In 2020, Amy Neville found her 14-year-old son Alexander dead in his bedroom. He had taken what he thought was an oxycodone pill, bought – according to Neville – from a drug dealer he met on Snapchat. The pill was a fake, laced with fentanyl. Four years later, his mum stood up in the California high school where Alex would have been a student to warn other parents and teenagers about social media. “We give our kids these smartphones. We let them have these apps. And that is the equivalent of dropping them off in the worst neighbourhood in our area.”
Neville is featured alongside other bereaved parents in Can’t Look Away, a terrifying new documentary about kids and social media directed by Matthew O’Neill and Perri Peltz, based on extensive investigative reporting by Bloomberg News journalist Olivia Carville. It follows American families who are filing lawsuits against social media companies and campaigning for stricter legislation; they are represented by the Social Media Victims Law Center, a crusading legal firm run Matthew Bergman, a lawyer so charismatic he could probably play himself in a Hollywood movie.
