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[quote=Anonymous]Any candidate for local public office that hasn't yet acknowledged this as a major problem not just with personal devices but also with school-issued devices has lost my vote.
[quote]
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.
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Google employees cited classrooms as a source of long-term customers. A 2020 slide deck said that “investing in schools helps onboard kids into Google’s ecosystem.”

With its Chromebook laptops and software tailored for schools, Google has come to dominate the education technology market over the past 15 years. That business boomed during the pandemic, as many districts provided students with their own devices for remote learning. The majority of U.S. schools now use Google products to teach.

Members of the company’s education department were often excited about products they thought could improve learning, such as affordable laptops and educational YouTube videos, according to court documents and interviews. They worked alongside product managers, however, who were focused on a different upside: increasing YouTube’s viewership.

In one 2015 memo, YouTube employees noted that Saturdays drew 80 million hours’ more watch time than Thursdays, and that “increasing usage in schools M-F could decrease this gap!”

It was clear even back then that YouTube was proving problematic for schools, according to documents first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The company’s education team repeatedly complained that the algorithm often led children into a spiral of unrelated content.

One slide presentation illustrated how this could happen. If someone began a YouTube session with a query about linear equations, the platform would first offer a learning video, the presentation showed. But after that, the algorithm would recommend a Will Ferrell comedy video.

A Google spokesman said the documents were outdated. In 2022, the company released a tool that allows teachers to remove ads and recommendations on videos they assign students to watch, said the spokesman, José Castañeda. He also said that YouTube could be blocked, and that browsing on the site had been turned off by default on school Chromebooks for a decade.

But teachers and parents said that even when YouTube and other sites were blocked, students used internet proxies and other workarounds. And schools often allowed YouTube browsing so children could do research, which Google said highlighted its educational value but which made policing its use more difficult.

Joanna Houston, the mother of a sixth grader in Richmond Hill, Ga., said her son had watched more than 1,500 noneducational YouTube videos on his Chromebook during school between August and January.

She was concerned that her son’s school had embraced Chromebooks and YouTube, but she blamed Google for marketing to schools and making it so easy to mindlessly consume its content.

“It’s this whole ecosystem that ultimately benefits this company, and I don’t think it very much benefits students,” she said[/quote]
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/us/social-media-schools.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nlA.TxAz._2Pq7SFKjc4k&smid=url-share[/quote]

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