Dulcie Cowling explains why Smartphone Free Childhood used parody to target tech bosses

Dulcie Cowling, the creative behind a new film for Smartphone Free Childhood, argues that parody rather than panic is the most effective way to challenge social media bosses on children’s online safety.

Cowling says she has watched Facebook grow from a place for unflattering party photos into Meta, a $1tn company present in every part of daily life. Social media’s “profit at all costs” approach suits shareholders, she argues, but harms young people drawn into addictive algorithms, a view she says is supported by many studies, other than those funded by the platforms, and now by legal verdicts.

The difficulty, in her view, is that the richest and most powerful men on Earth appear to be beyond the reach even of lawmakers, shrugging off multimillion-dollar fines. She points to Mark Zuckerberg’s trademark smirks when he has appeared before Congress or MPs, and argues that when the tech bosses dislike a law, they have it changed, and when they dislike lawmakers, they change those too.

Why now

Cowling opens by asking, of the tech bosses, whether they are “taking the piss”, and answers that she certainly is. She writes as a parent on a deadline: her eldest child starts secondary school in just over a year. Smartphone Free Childhood, which she describes as the UK’s main grassroots campaign group, began in 2024 with a frustrated parent’s WhatsApp message and has grown rapidly. “We are not anti-tech, we are pro-childhood,” she writes.

The group’s message has resonated with parents who want to delay children’s exposure to violent, sexual and self-harm content for a few more years, she says.

She argues the timing is critical. A government consultation on children and social media is under way, programmes such as ‘Adolescence’ and Louis Theroux’s ‘Manosphere’ documentary have made headlines, and polls suggest voters of all five major UK parties would support an Australian-style ban for under-16s Smartphone Free Childhood wanted its film released during the consultation, as public frustration grows.

Humour as a Trojan horse

Cowling worked on the campaign with fellow creative and executive producer Sam Ojari. Humour, she argues, is a reliable response to a bully, and laughter is “the perfect Trojan horse to deliver serious messages”. She notes that ‘SNL’ has arrived in the UK and offers relief from a grim news cycle.

She suggests tech leaders are easy to parody because of what she sees as their juvenile ambitions, such as colonising Mars, MMA fighting and building fast cars and space rockets, which she likens to themes from children’s duvet covers. “It’s easy to poke fun because these guys are walking parodies already,” she writes. In her view, they are so focused on creating impressive legacies that they forget that being remembered fondly simply requires being decent.

She also questions why such wealth and power are not used to solve real problems, citing Elon Musk’s remark that “income is directly proportional to the difficulty and scale of the problems you solve,” and arguing that tech leaders appear to create more problems than they solve.

The brief she and Ojari set themselves was to show that the status quo protects what social media bosses want rather than what children need.

Joe Ryrie, one of Smartphone Free Childhood’s founders, has said that debate on keeping children safe online tends to fall into one of two traps: dry campaign language that nobody remembers, or frightening statistics that leave parents feeling powerless. The team wanted to avoid both.

Meet Zack Zingerberg

Rather than a film centred on what parents and children need, they flipped the idea and focused on what social media bosses want, asking what a tech boss would say in his own campaign film.

The result is a parody character, Zack Zingerberg, dressed in boyband-style clothes with a “nasty little necklace” and a falsely sincere, media-trained manner, delivering what plays like a desperate charity appeal for children’s data, minds and mental health.

Cowling says the team had a lot of fun making the film, with Smartphone Free Childhood willing not to take itself too seriously. The process was collaborative, she says, and involved imagining what tech bosses really say behind closed doors. “Lighthearted campaigns are always a team effort,” she writes, and production partner Nusa Films contributed further ideas to bring the character to life.

She says the film is already circulating in MPs’ WhatsApp groups. Asking politely and campaigning angrily may have failed, she writes, but the team hopes humour can now speak truth to power. “Sometimes, to be taken seriously, you just have to be silly.”