I’ve been sitting with this one for a few days, trying to figure out how to say what I want to say without adding to the noise.

If you’ve been anywhere near Netflix recently, you’ve probably already watched The Crash — the documentary about 17-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla, who drove her Toyota Camry into a brick building at 100 miles per hour in Strongsville, Ohio, killing her boyfriend Dominic Russo and their friend Davion Flanagan. She survived. They didn’t. A judge later convicted her of murder and sentenced her to 15 years to life.

The internet has had opinions. About Mackenzie. About her parents. About the relationship. About whether she’s a monster or a victim or somewhere in between.

I’m not here for any of that. I’m not defending Mackenzie Shirilla and I’m not advocating for her to be released from prison. I’m merely highlighting the role technology played in this tragedy. ( I also think the victims’ families should look into suing the parent companies of Instagram and SnapChat. I think there is a strong case to be made that they played a role in this and it’s giving me very “Big Tobacco” vibes.)

And as a technology professional, I’ve spent my career living inside the systems most people just swipe through without thinking. When I watched The Crash, what I couldn’t stop staring at wasn’t the surveillance footage or the courtroom drama.

It was the phone.

Point 1: The Phone Was Already in the Driver’s Seat

Before Mackenzie Shirilla ever turned into that business park at 5:30 in the morning, her phone had already been doing its job.

She was, by all accounts, a aspiring TikTok influencer. She posted her outfits, her life, her vibe. She also posted videos of herself driving recklessly. Smoking behind the wheel. Performing for a camera that was, presumably, propped up somewhere in that car while she drove. Prosecutors later used those videos against her in court, footage she had voluntarily uploaded to her own accounts, apparently without a second thought about what they revealed.

That’s not a side note, folks. To me, that’s the whole story.

Because here’s what I need you to understand about how social media really works: the algorithm doesn’t reward caution. It rewards engagement. Dramatic content gets more views. More views mean more followers. More followers mean brand deals and collabs and the dopamine hit of watching your numbers climb. Mackenzie Shirilla wasn’t posting reckless driving videos because she was reckless by nature. She was posting them because they performed.

The platform taught her that.

And within days of the crash that killed two people, while she was still in a hospital bed, still wearing a neck brace, she and her mother were reportedly pitching a modeling agency in Los Angeles. Not grieving. Pitching. Because that’s what you do when your entire identity has been built around the pursuit of clout. You look for the angle.

The phone didn’t drive the car. But it absolutely built the driver.

Point 2: We Already Had the Receipts. We Just Didn’t Act On Them.

This is the part that should make every woman reading this want to flip a table.

We knew. We have known for years. Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, has been sounding this alarm louder than almost anyone. His research makes the case clearly: smartphones and social media, handed to children before their brains are anywhere close to finished developing, are doing measurable, documented damage. His recommendation? No smartphones before high school. No social media before 16. Full stop.

Not because kids can’t handle technology. But because the technology, specifically, the apps on the technology, was never designed with kids in mind. It was designed to be addictive. Engineered to keep you scrolling, posting, performing, and coming back for more. And it works especially well on adolescent brains that are literally wired to prioritize social acceptance above almost everything else.

And if you thought that was just a theory? The courts just caught up.

In March of this year, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google liable for a teenager’s mental distress; awarding $3 million in damages, with Meta on the hook for about 70% of that. The very next day, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for failing to protect young users on Instagram and Facebook. And in the documents that surfaced during these cases, we found this little gem from inside Meta’s own walls: “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.”

They knew. They strategized around it. And then they handed your kid an algorithm and called it a social network.

I want to be very clear about one thing before I move on: I’m not a parent. I have genuinely no idea how I would have navigated raising a kid like Mackenzie Shirilla, a strong-willed teenager in a world where every phone is a portal to unlimited validation and zero accountability. I’m not throwing stones at the people who did. Parenting in the age of social media is a nightmare I observe from the sidelines with both sympathy and relief.

What I do know is technology and I know the ethically-challenged, technology culture that permeates our society. It’s also worth noting that the tech bros responsible for these products, refuse to give them to their kids. So, all of this tells me one thing: without the apps, without Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat installed on it, that phone is just a really expensive iPod. The apps are the weapon. The platforms are the ones who put them there. And two juries just agreed that they’re not good for your kids.

Point 3: This Is Our MADD Moment

Let me take you back to 1980.

A woman named Candy Lightner lost her 13-year-old daughter to a drunk driver. The driver had multiple prior offenses. He received a two-year prison sentence and served 16 months. Candy Lightner was furious — not just at the driver, but at a system that had decided drunk driving was simply a tragic fact of life.

So she started Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Within a few years, MADD had helped push the national minimum drinking age to 21, mandatory sentencing laws for drunk driving, and a cultural shift so significant that what had once been treated as a minor inconvenience became socially unacceptable. They didn’t wait for the system to fix itself. They became the pressure that forced the system to move.

We are at that moment right now with social media and mobile devices.

The researchers have done their jobs. The courts are starting to do theirs. What’s missing is the organized, sustained, loud pressure from the people who have always moved the needle when it mattered most: women.

We need age restrictions on social media accounts that are actually enforced, not a checkbox that asks a 12-year-old to confirm she’s 13. We need device-free schools backed by law, not just policy. We need platform accountability that goes beyond a half-hearted Senate apology from Mark Zuckerberg while parents wept in the gallery. And we need the kind of cultural shift that makes handing a 13-year-old an unrestricted smartphone feel as irresponsible as putting them in the passenger seat with a drunk driver.

Mackenzie Shirilla was a teenager who grew up believing that her value was measured in views, that drama was content, and that the camera always deserved a performance — even behind the wheel of a moving car. She wasn’t born that way.

She was scrolled into it, one algorithmic reward at a time.

Dom Russo and Davion Flanagan deserved better than to be supporting characters in someone else’s feed.

So do our kids.

Have you had enough of waiting for someone else to fix this? So have I. Drop a comment, find me on Substack, and let’s have this conversation out loud — because the noise needs to get louder.

And if this post made you want to get smarter and more intentional about how technology works before it works on you — my eBook, Stop Apologizing to ChatGPT! The Blonde Byte’s No BS AI Prompt Playbook is waiting for you. Link here 💙