There’s nothing new in claims that social media platforms as they target young users cause children a host of mental health issues, from unhappiness and depression to online bullying and even teen suicides.

But a Bloomberg News feature documentary, Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media, set to premiere April 4 on Jolt, has spotlighted a link between online drug dealers and social media algorithms that allow the sale of fake pills to young people online, and a resulting epidemic of drug overdose deaths.

“This is a public health crisis. We’re facing a mental health emergency. It is tied in many ways to social media,” Perri Peltz, who co-directs the feature doc with Matthew O’Neill, tells The Hollywood Reporter. Can’t Look Away will also have a theatrical run at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in New York City and will appear on Bloomberg Media platforms starting in July 2025.

The doc includes a David vs. Goliath legal battle by parents whose children died from consuming fentanyl-laced pills to potentially hold tech giants accountable for the harm allegedly caused by their negligence and threatening algorithms.

Can’t Look Away, in part, focuses on the Social Media Victims Law Center and its lawsuit against Snapchat on behalf of families whose children met tragic ends after consuming counterfeit prescription drugs acquired through the disappearing messaging app run by parent Snap.  

O’Neill argues the increasing trade in harmful pills sold on social media sites results from drug dealers now being able to move from street corners to online sites where preset algorithms are designed to become addictive to young people. What’s more, online drug pushers can easily keep their illegal activities away from the eyes of parents or the authorities by using disappearing or encrypted messages.

The social media sites themselves could do far more to protect young users, not least by allowing greater regulation of their platforms. As O’Neill put it, “these social media platforms consistently choose profits over real harm to children, and these are things a social media company can target.”

The Bloomberg News film includes interviews with parents involved in efforts to secure wins in the courts and the halls of power in Washington D.C. to regulate social media platforms. The Can’t Look Away trailer includes an interview with Jaime Puerta, who lost his only child after his son contacted a drug dealer on Snapchat and died from fentanyl poisoning.  

“They have the best distribution system in the world, and nobody has stopped them,” Puerta, who in a lawsuit alleges Snapchat had a role in his son’s death, declares from the steps of the U.S. Congress. Can’t Look Away, based on investigative reporting by contributing producer Olivia Carville, warns at one point about the use of Snap Map, which identifies a user’s geographical location. That potentially allows drug dealers to more easily target potential customers. 

Peltz, whose earlier credits include Axios on HBO and ‘Surveilled’ with Ronan Farrow, countered prevailing myths about young people making bad decisions on social media sites. She argued that, too often, teen users see what’s offered to them by preset algorithms.

“Your kids are looking at content they didn’t ask to see. They’re looking at content that an algorithm decided they should see because the algorithm knows what is most ‘sticky’ for young people, and that’s a euphemism for addictive,” Peltz insisted. All of which underscores an urgent call to action from the Can’t Look Away film for industry reform and political action around social media and its use of algorithms to target and potentially exploit and endanger vulnerable young people.

That campaign has been dealt a blow by the increased lobbying by social media giants with the new Donald Trump administration, with an eye to turning a once adversarial relationship between government and Big Tech to their advantage. “You saw, as we all did, so many leaders of tech companies in an unprecedented way appear at President Trump’s inauguration, and obviously one of the biggest tech leaders in the world, Elon Musk, is a very important element in this administration,” O’Neill conceded.

But he added that politicians on both sides of the aisle in Washington, D.C., increasingly see common causes to work for parents and families to lessen the harm social media sites can cause young users. And O’Neill, a two-time Oscar nominee, dismissed any talk about Silicon Valley giants needing fewer guardrails, and not more, to protect U.S. dominance in digital technologies against global competitors like China.

“The United States managed to dominate the automobile industry and innovate with seat belts, and I don’t see why we can’t do the same with technology and with communications and social media,” he insisted. Ultimately, O’Neill sees young people forcing politicians to impose real regulation on tech giants.

“Kids aren’t suckers and a lot of young people as they discover the ways in which social media companies are taking advantage of them are fueling a backlash. That’s not the power of regulation. That’s the power of public conversation,” he said.

The film is also produced by O’Neill and Peltz, and executive produced by Kristin Powers. It is Bloomberg News’ second original feature documentary after Ruin, an earlier original doc about Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX.