Fitness trainer and media personality Jillian Michaels is calling on parents to take a harder line with social media companies and with their own children’s phone habits, arguing that popular platforms are built to be “addictive.”
Michaels made the comments during an appearance on Fox News’ “The Faulkner Focus” while promoting her new Fox Nation documentary, “Toxic 2: A Generation on the Brink.”
“You have to do everything you can,” Michaels said. “And that means putting parental controls on your kid’s phone, period. Take the phone away at night, limit the sites that they can access, have communications with them regularly about the content that they’re seeing online. But you also have to be realistic about what they’re going to do when they’re not with you.”
She also argued that the responsibility doesn’t rest with parents alone. “This is the part where we also have to continue putting pressure on the social media companies to make their algorithms safer for kids,” Michaels said. “They created an addictive product, they know it, and we need to keep the pressure on.”
In the documentary, Michaels looks at what she describes as the array of risks facing children today, including heavy screen time, mental health struggles and over-medicalization. “The truth is, a lot of parents probably don’t realize the scale of what kids are dealing with today,” she said. “From day one, the fragile little bodies and brains of the tiniest and most vulnerable among us are being targeted, treated and toxified from all angles.”
Researchers weigh in
The film features several experts, including psychology researcher Jean Twenge, who has studied links between early smartphone use and later mental health problems. “In some of the best design studies, the heaviest users of social media are about twice as likely to be depressed as lighter non-users,” Twenge said. “Even in other studies, you see at least often a 40% or a 50% increase in depression from not using social media to being a heavy user of social media.”
Twenge also pointed to how younger generations themselves describe the problem. “Gen Z and Gen Alpha know how bad these technologies can be for them,” she said. “They’re the ones who came up with phrases like ‘chronically online,’ which make it sound like a disease, ‘brain rot,’ that it’s bad for your attention span and your focus.”
Growing scrutiny of tech companies
Social media companies have faced mounting pressure over how their platforms affect children. In August, Meta agreed to pay as much as $17.1 billion and to put new restrictions on teen accounts to settle claims that it designed Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to children and misled the public about the platforms’ safety. Meta has denied the allegations.
“Toxic 2: A Generation on the Brink” is now streaming on Fox Nation.
