Left to Their Own Devices is brought to you by Children First Canada. Hey y'all, it's Ava. Before we start, I wanted to send out a big thank you and some love to those of you who are listening to this podcast. The stories and the issues we cover, they mean a lot, not just to me and this team, but to a lot of young people. So thank you so much for spending this time with us. And if you've been enjoying this podcast, I have a small favor to ask. Please send it to somebody in your life who might like it. It'll really help us get the show out into the world. Okay, now here's our last episode. It contains reference to suicide, so please take care while listening. I woke up in this giant white room. I mean, it was infinite. It was like an infinite white haze. There wasn't even walls. This is the dream that changed everything for Harrison Haynes. And there was this giant, like, landscape picture frame. And it's this really deep maroon, red, brown, like, kind of burgundy. For like three quarters of the image, it's that. It's a gradient, darkest to brightest. And this small little sliver of, like, beige-white. You might remember Harrison from our last episode. When he was 12, he was victimized by a stranger online. And that abuse pulled him away from his family and into a life on a screen. And eventually, into a porn addiction. I'm almost 14. School is hard. Relationships are hard. My family is difficult. And I have no sense of community. I decide that I'm going to take my life. And that's when Harrison had this dream. And I'm looking at it and I don't understand, and I focus really hard on the bottom and there's this little dot right in between the convergence of these colors. And I'm looking at it and I'm just like, what am I looking at? Like, I don't even understand. It's like some weird abstract art you'd see in a museum. And this just soft, gentle, but powerful voice boomed over me and said, my son, you've planted all your seeds in the wrong gardens. And it's time to wake up. I woke up and I was like shaking and crying. I was excited, but also angry. But ultimately I was grateful because like I had a reason to be alive because I had something to discover. After waking up, both literally and figuratively, Harrison knew he needed to make a change. So he joined a Christian youth group at his school. At the time, he wasn't even religious, but he was desperate to find community somewhere that wasn't mediated by a screen. And I was kind of just sitting there observing everything that was happening around me. And this guy, he stands up and he's like, my mom is at work all day. My dad hasn't been a part of my life for so many years. And he just opens up, he's like, I have a chronic porn addiction and I really need help. It was a co-ed group too, so it took a lot of boldness for him to say that. And at the end, I awkwardly approached him and was like, you know, dude, I think that might be me too. Then Harrison joined a support group on Discord, an online platform that, ironically enough, led him to real-life connection. For the first time, I started experiencing real friendships. From that moment on, Harrison has tried to build a life for himself centered around community. just being fully unapologetically human in front of other people. He now shares a house with five other guys who have the same vision as him. A life where technology isn't in the driver's seat. My phone is locked down by my roommate. He has a passcode on it. I have a passcode on his. Everybody in the house, there's six of us. We have accountability buddies. We all want to see a life where we're free from pornography. And also other things, you know. I don't like the infinite scroll. I don't want to spend my time on that, so I don't have YouTube on my phone. I don't want to be pulled into endless emails from work on a Saturday, so I don't have email on my phone. I don't want to spend my precious hours, you know, my 75 years, doing things that I hate. You know, Americans spend four and a half hours on average on their phone a day. That's a lot of time. Four and a half. Then we spend 8.1 at work. We spend two and a half hours a day watching television. That leaves about 8% of your waking hours for the things that you say matter most. And so if it's working, it's working. And if you love the way that you have a relationship with your phone, keep going. But if you'd like to see 8% go to 25%, then that's when it's time to make a change. Harrison isn't alone in thinking this. The Financial Times recently found that social media use actually peaked in 2022 and has been declining ever since. And that decline has been the steepest for young people. I think that this beautiful invention of the iPhone that was supposed to bring people together, the fact that it has unintentionally pulled people apart, is really a tragic experience. It seems like our generation is finally starting to realize that maybe spending a good chunk of our lives on platforms designed to capture our attention isn't the best way to spend our time. We can experience the deepest, richest humanity that people have experienced for generations. Generations on generations. There are thousands of generations inside of our bones that have experienced the beauty of humanity that we are missing out on, that technology is robbing us of. But just as we're beginning to figure out what a healthy relationship with tech might look like, something else is happening at the same time. Tonight, Australia