The Tech CEO Who Won’t Let His Kids on Social Media
The power of social media is why I co-founded my company, Viral Nation, in 2014. I was only 23, and I could see how platforms like Facebook and Twitter were changing the world. Viral Nation is a marketing agency that helps brands transition from traditional media to social media and connect with influencers on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and others. Some of our influencers have millions of followers, and those connections are how they earn a living. It’s also, increasingly, how brands build trust with customers. The demand is vast.
A year after my co-founder and I started the company, I began dating my future wife, Emma, and started spending a lot of time with her four-year-old daughter, Sienna. My personal use of social media in those days was heavy and constant. I was on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and other platforms for hours every day. I wasn’t thinking much at that point about the dangers of online life for kids. But soon after establishing the company I got an insider’s view of how social media’s power, unsupervised, could have devastating effects when used the wrong way, especially on vulnerable children. Working with young influencers quickly revealed the uglier aspects of online life. They’re exposed to everything that a typical young person might see online but, given their large followings and their visibility, it’s all amped up to a far greater degree. What they experience highlighted for me the dangers that come with this powerful medium.
In 2016, I represented one young influencer who did comedy videos. I’ll call him Dave. He began struggling with his mental health, and it turned out he was dealing with a lot of online abuse; he would voice an opinion about some trending topic, and people would react in ways they never would in real life. People made death threats against him and his family. Dave was a person of colour, and he received barrages of racist comments.
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Not long after that, I received a phone call from police in the U.S. regarding another influencer I represented, a girl I’ll call Julie, who uploaded songs and modelled. The police told me that someone had taken her image and created a fake profile for escort services, which criminals used to bait men looking to pay for sex and then rob them. Eventually police got the profile taken down.
One of the worst incidents surfaced in 2017, involving a child influencer I’ll call Sammy, who made funny singing and dancing videos. Someone took his image and superimposed it on a pornographic image. I called the police, but there was little they could do—once something is online, attempting to remove it is a hell of a process. You have to contact websites, prove you are who you say, explain why the content should be taken down. In the end the best I could do was offer support to Sammy and his mom. The experience made her question whether her son should be pursuing the influencer lifestyle at all.
Emma and I married in 2018, in a beautiful ceremony; Sienna, then seven years old, was the flower girl. By then, my eyes were wide open to the positive and negative powers of social media and the risks it can pose to kids. My fears intensified the following year, when Sienna was eight and asked for a smartphone of her own. I knew that’s when the floodgates could open—not surprisingly, kids’ social media use spikes when they get their own devices, and protecting them becomes harder for parents.
Emma and I wanted to keep Sienna off social media for as long as possible. We reached out to her dad to make sure her whole family was aligned. Then we developed a plan of action. It was simple in the beginning. I began talking to Sienna about social media and its impacts. It wasn’t difficult to talk about things at that age. We had upbeat discussions about not interacting with strangers, and she understood we were making choices for our family and, ultimately, her safety. She accepted it.
A year later, Emma and I had a daughter, Scottie. That moved the needle even more for us—suddenly we were thinking about screen exposure in general, as well as the specific effects of social media. I started taking stock of my own screen time as well. I remember being at a plaza in Mississauga in 2020 and watching a mother and child. The kid was wailing for what seemed to be no good reason, but the mother was simply sitting there, scrolling on her phone, paying no attention, absorbed in her screen. It was a small moment, but it hit me powerfully. I didn’t ever want to be that parent, or for someone to see me the same way. I decided to limit my screen time to 30 minutes daily.
I’m the first to admit that I haven’t followed my own guidelines to the letter, and I obviously need to spend a lot of time on my phone for work. But having children, and making this resolution, changed how I relate to screen time. I had to hold myself to the same standards I would for Sienna, Scottie and our son, Anthony, who was born in 2021. I used to spend hours caught up, scrolling aimlessly and ending up in some internet rabbit hole. Even for me—a full-grown man—it was all too easy to lose myself. For children, who lack the self-control that adults (should) have, hard limits are absolutely necessary. Have you ever tried talking to a child clutching a phone or a tablet, trying to get their attention? They’re entirely unresponsive.
Our youngest kids are allowed to watch a max of one or two YouTube videos, totalling 15 or 20 minutes each, per day. Sienna can only watch videos when we’re with her. This is another example of how easily the perks of social media can become pitfalls. YouTube is a great example. I love it; it’s all I watch at home. The sheer volume of information and entertainment is extraordinary. But the abundance that makes it so exciting is what makes it so dangerous. It infuriates me when I see parents essentially raising their toddlers and young children with it, streaming for hours.
We understand now how social media and streaming content activates the parts of the brain that reward novelty, delivering little dopamine hits every time something new or exciting comes up. So we keep scrolling and we keep watching, hoping for the next rush. The content itself may be innocuous, even kid-friendly and educational, but the magnitude of it—the firehose aimed right at children—is enormous. I can’t even imagine how a little brain processes it all.
Maybe they don’t; maybe the medium undermines the message. For example, when Scottie was three, Emma and I noticed she’d begun mimicking behaviour she was seeing in videos on YouTube Kids. The videos were intended to have a positive message, portraying a negative behaviour—like a child taking candy from their sibling—and then correcting it with a good behaviour, like asking to share. But our daughter didn’t understand the correction. The videos were so short, so flashy and entertaining, that the message didn’t stick.
So Emma and I did an experiment. We limited Scottie’s YouTube consumption to three creators whose content we felt was in line with how we’d want to educate our kids: Ms. Rachel, Blippi and Caitie’s Classroom. Education is the key word, because I do feel that YouTube, when managed right, can have a positive impact. If I’d had access to YouTube as a child—with the right guidelines and parental control, of course—I’d have gotten 99 per cent on every report card. Soon after we limited Scottie’s YouTube consumption, her negative behaviour vanished.
