Molly vs the Machines (Marc Silver, 2026)

It is a relief that I was in my mid-thirties before social media hit me — I am, in a dubious phrase, a digital immigrant.

I suspect some of the systemic racism, sexism and homophobia, I would have been soaked in and probably expressed would put me in cancellation territory. The (large) dormitory village where I grew up was hideously white — there was a Black technician, but I don’t recall any Black pupils. Ethnic diversity was for takeaways and corner shops, or something in the (not very) big city. It wasn’t quite a monoculture, but the only access to alternate lifestyles was in print. I am/was overweight, which was added to the litany of low key bullying.

Social media allows the weight conscious to see many more images than the glossy magazines I could have consumed. Perceived self-image is magnified, trauma added to trauma, cyberbullying not only endemic, but no further away than the mobile in your pocket. It’s never easy being a teen, but I’m glad I’ve got it out the way with when I did.

On 20 November 2017, Molly Russell, an apparently happy teenager, took her own life. Her family saw some of the social media posts that she had been subjected to and her father, Ian Russell, vowed to hold the tech giants to account. How can they continue with such hideous content? How can such a pervasive medium stay unregulated — unlike magazines, books, films, radio …? After five years, an inquest ruled that the negative effects of online content was a factor in her death.

Marc Silver decided to use this story to examine the impact of data mining as discussed by Shoshana Zuboff in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019). This is one of many ideas that social media is suffused with — alongside the attention economy, valorised leisure time and so on. If a product is free, you are the product.

Put simply: the algorithm will show you the posts that overlap with posts another person have seen. If you like this — like they do — the chances are you will also like this. Add the speed of computer processing and a couple of million uses and the iterative process, and you get a feed which tends to the homogenous. The algorithm doesn’t care if it’s sourdough recipes or the career of Josh O’Connor or methods of self-harm. This is your feed.

The tech giants don’t see the harm in this — part of the documentary is a reconstruction of the inquest and a Meta executive outlines the cold equations. But testimony from whistle blowers and academics reveal the harm that content can have, and how the social media companies were warned.The safeguards are uneven at best and laughable at worst.

Do I mean laughable?

Surely mental health advice or the Samaritans’ phone number could be there? Is the report function visible and worth clicking?

Throughout the documentary — we hear Russell’s cogent argument — it seems as if he worked in the media prior to the campaign, but he looks like any number of university lecturers and there is no before time, no one else from the family — and the conversations of the twenty something young women who were Molly’s best friends. Their voices are key.

Towards the end of the documentary we hear Zuckerberg’s announcement of the rolling back of safeguards and the primacy of free speech. Regulation is posed as censorship.

Russell doesn’t back the proposed smart phone and social media ban for under sixteens. I suspect he is right. Our entry into that sphere needs more nuance. It’s not quite victime blaming but it’s conceding defeat.

Whilst this is unashamedly partial and thought-provoking, Silver’s decision to use AI to write parts of the scripts is troubling. He has justified it in interviews and he clearly had a struggle to find a narrative with such an elusive antagonist — but it strips out a crucial element of humanity by normalising the piracy of the 2020s.