taking an unprecedented step, becoming the first country in the world to ban the use of social media apps for anyone under the age of 16. Countries like Australia and Denmark are forcing kids off social media. This one's for the mums and dads. Social media is doing harm to our kids, and I'm calling time on it. In the U.S., eight states have attempted to implement similar bans, although for the moment, they've been blocked by the courts. And in Canada, Nova Scotia and Quebec are reportedly considering bans as well. Proponents of these laws argue that they're exactly what we need to keep kids safe online. Their critics say they're taking away a vital lifeline for kids, a place where they can learn and play and find community. Some psychologists say actually this ban could isolate a generation of children. So, on the precipice of Australia's social media ban, one question remains. Can kids figure out how to use social media in a way that actually works for them? Or will governments make that decision for them? I'm Ava Smithing. From Paradigms and the Toronto Star, this is Left to Their Own Devices. Episode 10 Left to Our Own Devices Kids have been left to their own devices long enough Children are growing up in a digital world that was never designed with their safety in mind. They are bullied, groomed, extorted, and exploited online. Every. Single. Day. Children First Canada is demanding a safe digital world for all our children. Through trusted research, bold advocacy, and youth empowerment, they're working to make Canada the best place in the world for kids to grow up. But they can't do it alone. Visit childrenfirstcanada.org and join the Countdown for Kids today. I'm going to just turn off my email because it is the time of morning where you're going to hear lots of pinging. Julie Inman-Grant is Australia's eSafety Commissioner. She didn't come up with the idea of the social media ban, but she's the one responsible for enforcing it. I'm often referred to as the poacher-turned-gamekeeper. I was born in Seattle and always wanted to work in Washington. And so I went to work for my hometown congressman with big ideals and even bigger hair, because it was the early 1990s, and was working on a range of social issues when one day he put his head around the cubicle and said, hey, Julie, we've got this small little software company on our electorate. It's called Microsoft. So would you work on tech issues as well? After doing a little work on the Microsoft file, Julie switched teams, so to speak. I was then recruited as one of Microsoft's first lobbyists in Washington, D.C. And we truly believed that if the Internet was over-regulated and over-taxed, that it would stop the growth of the Internet in its tracks. Of course, we weren't thinking about social media. than Mark Zuckerberg was probably playing Dungeons & Dragons at that time. And then, after nearly two decades at Microsoft, Julie went to work for Twitter. I felt so passionate about democratizing and leveling effects of social media and the ability to speak truth to power. But the truth was, when I was on the inside, I saw how horrific the online abuse was, particularly to marginalized communities. Around this time, a story started making headlines in Australia. Good evening, after a long and public struggle with depression. A story that would change the way much of the country thought about social media. Television personality Charlotte Dawson's life has ended tragically, with her body discovered this morning at her Woolloomooloo home. Charlotte Dawson was a 47-year-old woman, best known as one of the judges on Australia's Next Top Model. And for whatever reason, she became the target of online trolls. And she had a nervous breakdown, which was very public. And I remember seeing tweets like, why didn't you stick your head in the oven and finish the job? Just terrible abuse. And unfortunately and tragically, she ended up taking her life. And, you know, Australians started saying, enough is enough. This was back in 2014. A year later, the Australian government established the world's first e-safety commissioner. That's kind of the origin story. Julie says the e-safety commissioner has a three-pronged approach, which she calls the three Ps. Prevention, in other words, educating the public. Sort of build critical reasoning skills and digital literacy and resilience. Protection, making sure people aren't exposed to harmful or illegal content. I mentioned cyberbullying. We also have an image-based abuse scheme that also captures things like deep fakes. And proactive change, ensuring that technology products are safe before they're rolled out to the public. And that's really about how do we minimize the threat surface for the future and become an anticipatory regulator so that technology change doesn't hit us in the face. Around the world, this three-pronged approach is widely endorsed as good digital policy. But when Australia announced they were banning social media for kids, they were stepping into uncharted territory. I would say it's a much more monumental rather than an incremental step that we've been taking over the past 10 years. Australia is the first country to try something like this. And no one really knows whether or not it'll work. But the public seems to have gotten behind it. A YouGov poll from last November found that more than three quarters of Australians supported a ban. I would say that this was really very much a political populist movement. But