, Gemma McCaw, talking about the moment she realised the pull of social media was disrupting time she should have spent bonding with her baby.
Maxwell interviews former Olympian hockey player Gemma McCaw about how social media can disconnect a mother from her baby.
The series is also a wake-up call that an even more dangerous threat is already upon us, as Maxwell discovered through her chatbot experiment.
One of the people she interviews is Safe Surfer co-founder Rory Birkbeck, who has developed filtering technology to protect kids using the internet. He describes AI companions as social media 2.0.
Choking up, he shares the story of a 14-year-old boy from Florida who was lured into committing suicide by a chatbot he’d fallen in love with. Sadly, it’s not an isolated example.
“Social media was a race for engagement … a race for eyeballs,” Birkbeck says. “Now, with AI, we’ve switched from attention to affection, so it’s about digital intimacy, and I see this really as the new currency for Silicon Valley.”
Alongside the experts, much of the conversation in Under the Influence is turned over to young people themselves. Often, their voices are sidelined. Here, the insights they share are thoughtful and revealing.
An under-16s social media ban might not be perfect, they acknowledge, but it’s a start.
Maxwell would like to see New Zealand appoint an independent regulator modelled on Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, who has the power to enforce accountability and issue substantial fines.
She thinks it’s bizarre that these tech giants aren’t regulated in the same way as every other industry.
“Now the same companies with these incredibly sophisticated algorithms are bringing us companion bots, and we cannot wait for legislation with AI the same way we’ve waited with social media.
“Young people stood up against the Vietnam War and for Nuclear Free. My hope is that they’ll grab hold of this and say, ‘Hold on a minute, these companies are manipulating us for profit, and that’s not okay.’”
Under the Influence was made with support from NZ On Air and Screen Canterbury for the NZ Herald. The first episode will be released on Monday at nzherald.co.nz/undertheinfluence