“I think social media makes a lot of teens feel like crap, but they don’t know how to stop using it,” says Cooper, one of the teenagers featured in Lauren Greenfield’s docuseries Social Studies, summarizing its thesis.
“There’s like this pressure — doing all that you do without flaws. I need a perfect resume. I need a perfect GPA, perfect test scores, perfect body.”
She lives in a big house in Brentwood, has good friends, and, at 18, co-hosts a podcast about thriving. But she calls herself a recovering perfectionist, and admits that she’s haunted by online negging along the lines of “you’d be so pretty if it weren’t for your nose.” She laments that she feels she can’t take part in a recent TikTok trend of posting your face from all angles, to be admired or critiqued by your peers and strangers, on account of her (for what it’s worth, totally normal) nose.
She’s one of the more economically privileged of the many teenagers profiled in the five-part series. But across many demographics, almost all have one thing in common: a reliance on social media that brings them sadness.
Greenfield has previously investigated excess in documentary features including Thin (2006), The Queen of Versailles (2012) and Generation Wealth (2018). She often focuses on the rich, but with FX’s Social Studies she trains her cameras on a form of excess available to anyone with a smartphone.
Her subjects agreed to give her near-total access to their screens and lives, which provides fascinating and at times heartbreaking insights into the way many teenagers act online: They use FaceTune to sharpen jawlines or thin thighs, and find workarounds to social media bans on pro-anorexia accounts. They stress over false rumors that a socially awkward classmate is planning a school shooting. They post or are targeted by racial slurs.
They quickly discover depressing algorithmic hacks, as when underage girls observe that they get more engagement when they wear fewer clothes, and wrestle with how to use that knowledge.
Not everything is bad: Sometimes they find friendships or community online, too. But their relationships are often threatened by the state of being perpetually online, subject to the judgments of friends, enemies and trolls.
The series is centered largely around Palisades Charter High School, where many students are from well-off families, but all suffer the curse of living in interesting times. The doc was recorded soon after the lifting of pandemic lockdowns that made young people, and many not-young people, increasingly reliant on their phones. It also takes place soon after nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, which brought out a complicated mix of awareness, yes, but also performative allyship, barely concealed resentments, and outright racism. Students of color complain about racism and segregation.
And all this was before the school was shut down by the Los Angeles wildfires.
Greenfield resists moralizing, letting her subjects speak for themselves. Her open questions lead to expansive, vulnerable, complex answers — and her simple juxtapositions of her subjects’ online and offline lives are sometimes comical, sometimes troubling, and almost certain to induce vicarious anxiety.
Lurking in the background of the series is the realization that we aren’t just getting a static look at the lives of teenagers: These are the people who will take over our world, eventually making their values and habits the norm.
We talked with Greenfield about winning her subjects’ trust and telling their stories on a bigger screen.
Lauren Greenfield on Making Social Studies
Joshua Encinias:What was the initial concept for Social Studies, and how did it evolve during production?
Lauren Greenfield: The original concept was a social experiment following a cohort of high school students over one year with access to their phones, to investigate social media’s impact. I’ve studied media’s influence on kids since the ’90s. My first book, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, looked at how cable TV and Hollywood affected L.A. youth. But seeing social media’s effect on my own kids, then 14 and 20, made me want to explore it from their perspective, not through experts or adults. The forbidden access — seeing what’s actually on their phones — was key.
The biggest evolution was technical. Social media companies make it deliberately hard to extract content. I hired an engineer who failed to access their phones, but my teenager helped hack a solution for real-time feeds. That became vital because so much of modern life happens on phones, invisible to traditional filming. Ultimately, though, I followed the kids’ stories wherever they led.
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Joshua Encinias: How did you access the teens’ phone activity?
Lauren Greenfield:Part is a trade secret, but Apple’s screen recording was one method — but even that was tricky. We needed a dedicated social media tech producer on set to manage memory limits, since losing data could ruin a scene. Another tool let us back up specific phone sections, like entire chats, with the kids’ consent.
But the core wasn’t tech, it was trust. Though sharing phones was a ground rule, they opened up more as we built relationships over 150 shoot days.
Joshua Encinias:How did Covid accelerate the teenagers’ reliance on social media?
Lauren Greenfield: Kids were glued to screens during lockdowns for relationships, entertainment, even dating, and those habits stuck. Post-lockdown, you see one participant, Ella, texting in class or gaming during lessons. The multitasking normalized during Covid never stopped.
This generation texts more comfortably than they talk. Conversation as an art form in their generation is fading. But Covid only amplified existing issues like body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and their sexualization. Social media put them on steroids.
Joshua Encinias:You hold several on-camera group discussions. Given that some teens are less comfortable with in-person communication, how did those talks go?
Lauren Greenfield: Surprisingly, they craved those sessions. I’d planned them for research, but the kids were brutally honest with peers in ways they couldn’t be online. Sydney, for example, was innocent in person but vampy on social media.
In groups, they dropped the performance. And Cooper said it best: “It’d be great if we could have conversations like this in the real world. But we can’t.” That broke my heart—these kids rarely experience unfiltered dialogue.
Joshua Encinias: Did you use AI in any aspect of the production?
Lauren Greenfield:No, as a documentarian, authenticity is my currency. The show exposes artifice like FaceTune or filters, so using AI would undermine that. I worked with a New Zealand animator, Eric Jordan, to layer screen recordings over live-action, making phone activity legible without fabrication. In an era of fake news, transparency matters.
Joshua Encinias: Are social media’s negative trends also shaping adult behavior?
Lauren Greenfield:Online,adults are struggling with addiction, conspiracy theories, or distracted driving, but my focus was teens, whose brains are still forming. Parents often don’t grasp what kids experience online. Sydney’s mom thought TikTok dances were fun until Sydney’s content turned sexual.
Social media’s grip is universal, but its damage is acute for developing minds.
Joshua Encinias:Should we all just delete our social media accounts?
Lauren Greenfield:Jonathan, one of the teens, nailed it: “It’s our lifeline, but it’s also a loaded gun.” We can’t reject social media, it’s the air Gen Z breathes, but we must address its dangers. The kids in the show are now advocating for change, speaking to lawmakers and peers.
In Greece, a girl told me, “This is the first show about us.” That’s why we made it. To help them feel seen.
Social Studies is now streaming on Hulu.
Main image: Jonathan, Anthony and Lauren Greenfield in Social Studies. Photo credit: Lauren Greenfield/INSTITUTE.