News Investigation

This Documentary Will Make You Deactivate Your Social Media

Aug 2020 🇺🇸 Vanity Fair

Ahead of the film's Netflix debut, Vanity Fair's profile of The Social Dilemma quotes Jeff Orlowski describing social platforms' data collection and behavioral profiling as posing a societal risk he compares in scale to climate change, the subject of his earlier films. He tells the magazine that constant algorithmic interruption is associated with what he calls a 'mindfulness crisis' and a loss of capacity for sustained, critical thinking, and that the same engagement-driven systems are linked to polarization and echo chambers. Orlowski says he favors redesigning platform incentives and pursuing policy change over simply telling individual users to quit, describing the tension between social media's original connective purpose and its advertising-funded reality. TechKids Foundation cites this piece as a substantive outlet profile capturing Orlowski's own explanation of the film's stakes shortly before release.

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"This Documentary Will Make You Deactivate Your Social Media." Vanity Fair, Aug. 27, 2020.

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Nov 2021 🇺🇸 Harvard Kennedy School / The Harvard Gazette
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Apr 2025 🇺🇸 The Wall Street Journal
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Aug 2025 🇺🇸 Tech Policy Press
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In this September 23, 2021 Fresh Air interview, Terry Gross talks with Jeff Horwitz days after his Facebook Files series ran, in his own words rather than through the articles. Horwitz describes internal research in which the company's own staff associated Instagram with worsened body image for a share of teen girls — including a presentation to executives stating the platform made body-image issues worse for one in three teen girls reporting the issue — and internal findings in which some teen users who reported thoughts of self-harm traced those feelings to their Instagram experience. These are company-attributed associations from leaked research, not independent clinical findings. Horwitz also describes Facebook's public response, which characterized the research as small-effect and inconclusive. TechKids Foundation cites this as the lead reporter's own long-form account of what the leaked documents did and did not show.

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Apr 2018 🇱🇰 The New York Times (syndicated via New York Times News Service / WRAL)
News Investigation

Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests

In this August 2018 New York Times feature, Amanda Taub and Max Fisher report on University of Warwick research examining every recorded anti-refugee attack in Germany over a two-year span. The researchers found that towns where per-person Facebook use ran unusually high also saw markedly more attacks on refugees — a correlation that held across community types, including otherwise tolerant towns like Altena, and that weakened during local internet outages. Taub and Fisher pair the data with on-the-ground reporting on how the platform's ranking of emotionally charged posts may distort a community's sense of local opinion. The study was not peer reviewed at publication, and the article presents the pattern as an association between heavy platform use and offline violence, not a proven single cause. TechKids Foundation includes it as a key data-driven entry in Fisher's platform-harms series.

Aug 2018 🇩🇪 The New York Times (syndicated via New York Times News Service / WRAL)
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