Hello and welcome back to The Bunker, News Without the Nonsense.

I'm author, broadcaster and campaigner Natasha Devon.

Today we're asking, is social media dying?

I know, I know, a cursory glance at the numerous people mindlessly

scrolling through TikToks on the train or that conversation you tried to have with your radicalised

by Facebook into believing chemtrails are a thing, uncle, last Christmas, might make this question

seem implausible at first. But recently, there's been a mass awakening to the harm's social media can inflict,

whether it's the British woman who took META to court for the invasive nature of its targeted

advertising, the huge response to the Netflix drama adolescence, or the mass exodus from

wannabe Bond villain Elon Musk's X. When I'm not behind the Micah LBC, I spend my days researching and

educating on young people's mental health. Social media is a huge component of that. So I've

been fascinated by the latest developments in this area. The days of naively believing social media

to be a global marketplace of ideas where everyone's views are heard,

or just another form of entertainment, are over. In an effort to protect children, the government

introduced the Online Safety Act in March of this year, but people don't magically stop being

vulnerable at the age of 16. As we watch online hate speech spill over into real world violence,

as we understand more about how our data is farmed and used to further enrich some of the

world's wealthiest people, and with the speculation that social media has even been used

by nefarious forces to undermine democracy, will we turn our back on it? Can that genie ever

be put back in the bottle? To help me answer these questions, I'm delighted to be joined by Will Gaiat,

having worked at Instagram, Facebook, and even back in the day, MySpace, our memories. Will is now

tech correspondent for a number of media organisations, including LBC, which is how I know him.

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