Just as important as what she watched was how much she watched. That’s why we have the time limit, and why none of our three kids has their own tablet. They can’t hide in the corner clutching an iPad for hours. They watch YouTube on our main TV, and either Emma or I need to turn it on to navigate to their content. There are no screens in their bedrooms, either, an idea that came from my mentor, Bruce Poon Tip, an entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded the travel company G Adventures. I used to spend a lot of time at his house and saw how he approached things with his daughters, who are older than my kids.
Our rules are increasingly at odds with how a lot of children are raised. The long-term effects of constant screen time and dopamine-targeting video content are still unknown. I think there’s a strong chance that, in a decade, my own kids’ brains may be better developed than their peers’. Even so, we’ve noticed Scottie’s attention span is short—she can’t watch full-length movies, and we’ve seen the same with some of our friends’ children. Now we’re working on increasing her attention span.
One day last year, when Sienna was 12, her stepmom reached out to my wife. She’d discovered that Sienna had hidden a phone in their house and was using it while she was there to access social media platforms and send pictures to friends. At that moment we were especially grateful to have a collaborative and open co-parenting relationship: it can be really hard to co-parent in a blended family, especially if there are differing ideas about how to raise children, or if there’s conflict or animosity. Of course we talked to Sienna about lying to us. But the thing that blew us away was how social media has become second nature to her generation.
These days, every single kid in Sienna’s class—except her—is spending all day texting and sending pictures back and forth to one another. I’ve worked in this space for 10 years, but I’m still from a generation that feels, in some ways, ancient. I grew up playing with the kids next door and climbing trees. So my reaction was very much that of an older person: there is no reason a 12-year-old needs to be sending pictures of themselves to anyone. Your body and your images are yours, and at such a young age they’re not to be shared with other people until you understand more about the world. Period. Especially not in a public and permanent way that opens you to predatory behaviour online. Given that I work with young influencers who are putting themselves out there, I try to lead by example by talking to them about these challenges openly and making sure that they and their parents are making informed choices. It’s important to me that the parents of our influencers who are very young have all the information and tools necessary to keep their children safe.
And then there’s the issue of regret. Children’s emotions are heightened and ever-changing. I’ve seen Sienna get emotional about socks. She could say the wrong thing online, or send pictures to a young boy, or do something that could be construed as bullying. The implications could be serious. Those messages aren’t offhand comments to friends; they’re irreversible and can be shared with everyone. Social media is not friendly to those lacking impulse control. That’s children to a tee.
We were angry with Sienna for lying to us, but when we confronted her, our concerns almost collided with her sense of reality. Even Sienna, raised relatively free of social media, doesn’t understand a world unmediated by it. So again I had to explain how things work online: there may be predators on social media posing as boys from school. And suicide rates for young women have skyrocketed since social media became widespread. A dear friend of mine who is a teacher in Brampton, Ontario, told me that kids were sexting in Grade 6. Who knew where those pictures would end up, and what kind of long-term repercussions they’d have online? The teacher described the challenges of dealing with social media at school as the single biggest issue among young people she has ever seen. How far have we, as a society, let this go, and how poorly are we managing these risks, that our kids feel confident taking pictures like this and sending them to whomever?
My daughter was fine, fortunately. She’d only sent harmless pictures to friends. But that’s not really a comfort. Most parents will not understand the dangers until they’re faced with them—and many believe their children need a phone to fit in at school. Teachers are tired of policing these things and don’t have the resources to do it. And every day kids are encountering the kinds of things that happened to the young influencers I worked with.
The irony of all this is that those of us in the industry—who are often among the biggest enthusiasts and boosters for the positive power of social media—are also among the most aware of its risks. Last year, Bruce Poon Tip challenged me to make some kind of positive change in the world. So I resolved to speak out about the dangers as well as the positives. Because it should not be strange for a 13-year-old to not be online. Yet to this day, as far as I know, Sienna is the only person in her class who doesn’t have any social media accounts. She won’t until she’s 16, either, and even then there will be limitations. She’ll need to sign a contract, she won’t be able to keep a device in her room and she’ll be limited in how much she can use the platforms.
It’s been hard sometimes for Sienna. But she’s coming around to our family’s controlled approach to social media. She’s maturing and can understand both the benefits of social media, and the benefits of limiting it. She’s also glad she’s not spending all her time online, as so many of her peers are, and is experiencing other things.
Some blame tech platforms. Some blame schools. But I believe it’s parents who need to step up. Another dad asked me not long ago for advice on this; he was having a hard time supporting his teenage daughter, who was getting bullied online. He didn’t know what to do. When he told me he didn’t monitor her time online, I asked him: would he let his daughter go alone into a bar and strike up conversations with anyone there, free from parental oversight? Of course not, he said. I told him that he was allowing her to do pretty much the same thing every day on social media.
To extend that metaphor: social media, like a bar, can be a wonderful place for adults. Every day we’re online is one big networking event, and that’s the incredible new world social media has delivered. I’m grateful not only that I live at a time in human history when I get to experience it, but that in my work I get to shape it. But it’s simply too much for kids to navigate unsupervised. Allowing them that kind of free rein is, I believe, tantamount to child abuse. And though it may avoid conflicts in the short term with our kids, it’s not fair to them in the long term. Our primary job as parents is to protect our kids and help them understand the world before they can be set loose in it—whether that world is on- or offline.
—As told to Angus MacCaull
