Since the advent of the internet, online spaces have rapidly been changing, expanding and for most part have remained relatively unchecked. Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy's Advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health released in 2023 cites that children and adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of mental health problems including experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety. Adults feel the impact too, as these platforms are designed to keep us engaged even when we recognize the negative effects.
The new documentary Your Attention Please highlights the real-world consequences of social media and how it reshapes all of us. But it also shows how a new generation of parents, teens and reformers are fighting back against Big Tech’s agenda to keep us scrolling and define the future of human connection. It's a part of the Milwaukee Film Festival, and you can see it Thursday April 23 at the Downer Theater.
"The business model [of technology] is engagement-based, so the longer we're on these devices the more money these companies make. That disrupts a whole plethora of healthy, normal functioning and I think it's particularly visible when it comes to young people. So anything from ability to focus, ability to socialize, to connect with people, stable sense of self, self-confidence, trusting relationships with friends - all of that has been impacted by technology in ways that are often very invisible. And I think it took over a decade for us to wrestle with this and get to a place where we now have scientific evidence that actually shows the links to social media," says director Sara Robin.
Through sharing intimate stories of parents, technologists, educators, and youth advocates working to reshape digital environments, the Your Attention Please shows what can happen when individuals and communities begin challenging those systems.
"Even though it does wrestle with some very dark and difficult topics and it takes an honest look at the scale of the problem that we’re facing, it importantly looks at people who are actively working towards solutions and offers viewers a whole range of solutions of how we can approach this," Robin adds.
"This experience was for us, like a crash course in a survey and what this has done to humanity at large," says documentary writer, editor and co-creator Jack LeMay. "We sort of tried to balance the film between these two worlds of looking at the quantitative effect because data is impactful and people wanna understand it scientifically. But also we're not really gonna push this needle forward unless we look at the subjective experience. What is this doing to real families, real people? What is the cost?"
That's where the story of documentary participant Kristin Bride comes in to help emotionally center the film. Bride lost her youngest son Carson to suicide in 2020 after he was experiencing online harassment on the anonymous app YOLO that was supported through Snapchat.
"He was the shining light in our family, very high energy, great sense of humor, made everyone laugh, started to get into acting and was really talented at it. And as a result of losing him, we have a very big hole in our families and in our hearts," she says. "Early on I had to make a decision: am I going to rip the bandaid off and go public with this and try to save other families from this horrible tragedy or just lay in bed and cry all day? And I chose to go forward and become an advocate."
Bride says that Carson was the last kid in his class to get an iPhone, which initially was an old phone with no apps on it. "By the time he got to tenth grade, he was telling us that that is the way all the kids are connecting is over Snapchat and I feel left out. And so we allowed him to have Snapchat in tenth grade and he did not make it to eleventh grade."
In the past Carson shared incidents of bullying at school, but he didn't share the cyberbullying he was experiencing according to Bride, and they didn't know that Snapchat had the anonymous app that was promoting the harassment. "We later learned that [YOLO] only had one employee. The app went viral because of the cyberbullying that it facilitated, and they really had no way of identifying cyberbullies or were they even monitoring it? And I found that out the hard way by reaching out to them after Carson's death and I was completely ignored," she explains.
Bride holds the title of "parent survivor, "and works with other survivor parents and organizations to fight for legislative reform to protect kids from the harms of social media. A key part of Your Attention Please is Bride's efforts to advocate for the passage of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). It would require platforms to implement mandatory safety settings, disable addictive features for minors, and adhere to a "duty of care" to prevent harms.
"I knew with the film that I wanted to have it done in two to three years because I could feel that the subject matter was getting more and more important. And tech moves so fast, I just thought we'd don't have that much time. I [needed] something ... to be kind of our narrative thread and the push for KOSA just naturally became that," explains Robin.
While filming the documentary, there was a historic bipartisan vote to pass KOSA in the Senate in 2024. However today it is stuck in the House of Representatives as House Republicans rewrite the bill to change the duty of care provision with no consensus of what content is inappropriate for minors.
"For quite some time in making the film we were like, 'This is going to be a really good news happy movie!' And in some ways it still is, but you know, it also has some really heartbreaking, breaking moments in it now," adds Robin.
Bride continues to spend time on Capitol Hill advocating for online safety for children and teens. While KOSA is stalled, she says the good news is that this remains a bipartisan issue.
"Everybody cares about kids... and we saw that with [the Senate vote]," Bride notes. "But unfortunately another part of Washington D.C. are the big tech lobbyists and they have incredible amounts of money. And we definitely have to make this a election issue so that our elected officials are standing for families and not for big tech... I feel like even with non-survivor parents, we are creating a movement for change and everyone can do their part to make a change in their life to reclaim their humanity."
While Your Attention Please sounds the alarm of the increasingly negative impacts of tech use, Bride also wanted to highlight the positive stories of individuals and larger movements that are working to reclaim our attention and promote healthier ways of connecting with others. From a high school in Massachusetts implementing a phone-free policy, to Trisha Prabhu who designed a social media app to encourage users to think twice before posting harmful messages and offline clubs around the world — people are trying to recapture the initial idealistic vision of technology to turn it into something that actually helps us connect and solve big problems.
"The film for us was an experience to see all these different people come together and show how, in all these difference ways, we all fit into this puzzle together and really, we are resilient," say LeMay. "And human beings will be able to thrive again when this stuff is taken away or changed to be more positive."
