One of the reasons social media companies have invested so heavily in artificial intelligence (AI) is that the curtain is slowly closing on their social media moneymakers.

Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat are about to be forced, through legislation and court rulings, to confirm the identity of every single user on their platforms in order to age-verify them. Combined with their own AI-generated spam, social media platforms will be rendered useless.

Tomorrow, October 30, Bloomberg is scheduled to release a new documentary film, Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media. The film is based on reporting by Bloomberg News investigative journalist and Columbia School of Journalism professor, Olivia Carville, into the lives of families destroyed by social media addiction.

One of the main sources for Carville’s documentary is the Social Media Victims Law Center, which represents families harmed by social media. The Center’s attorneys have found a novel way around the Section 230 protections in the Communications Decency Act for social media firms.

Section 230 protects social media companies to the extent that they are a common carrier and not a content generator. They cannot be held liable for content on their platforms as long as they are responsive to legitimate takedown requests.

However, the Center’s lawsuits, which have proceeded through lower courts, seek to hold the companies liable for designing their platforms to be addictive and knowingly causing mental health problems for children.

Carville updated the status of the cases against social media companies in a Bloomberg article on October 20:

The vast majority of cases have been folded into two multijurisdictional proceedings, one in state and the other in federal court, to streamline the pretrial discovery process. The first bellwether trial is scheduled to begin in Los Angeles Superior Court in late January.

Almost 4,000 [lawsuits] have been folded into the multijurisdictional proceedings — more than a quarter of them from the Social Media Victims Law Center. They have been joined by more than 1,000 school districts and about three-quarters of all US state attorneys general.

The documentary relies heavily on Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, and the first lawyer to file cases against social media companies in the wake of documents released in 2022 by whistleblower Frances Haugen.

A former data engineer at Facebook, Haugen’s documents showed that executives at Facebook, Meta, and Instagram “knew social media was negatively impacting youth mental health,” writes Carville. Many of the cases profiled in the trailer for the documentary involve young people who attempted to kill themselves as a result of their exposure to bullies and predators online.

Trailer for the documentary, Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media, scheduled for release on October 30, 2025.

As school districts and governments start to roll out social media bans and smartphone bans, social media companies are rapidly installing identity verification requirements to ward off further legislation.

The documentary makes the comparison between social media companies and tobacco companies, which hid and denied information that their products were harmful while simultaneously coming up with clever ways to market to children.

A similar comparison can be made with the way the tobacco companies reacted to lawsuits against them: They focused all their growth efforts overseas, where the law had not caught up with the science. Similarly, social media companies continue to ply their dangerous wares globally, as their market locally disappears.

Written by Steve O’Keefe. First published October 29, 2025.

Sources:

“‘Massive Legal Siege’ Against Social Media Companies Looms,” Bloomberg, October 20, 2025.

“CAN’T LOOK AWAY (2025) — Official Trailer,” Jolt Film, March 21, 2025.

Image Copyright: cepn.