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Hinsdale native Zamaan Qureshi went to New York City at the end of April to protest against tech giant Meta — which owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp — and what he said were the apparent lack of safeguards for young people online.

As the co-chair of Design It For Us, a coalition of young people advocating for policy reforms to protect the online generation, Qureshi, 22, said he and his peers have been “taking on Big Tech” since the coalition’s inception in 2023.

Also at the protest was 40-year-old Maggie Taylor, of Ottawa, Illinois, who was representing parents who say they lost their children due to unregulated social media platforms. Taylor said her daughter, Emily, died in 2021 at age 17 after taking a substance she bought through Snapchat that ended up being laced with fentanyl.

“I showed up because most parents don’t have a clue about what their children are interacting with online,” she said. “We need to make as much noise as possible to bring our stories to light and make sure parents are aware of what’s going on and can talk and protect their children.”

After Emily’s death, Taylor got into her daughter’s phone and then learned that she had been in contact with someone through Snapchat and procured what she thought was a pain reliever. Later, Taylor would find out that the pill contained fentanyl.

“All of our children weren’t bad kids; it’s not like Emily was a bad kid, she just made a poor decision and it cost her life,” Taylor said.

She described her daughter as outgoing and lovable.

“She was so funny,” Taylor said. “She loved dancing. She liked cooking; that was her favorite class in school.”

Qureshi said Emily’s death is an example of why platforms like Snapchat and Instagram need to be pressed to improve their design features. Snapchat, he said, made it possible to connect with a stranger and purchase a lethal substance.

“This is a connection that should not have been facilitated,” Qureshi said. “A young woman is now dead because the algorithm connected these two people together. It’s becoming increasingly more important for us to think about the downstream effects of these apps’ design features.”

Meta and Snapchat did not respond to requests for comment.

Several social media CEOs, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year over concerns about child exploitation online. Children and parents shared how they had been affected during the hearing, with some parents silently holding up photographs of children they lost to suicide.

Zuckerberg said during the hearing, “I’m sorry for everything you have all been through. No one should go through the things that your families have suffered,” speaking directly to the affected families in the room. He said Meta continues to work on “industrywide efforts” to protect children.

Design It For Us formed out of advocacy for the California Age-Appropriate Design Code, which was enacted in 2022 to help protect young people online but was recently was blocked by a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

“It first began as a campaign to get young people involved in that bill and then it evolved into a coalition bringing together young people who cared a lot about social media regulation and protecting our generation online,” Qureshi said.

The coalition, which exists virtually for the most part, has now grown to about 300 members from across the country. The group organizes online and occasionally in person, showing up for lobby days on Capitol Hill or to support local actions in various states.

“I think that’s what’s so exciting is that young people are showing up to these calls, generating ideas, because ultimately they believe in protecting young people online and creating a better online world for the next generation,” Qureshi said.

Qureshi grew up in Hinsdale and now lives in Chicago. He said he graduated high school during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and remembers becoming “really interested and concerned about the role of social media in our society” during that time.

“I’ve grown up on social media,” Qureshi said. “We’re kind of the guinea pig generation, and seeing how that impacted my community, I remember conversations with my classmates about the way social media affects our mental health, our safety.”

Isabel Sunderland, 22, is also from Hinsdale and attends American University in Washington, D.C. She said she got involved with Design It For Us after learning more about how social media platforms have played a role in shaping young people around the world.

Sunderland said she remembers starting to use social media in middle school and said it was a way to connect with people, share stories and learn new things. But the harsh realities of social media soon crept in when she learned that big tech companies “can’t just run on good vibes and making people feel good.”

“I started to see within my own algorithm a lot of really harmful content,” Sunderland said. “It started off small, like new apps that could distort the way my face looks to match the viral beauty trend of the day. Then it was showing me ways to cut some percentage of body fat and different diet supplements I could order.”

The way social media sucks someone in, Sunderland said, is by getting users to crave scrolling through the platform. The more time someone spends on the platform, the more tailored the content gets and the more the person wants to keep coming back, she said, adding that harmful ads or content is also more likely to appear on someone’s feed the more time they spend scrolling.

“Tech has been really successful at building an algorithm and business model that drives harmful and addictive content, whether that be content serving eating disorders, depression and anxiety, and even in many cases, content encouraging self-harm and suicide,” Sunderland said.

The movement to make the internet a safer place will continue to grow, Qureshi said, and it will be even more necessary for young people to be carving out space for themselves and speak up on the subject. He said that although he’s grateful for lawmakers who care about the issue, many of them are older and haven’t grown up on social media, so it’s up to the younger generations to educate those in positions of power.

“By pushing for policy and direct actions like the Meta protest, we will continue advocating for young people online and holding social media companies accountable,” Qureshi said. “We want to reach more and more young people and get more and more people involved in this work because its impact is everywhere.”

Illinois state Sen. Sue Rezin said it is “incredibly encouraging” to see youths who are involved in making the internet a better, safer place through advocacy for policy reform.

“It’s been so beneficial working with these groups of young adults,” Rezin said. “These people are smart. They’ve done their research and who best to advocate than the people who see it all play out in front of them. In the Senate, a lot of us did not come up with these kinds of problems that we are seeing now with minors, so it’s harder for us to understand and articulate how to solve the problem.”

Rezin introduced a package of bills in Illinois seeking greater online safety with bipartisan support after seeing the increased need for mental health services and wanting to find the root of the problem.

“The screen times that minors have on social media, the content they’re viewing, it’s causing increased anxiety and depression and is also leading to the increasing percentage of minors that are taking their own lives,” Rezin said. “Too often, minors suffer grave consequences from the deceptive practices utilized by social media.”

Rezin said she found social media algorithms to be prioritizing prolonged engagement and attention on their platforms to generate profits, which encourages exposure to harmful, addictive, controversial and negative content, which then results in negative effects on mental health. While social media companies seemingly understand these consequences, the goal to make money trumps keeping developing minds safe online, she said.

Rezin is hopeful that by the end of Illinois’ Senate session in May, a comprehensive bill that address online safety as well as social media and artificial intelligence will be voted on and passed, she said. From there, she said she wants to start applying pressure at the federal level.

Other industries that have also taken advantage of young people’s vulnerability with similar business models have been regulated to some degree, Sunderland said, citing the example of the tobacco or alcohol industries being required to put warning labels on products. Social media is disproportionately affecting young people as it continues to operate without proper regulation, she said.

Regulation for Sunderland means making sure that social media platforms rework their design codes and monitor what they are pushing out to young people, especially content that can induce harmful feelings and behaviors.

“We need to make sure user attention isn’t the currency for Big Tech, because right now the time that I spend on my phone translates into their advertising dollars,” Sunderland said. “So design-focused legislation really promotes changing those incentives and giving users agency.”

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