the law is definitely controversial. And one reason for that may be the way it came about. It actually started with the South Australian premier, whose wife had read Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation. Banning social media for kids under 16 is something Haidt explicitly recommends in his book. But you might remember that, earlier in the series, We spoke with some researchers who are skeptical of many of the arguments Hype makes. Everybody's like eating up the anxious generation and freaking out because basically it's bad science. I wanted to raise this with Julie. I was actually going to ask about that if you feel like the policy is supported by the research in this space. Well, I've said for a long time that the research and the science isn't totally fixed on this. But again, we're trying to build the evidence base. You know, probably, you know, it's the tail wagging the dog in some ways. But at least we're going through that effort so that other jurisdictions that consider this can learn from what we did well, but also learn from our mistakes. I appreciate Julie's honesty here. The fact of the matter is, a social media ban isn't really grounded in science. There wasn't really an evidence base that was used to choose 16 as the age. But part of me is also grateful that, unlike Canada and the U.S., at least Australia is doing something about social media and its effects on young people. When we import cars into Australia, we expect them to be built to Australian safety standards. Why should the technology industry be any different? The Australian ban goes into effect on December 10, 2025. The list of restricted platforms is somewhat in flux, but it currently includes not just social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, but also sites like Reddit and YouTube. And I can find platforms up to 49.5 million if they fail to implement adequate age verification technologies. The challenge these platforms now face is how to verify their users' ages. The government has said that platforms can't require kids to upload their IDs, which means they need to figure out another way to do age assurance. There's one coming out of France that I think is interesting. I haven't seen the test results. It's called Border Age, and it has you move your fingers around. And apparently the AI can tell based on the ligature and the movement of the hands the relative age within a couple of months In theory this sounds great but with only weeks to go before the ban goes into effect there's one problem. One minute I'm getting 15, the next I'm getting 19. Right now, these tools that predict users' ages are only about 85% accurate. Oh, it gave me 29, that same one. Really? I've been told my whole life I look like I'm about four years younger than what I actually am. It's unclear whether these kinks can be worked out. But even if they can get age assurance working, I think there's a bigger question looming over all of this. Is keeping kids off social media actually what's best for them? Look, you've heard countless stories on the show about young people who have been harmed by social media. But you've also heard from people like Kira McDuff, who learned she had a rare genetic disorder through TikTok. The algorithm does a lot of bad, but its ability to look at what I was interested in really was probably one of the only reasons I ever realized what was wrong with me. And from Sophie Fergie, the teenage influencer who used her platform to start a conversation about sexual abuse. I had people DMing me like, wow, I'm very inspired by you and I'm going to go and speak out about what's been happening at home, which is very moving to me. And we talked to the social media researcher Ethan Zuckerman, who says that most kids are totally fine on social media. For the vast majority of people, social media has almost no effect on their overall happiness and mental health. So again, does a ban really make sense? I think only time will tell. But if Australia is a model for how a government can intervene in the most dramatic way possible, something else entirely is playing out on the other side of the world. In Canada and the U.S., where governments have yet to step in, kids are taking matters into their own hands. Maddie. Hello, girlfriend. The last person I want to introduce you to is a good friend of mine, Maddie Freeman. I know that you are a very important person, so I appreciate that you would make time for me. You're an important person, Ava. So thank you for your time. This whole interview should just be us gassing each other up, I think, personally. I could do that for hours. Like so many good Gen Z stories, Maddie starts with Justin Bieber. I used to be like a big fangirl and I worked really hard to get Justin Bieber to follow me on Twitter. And I'll never forget the day that I was sitting at lunch in the cafeteria and I got a notification on my phone that said Justin Bieber followed you back. And I literally cried so hard. Like I was freaking out. Like that was like the best day of my life. And I called my mom hyperventilating and she literally thought someone like died. And I was like, mom, Justin Bieber followed me. I can confirm, at that age, getting the babes to follow you, that's a huge deal. I think the general consensus was just like, phones are awesome. Like, I feel like everyone just really liked it. And so I feel like all of my peers just really enjoyed having access to it and being online. We