Questions of consent and privacy aren’t the ones we should be asking about social media

September 4, 2026 — 3:00am

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

Things seemed so much better in Back to the Future II. Technology meant sneakers with power laces and auto-adjusting, auto-drying jackets. It meant hoverboards and hologram ads. It meant hi-tech sunglasses that allowed people to watch television shows in them or answer video phone calls. That last one is close to the bone. When we got hi-tech sunnies, we ended up calling them “pervert glasses” because people started using them to film people without their knowledge, including in various states of undress.

From there, things only get darker. The focus this week has been the ravages of the algorithm that drives our social media apps, that harvests rich data about us, and keeps feeding us ever more extreme content to keep us scrolling: that is the basis of their business model. If you needed a horrific illustration, you need only look back a fortnight, when a 16-year-old girl died, strangled during sex in an act increasingly being depicted in internet pornography.

And if you need an instructive one, it came even more recently, when Meta reached a US$18 billion ($25 billion) settlement in a US court, fleeing from allegations it knows and conceals the damage its products do to children. Meta agreed to add all kinds of controls and limits to its apps for children: daily time limits, blackouts after midnight, stricter content controls. We’ll see in the long run what that means.

It’s not right to call this a moment. It’s a culmination. For years, we’ve heard of the connection between social media platforms and bullying, mental illness........

© WA Today