Humanity in the age of design, with Marc Silver

What if the safety of minors were the starting point for designing social media, rather than an afterthought?

In the digital age, social media is part of everyday life for children and teenagers. Yet the models these platforms are built on raise an increasingly urgent question: what happens when a platform's design exposes a minor to content that can put their life at risk?

In this episode of Do Better Talks, Liliana Arroyo, director of the Chair for Socially Responsible Digital Innovation (SoReDI), talks with Marc Silver, the British director of Molly vs. The Machines. The documentary tells the story of Molly Russell, a teenager who took her own life after prolonged exposure to harmful content on Instagram. Although hers is a single case, small compared with the scale of the problem, Silver and Arroyo present it as a first stone in dismantling the system on which social media is built.

That system rewards engagement: platforms earn more the longer users stay and the more data they generate, so their algorithms prioritize whatever hooks people most. This is why the discussion goes beyond moderating certain content better or adding parental controls. Changing the foundations of social media means rethinking the incentives that guide its design and putting the safety and mental health of minors ahead of time spent on the platform. Regulation, such as the Digital Services Act in the European Union, together with the social and media pressure that films like this help generate, are key pieces of that transformation.

Marc Silver and Liliana Arroyo invite us to look beyond the individual case and ask what kind of technology we want.