really liked Snapchatting each other. We really liked posting on Instagram. But as Maddie and her friends got older, something troubling started happening in her community. Everyone felt like our town had a curse on it. Young people around her, Maddie's friends and crushes and classmates, started dying at an alarming rate. People were just dying left and right. And most of those deaths were suicides. I think there were many reasons why. There's no one reason at all. I will say, like, each person obviously probably had their own unique struggle and maybe some small thing or big thing that kind of set them off. like maybe family troubles, maybe relationship troubles. But I think collectively we grew up as a generation that was just mentally unwell. And I feel like, I mean, to be transparent, like I struggled immensely with, I had severe depression since sixth grade. And I had like horrible suicidal ideation from the time I was 12 years old on. And I barely made it through. Like I barely, barely, barely scraped by to like stay alive. When Maddie looks back on this horrible period, she thinks a few things may have been going on. One of them was that many of her peers started using drugs. Because we live in Colorado, there is a certain kind of like drug culture here that I think is unique because marijuana was legalized so early. And I think, I mean, transparently every single person that passed away was smoking every single day. The other was the rise of school shootings. Those school shootings, I think, gave kind of a dystopian feel of the world, which is also a little more uniquely our generation. Like, we've gone through that a lot. And the final thing was that everyone she knew was glued to their social media feeds. I think social media just amplified everything that's hard with growing up. Like, going through puberty is hard. You know, like, mental health things come up. So many issues come up. Your social life is so complicated. You're discovering who you are. And social media just taxes you on that. Like, it just makes it so much more difficult. It just exacerbates issues that already existed for previous generations. And I think that just made it even more difficult for people to function and exist. everything that you're saying I think is very unique to our generation so I think everything that you're speaking about aren't three different issues I think that those are like maybe we're smoking because we look around and we see our world state and we see oh like people my age are getting shot and there's nothing we can do about it so I'm gonna do something to cope I'm gonna smoke weed. And then your coping mechanism is on steroids all of a sudden because now you can smoke and consume content. Yeah. As her high school years wore on, Maddie watched helplessly as more and more of her peers succumbed to suicide. When someone passed away, it became this term my friend coined, the grief Olympics, where people would be posting like photos with the person who died. And it was like a competition of like, who was closest to that person? It became this really weird thing where people like felt the need to always take pictures together because like if they ended up dying, then they'd have proof that they were friends. Like it was literally the most screwed up thing ever. Eventually, the curse that had fallen on this small town came for someone really close to Maddie. The one that really messed me up is actually the reason why I started doing this work. She was someone that I cared about so much and I was so worried about. Like I had a feeling something was going to happen to her and I tried so hard to help her and she just didn't want the help. And she was just suffering so much. And like after that happened, I just like felt like I couldn't do it anymore. Like I didn't know what to do with myself. And that's why I ended up kind of channeling that grief into action because I literally didn't know what else to do. Like I was just like at a loss. As she was wrestling with the death of her Maddie started learning more about the business model of social media I just had no idea I did not know social media was designed to be addictive I did not know that, like, my attention was being bought and sold. I was like, oh my god, I think this is, like, part of the why. Like, I'd been asking myself for so long, like, why is everyone dying? Like, why is this happening? And that felt like a partial answer. I was like, oh my God, wait, this feels like a thread that is like absolutely accurate. Like in that moment, I feel like it all flooded back to me. I was like, oh my gosh, all that time I was spending online, my own depression, my suicidal ideation. Like I was getting recommended pictures of girls cutting like and then like all of it just came to a head. And I was like, oh, wow, like this is a big issue. And I felt so much anger inside me. And I remember feeling this feeling that I just wanted everyone to know. Getting the social media companies to change felt insurmountable. So Maddie came up with another idea. What if she and her friends just logged off? If you're interested, like, you can voluntarily participate in, like, a month-long detox with me. I had never done that either, and so I was scared because I was, at this point, still really addicted to social media. A handful of other students decided to join in, too. And on the first day of the month, they started to detox. It sucks for the first like three, four days