AI and social media: the battle for attention begins at home
“From the moment we got in the car and started driving,” Lembke recounts, “I noticed a clear difference in the quality of everyone’s presence—even in the car—and that feeling lasted throughout the vacation. We played board games, ate together, and the key thing was that no one was waiting for the meal to end thinking, ‘Now I’ll check my phone,’ because there was no device to check. We lingered longer. Conversations stretched out. After dinner, we relaxed under the stars. Everything felt so different.”
On February 18, Mark Zuckerberg entered a courtroom in Los Angeles to defend himself against claims comparing social media to addictive substances like alcohol and tobacco. The lawsuit, targeting his platforms (as well as Snapchat, YouTube, and TikTok, many of which have quietly settled), was filed by a 20-year-old woman who has been exposed to YouTube and Instagram since age six and now struggles with depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and compulsive media use.
The trial is historic for one key reason: the focus shifts from content to product architecture. In other words, it’s not about what the woman saw over a decade of social media use, but why that content was served to her—through what mechanisms, rules, and exploitation of vulnerabilities, and for what purposes.
Is there a link between social media’s drift and the AI race? Pier Luigi Pisa of Repubblica asked Luciano Floridi, head of the Digital Ethics Center at Yale. You might expect a measured, balanced answer from a scholar—but Floridi is blunt: “Brutal, short-sighted profit. For a big tech company, the ideal user is someone who stays on the platform 24 hours a day, preferably without eating or sleeping.”
The problem is that AI and social media are now deeply intertwined: the pervasive design of current platforms is constantly refined thanks to artificial intelligence, which drives content algorithms so tailored to each individual that they are effectively impossible to neutralize.
Families are responding to this imbalance by increasingly pulling their children out of the digital world: 13 out of 100 parents, according to a 2025 Agcom survey, completely ban smartphones and tablets for under-16s, while most impose some form of regulation. This caution is perhaps heightened by ignorance, as 64% of Italians have little to no algorithmic literacy, leaving them vulnerable to forces they don’t understand or cannot critically evaluate.
Banning or strictly regulating usage is a useful first step, but it becomes insufficient as digital life permeates social and school experiences. The home, whether we like it or not, is the first line of digital education: research shows that over half of Italian minors seek guidance from their families for conscious media use, and in Europe, when something online hurts them, parents are the first point of contact for 4 out of 10 young people—far above schools or professionals.
If we parents are the first not to understand the rules of this constantly evolving, sometimes exhausting game, how can we teach them to our children?
Without extremes, we can implement simple, responsible actions: set clear, negotiated, verifiable boundaries; create friction against technology’s spread (phones out of bedrooms, notifications off, no smartphones at meals—ourselves included, as 8 out of 10 parents keep theirs at the table); explain that online experiences are far from neutral, driven by economic motives and constant optimization; and finally, foster alliances with schools, inspired by the Community Digital Pacts launched by the University of Milano-Bicocca, so that families and educators reinforce the same lessons on digital literacy, social media, and AI.