Documents Show Social Media Companies Specifically Marketed to Schoolchildren ⇥ nytimes.com

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, New York Times:

Again and again, the world’s leading social media companies have targeted students, even as complaints have mounted that they are hurting teenagers’ mental health and academic performance, according to a New York Times review of internal documents that lay bare for the first time these tactics to hook young users.

[…]

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.

I do not think it will be surprising to many readers that these companies had strategies to increase usage by children, even during school hours, but I do think it is notable to see it spelled out in these documents. The popularity of these apps is not organic or foretold; it is, at least to some extent, created. There is no reason why Meta would need Instagram “ambassadors” at schools (PDF) to “drive product adoption” if it were not trying to increase Instagram use among teenagers.

Valentino-DeVries:

Members of the company’s [Google’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.

YouTube is maybe the trickiest of all these platforms to govern within schools because it has no alternative. There is a vast library of genuinely educational and informative video on the site, and then there is the rest of YouTube. It therefore makes sense to allow its use among students and within schools. However, YouTube has also been honed for boosting engagement, something which affects all users. That is not to say we should have exactly the same standards for children and adults, but it highlights the difficulty of using a singular platform with general-market financial incentives in an educational setting.