because your mind and body is so conditioned and used to having the platforms as an outlet and something you can, you know, click on when you're bored, click on when you're sad. And when you don't have that anymore, your brain is like, whoa, like what is going on? It's a little scary for a second because I think when you realize you don't have something that can distract you, the instant thing that you need to do is sit with your thoughts. And like people can't embrace those awkward or negative emotions anymore. Like we can't just sit with them and experience that. Like we have to numb it and distract it. And I think that's something that like we do so automatically, like we've been programmed to do that. Right. And so I've just realized how much tech takes us away from mindfulness. I went through the exact same thing when I quit social media. You literally feel like you don't know what to do with yourself, or even how to just be with yourself. And when you're in that state, it's easy for like sad, scary thoughts to come up. But when those 30 days were over, Maddie says she felt like a different person. And it was just like life-changing. Students were emailing me. I didn't even know who they were, but they were emailing me. They were like, this is like drastically improving my mental health. Like people were like, my issues with my body, like they've improved so much because I'm not seeing harmful content anymore. And like, they're like, my anxiety like vanished. Like I literally don't have anxiety anymore. I had crippling anxiety before and I couldn't even like talk to people. And now I'm like calling friends from middle school and like going out on dates. Like this is changing my life. And I was like, whoa, like this is having real impacts. Another girl told me that it literally saved her life. She was like, I tried attempting suicide multiple times. Like I feel like if I I didn't do this, I don't think I'd be here. After seeing how kids were responding, Maddie wanted to try and scale the idea. So she decided that every November, she and whoever else wanted to join her would do a month-long social media detox. She called it No-So November. Things started exploding. Just five years after starting No-So, Maddie now has thousands of kids detoxing with her from all over the world. even kids who might seem like they're hopelessly addicted to their devices. They didn't even really want to do the detox. And then after like a few weeks of doing it, they're like, wait, this is crazy. Like, my life is so good right now. Like, I don't want to go back. What has stepping away from social media done for your life? Oh my gosh. I could write a book about that. I mean, I think the biggest thing is like presence. I've just like changed what my day-to-day life looks like dramatically because it used to be nothingness. Like I just scroll and now it's so full. My life feels so vibrant. I've struggled so much my whole life and this is the first time I feel just like good. Like I feel really happy. Over the course of these 10 episodes, we've shown you what can happen when a technology is unleashed on a generation of kids without any guardrails. You've met young people who developed eating disorders because of their algorithms, kids who became addicted to porn before they even hit puberty, and parents who lost children after they were victimized online. If we want to stop these things from happening, governments need to intervene. But I also think that laws can only take us so far. because even if a country decides to ban certain platforms, kids will always have access to some technology. So we need to figure out how to live with it in a way that works for us. Our lives are so chronically short. We do not live the lives that we want to. We live lives that are consumed by technology, by social media, by things that we don't want to do. It's something that my wise friend, Harrison Haynes, has thought a lot about as well. It took empowering myself to realize that I am in control of the decisions that I make every day. There are lots of things that just happen, and I'm not in charge of those things. But that 8% of my day that I have, I fight for. Realizing that you are in control of your choices. and if Instagram isn't on the top of the list of what's the most important thing to you, then why isn't that reflected in the way that you live? You can make adjustments to the things that matter most to you, to have your life align with what you said matters most and to create that space, to enjoy moments between moments where there is silence and staring at a wall and fully accepting the gift of boredom. I mean, it's huge. And I don't think that this is an end-all be-all solution for the next generation, but I do think it's a healthy start. My generation was handed the most powerful technologies in history and then just left to our own devices. We didn't get any say in that. But what we do next? Well, I think that's up to us. Left to Their Own Devices is hosted and produced by me, Ava Smithing. It's written, produced, mixed, and sound designed by Mitchell Stewart. Our story editor is Kathleen Goldhart. Additional audio editing by Cameron McIver. Our social producer is Emma Frittazio. Episode artwork by Pietro Galliano. A special thanks to Cochrane Imagination Music Studios. The executive producers for Paradigms are James Millward, Helen Hayes, Taylor Owen, and Mitchell Stewart. The executive producer for the Toronto Star is J.P. Fozo.
