‘Teachers Are Going to Hate It’: How Social Media Apps Hooked Teens at School - The New York Times
Internal documents show how tech giants grabbed children’s attention throughout the day, a strategy that schools say has undermined education.
The companies’ push to keep children glued to their screens has overshadowed concerns from parents, teachers and even their own trust and safety teams about interfering with school, according to the documents and interviews with dozens of parents, teachers and former tech company employees.
TikTok’s leaders decided not to disable notifications during school hours, rejecting a change that its safety teams had pushed for years. A Snapchat strategy document referred to classroom phone use as “under the desk” time. Google managers knew YouTube was recommending videos to students during the school day that had nothing to do with their lessons.
All four companies recently settled with Breathitt County Schools, a small district in rural Kentucky that served as a test case for the litigation nationwide. The district, which has about 1,500 students, had sought $3 million in damages and about $60 million that it had planned to put toward a long-term education and mental health plan. The companies agreed to pay Breathitt $27 million: $9 million from Meta, $8 million each from Snap and TikTok and $2 million from Google, according to documents released on Friday and first reported by Bloomberg.
