What social media platforms don’t want you to know | Brett Brewer | TEDxUCLA

NOTE FROM TED: This talk represents the speaker's personal interpretation and understanding of social media use and youth mental health which warrants further scientific investigation. TEDx events are independently organized by volunteers. The guidelines we give TEDx organizers are described in more detail here: http://storage.ted.com/tedx/manuals/t... Brett Brewer helped build the platform that took social media mainstream. Now he's here to say what the industry won't: that the crisis in youth mental health is not an accident, that the companies claiming nothing can be done aren't telling the truth, and that the people with the most power to fix this have billions of reasons not to. In this talk, he breaks the silence that most founders keep: about what they saw happening to users as early as 2003, what they chose to call success, and what we owe the generation of children who grew up inside what they built. He also comes with something most critics don't have: he knows how these companies think, what they're capable of, and what it will take to force their hand, because he was one of them. Brett Brewer is co-founder and Managing Director of Crosscut Ventures, and one of the original architects of the social media era. In 1998 he co-founded Intermix Media, which launched MySpace and sold to News Corp in 2005 for $680 million. He has spent the twenty years since building, investing in, and leading internet companies — which means he knows exactly how the industry thinks, what it's capable of, and what it has refused to do. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx