In the first of our 2026 Mad Campaigns Lab sessions, exploring the social justice issues which intersect with mental health, we tackled Big Tech and its relationship to mental health.
While social media can have a negative impact on mental health for many, government proposals to ban people under the age of 16 from accessing it could be equally harmful, especially to racialised and otherwise marginalised groups who find community online.
We invited Mad Youth Organise, a youth-led campaign group speaking out against the big corporations driving the youth mental health crisis, to join our session.
Guest campaign: Mad Youth Organise
Mad Youth Organise argue that, rather than banning young people from social media, the Big Tech companies who own and run social media platforms should be held responsible for making them safer.
Mad Youth Organise is also calling for a 4% ‘misery tax’ on Big Tech companies to fund youth mental health services. They see this as a step towards a wider tax on corporations that contribute to social harm, including fossil fuel and private healthcare firms.
Mad Youth Organise campaigns by lobbying MPs and publicly telling the stories of young people whose mental health has suffered at the hands of Big Tech. Recently, they also put up billboard adverts near Meta’s London headquarters, mimicking those used by Big Tech companies, to draw attention to the harm they cause.
Mad Youth Organise’s campaigners stressed the importance of sharing and considering their personal experience in relation to the broader issues within UK policy and government. This is how they decided to focus their efforts on Big Tech companies and other harmful corporations.
Action session
In our first action session of the year, we focussed on the importance of breaking down competing narratives about Big Tech, asking who is to blame for the harm it causes to mental health. We used a theoretical tool called the drama triangle to help us think about who is being positioned as the hero, villain and victim in a given story. While the drama triangle was originally developed as a way of thinking about social interactions in psychotherapy, it is also useful for getting to the bottom of media narratives around controversial issues.
Analysing other people’s stories in this way can help us, as campaigners, to:
- See what we are up against, so we can strategically place ourselves in relation to other voices in the conversation
- Develop clear counternarratives
- Test our own stories, so they cannot be misinterpreted
- Get clearer with other campaigners about where we agree and disagree
Next steps
If you’d like to take action on Big Tech, here are some campaign actions you might like to consider based on the time you have available:
- 30 seconds: Follow @MadYouthOrganise on social media
- 1 minute: Sign Mad Youth Organise’s Big Tech petition
- 10 minutes: Learn more about the proposed social media ban by reading NSUN’s analysis.
- 15 minutes: Contribute to NSUN’s response to the Government consultation on the social media ban. Email your thoughts to courtney.buckler@nsun.org.uk. We can also support members who might like to submit evidence themselves, so please do get in touch.
- 30 minutes: Listen to this interview on defending our digital rights with Adele Zeynep Walton
- Ongoing commitment: Join People vs Big Tech or Mad Youth Organise.