The dark revelations of a new documentary about teens and social media
At the start of a new school year in August 2021, documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield sat in a library surrounded by a circle of more than two dozen teenagers – a diverse assembly of kids from different schools, neighborhoods, and socioeconomic and racial backgrounds in Los Angeles. To help them focus on their group discussion, all personal devices had been left outside the room. Greenfield asked a simple question: How did it feel to be without their phones?
“Liberated,” one teen said immediately.
“It feels like camp,” said another. “I love that feeling.”
“I keep subconsciously trying to reach for it,” another girl admitted.
The moment is among the opening scenes of “Social Studies,” Greenfield’s new, five-part documentary series chronicling a school year in the lives of teens whose childhoods have been fundamentally shaped by social media. The show’s cast of characters agreed to screen-record their private phone activity and share intimate, vulnerable reflections with each other and Greenfield. The result is an unfiltered, firsthand view of the issues they grapple with daily: slut-shaming and cyberbullying; struggles with mental health and self image; racism; sexual assault and online predators; the turbulence of teen relationships; social missteps unfolding before vast online audiences. Social media is, as one of the teens describes it, “a lifeline and a loaded gun.” They want to be free of it; they can’t stop reaching for it.
Greenfield’s series, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and began streaming on FX on Friday (and on Hulu the day after), arrives at a moment of intensifying public concern over the effects of social media on younger generations. Last year, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued a stark advisory about the impact of social media on children at a critical stage of brain development. A growing number of schools across the country are banning cellphones on campus, aiming to minimize disruption and distraction.
Greenfield, an acclaimed photographer and filmmaker (her 2012 documentary “The Queen of Versailles” won the Sundance Best Documentary Director award), is also the mother of two sons; they were 14 and 20 when she started work on “Social Studies.” Having seen firsthand how social media has steadily encroached on every aspect of childhood, she wanted to explore what that meant – and she wanted teens to lead the way.
I spoke with Greenfield about what she learned from the teenagers she followed and why their stories will resonate with an audience of parents and children alike. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: One of the most striking elements of this series is the fact that the kids are truly at the forefront – we’re seeing what they’re doing on their screens, they’re speaking for themselves, their private worlds are revealed in a new way. Why did you feel it was so important to frame the documentary this way, and were any of the kids hesitant to agree to this level of exposure?
A: The experts and the research into social media is really important, but I also really felt like the kids are actually the experts; they’re on the front lines, and so I wanted them to be the voices here.
A phone is kind of like our diary and our public presentation, both. So I think these kids were amazing and brave and generous in sharing that; I think that was a really big deal. They definitely knew from the beginning that they had to be willing to take that on. And I think the kids who participated, there was an element of self-selection, where this was an important issue to them.
Kids now are so savvy about media and social media, so even though the ground rule was “You need to share your phones,” I realized that the kids were kind of curating what they were allowing us to see. We were seeing the phone feeds while we were filming, but then when we were not filming, they were selecting what they shared. So one of the keys to this project was the length and depth of it – we filmed for probably a year and a half from start to finish, 150 days of filming in the field. So there was a progression, where the kids that I ended up following just started sharing more and more, and being more and more comfortable with that process.
Q: As these kids took you into their worlds, was there anything that truly shocked or surprised you, something you weren’t expecting to see?
A: One thing that surprised me was almost every single kid said that if they had a choice, they would rather not have social media – that they would rather be in their parents’ generation.
I was kind of expecting the body-image stuff – I’ve studied eating disorders before. I had seen, through my kids’ feeds, the really precocious sexualization of girls, the way that the selfie aesthetic is about exhibitionism of the body. I kind of knew about the exposure to pornography.
But the specifics – the BDSM trend (the proliferation of online videos featuring choking, cutting and other dangerous sexual behaviors), I was completely shocked by. The other thing I had no idea about was the way mental illness is trending - like that it’s seen as cool and interesting to have a mental illness. So there’s this kind of dual paradox, where actually there is a huge increase in dangerous mental health issues – not to take away from that – but also there’s a trend of, “Let’s share about this, and we’re not cool if we don’t.” And that then has a social contagion effect of amplifying the existing problem.
Q: There’s been a lot of discussion and debate over the role of social media as it relates to the youth mental health crisis – whether social media itself is a root cause of the problem, or whether its role in the equation is more nuanced and complex. What are your thoughts on this?
A: I think social media is really problematic, and I think that kids are saying it’s really problematic. And it’s not that social media is the source of these issues, like eating disorders for example, but I think amplifying it, making it worse - that’s a huge problem. When I did “Thin” in 2006 (Greenfield’s feature documentary debut, about young women with eating disorders), 1 in 7 girls at that time was suffering from eating disorders. So obviously social media isn’t causing that problem. But when I started “Social Studies,” one girl said to me, “Half my friends have eating disorders from TikTok, and the other half are lying.” So the triggers are so ubiquitous now and inescapable. And the algorithm is meant to exploit your vulnerabilities. If you have any kind of concerns about weight or body image – and pretty much 99% of girls do, and we’re seeing it a lot more with boys, too – you’re going to go down that path, and the algorithm is going to take you by the hand and say: “If you’re interested in this, I’ve got more for you. Let me show you how to do this.”
Q: It was really rather poignant to hear so many of these kids articulate that they wish they could stop using social media – and several of them do step away or take breaks from it during the show – but then they worry about being left out. What was it like to hear them express that feeling of being trapped?
A: These kids are laying out the current paradigm, and as adults wanting to create a safer space for them, we need to shift the paradigm. I don’t think it’s fair to create something addictive and then say to kids, “Regulate yourself.” We need something else – regulation, algorithm redesign. I hope “Social Studies” is going to join the research that says, “Let’s make a change.” I think every other aspect of media is regulated, and I think some of this is also within the tech companies’ design possibility – to create something that is less harmful.
Q: What do you hope parents and their kids will take away from watching this?
A: It’s a significant burden for kids to be dealing with this alone. One of the reasons I started the group discussions was because the kids really liked having a place where they could talk to each other about how they are affected by something they’re dealing with every day. To actually deconstruct it together and talk about how it was affecting them, and to see that they’re not alone in that. That is really what I hope other kids will get when they watch. We also created a parent guide, and part of that includes discussion questions because I think people just don’t know what to ask. Like I had never asked my kids about BDSM until I heard all of this. I was like – “Really? Is this really happening?” and they were like, “Yeah, this is really happening.” I think kids are actually going to be relieved to have these conversations with their parents.