[tempsy]

i don’t know anything about the other issues facing the school but to say social media addiction is a “dumb” thing to address seems incredibly naive to me.

growing up is hard enough as it is and social media absolutely can be detrimental to mental health if used excessively.

imo the only reason we haven’t properly addressed the issue as a society is because it’s incredibly difficult to “prove” from a research perspective given the newness of social media.

[idopmstuff]

Social media addiction is an important thing to address, but a school district filing lawsuits against social media companies just seems like the worst possible way to address it.

This is an organization whose entire purpose is educating kids. If they want to address social media addiction, why on earth would they not start by educating kids about it?

[LarryMullins]

I expect that'll work about as well as gym teachers teaching kids not to have premarital sex or smoke drugs. Such admonitions might sometimes work for individual kids, but on the whole they don't work.

TikTok/etc is unlike sex and illicit drugs in that it's a commercial enterprise that is operating openly and can in theory be sued into submission. You can't sue a plant anybody can grow in their closet, but you can sue a tech company.

[idopmstuff]

Gym teachers telling kids not to have premarital sex or smoke drugs isn't teaching them. You can teach kids how condoms work and that STDs stay with them for life. You can teach kids that drugs these days can be laced with fentanyl and how to acquire and use fentanyl test strips.

Those things won't stop kids from having sex or doing drugs, but they can certainly and do mitigate some of the harm.

You can take a similar approach to social media. Gym teachers telling them not to use TikTok will obviously not work, but you can teach them about how their data is shared and monetized. You can show them examples of people who posted things on social media and had their lives ruined over it. If the leaders of a school district have adopted the approach that you just can't teach kids anything they don't want to hear, I think they ought to find different jobs.

As for the lawsuit, sure, you can sue a social media company? Will you win? Maybe, after extensive and costly litigation. Will those companies be forced to change their behavior in meaningful ways that will impact your students? Maybe, or maybe they'll just pay a fine and make superficial changes that last until the next lawsuit concludes in half a decade, then repeat.

And besides that, even if you manage to win and dismantle Facebook, TikTok, etc., you'll have an infinite number of other companies coming in to fill the void. You can sue a tech company, but you can't sue a general class of software. You can legislate against it, but at best that is a long, hard road.

[LarryMullins]

Teach kids all you like, however you like, they're not going to stop using social media on their own. It's a digital drug engineered to be addictive, and the kids are already hooked.

[brianwawok]

Parents control if they get a phone till 18. Generally the more upper class the parent I know, the later they give their kids access.

It’s not like kids are born with an iPhone glued to their hand.

[kube-system]

Sort of. Kids in the US can get a job and buy their own phone as young as 14.

[asdff]

Exactly. A student will sit there, arms crossed, internally opposing everything the administrator is saying because they've convinced themselves already its bullshit. They already think they will just find work as an influencer:

https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/arts-culture...

[tempsy]

This is really silly. Putting the onus on kids to fight the addictive cues created by sophisticated social media companies that actively work to make their products even more addictive is absolutely not the right way to address it.

Though I do agree that if school districts actually cared enough today they should start by banning social media use on school premises and more aggressively monitor phone usage during class.

[LarryMullins]

> Though I do agree that if school districts actually cared enough today they should start by banning social media use on school premises and more aggressively monitor phone usage during class.

AFAIK they do, but it is extremely challenging for teachers. Phone use can be very discrete, "aggressively monitoring phone usage" just isn't practical. And when teachers do confiscate phones the backlash against them is frequently strong and fierce. They face hyperbolic rhetoric about such confiscations being dangerous because "what if somebody needs to call 911!?" Even when administrators don't fold to the pressure, the teachers still need to put up with deranged rants and accusations from the parents. It's much easier for teachers if they pretend they didn't see the phone.

And schools can hardly screen every kid entering the school for a phone, every day. It would be invasive, slow, and expensive. Imagine having to go to school an hour early every day because you need to stand in line for TSA before entering the building. Not practical. We can't even keep cellphones out of prisons where invasive cavity searches are permitted. Jamming cell signals on school grounds is out of the question, it isn't legal. So given all these problems, why not sue tech companies for making these systems and services available on school grounds during school hours? I think it probably won't work, but it's worth a shot.

[tempsy]

Yeah that’s not what I mean. I mean make it a policy to not allow people to have their phones out in class. You can also block certain sites on school WiFi networks. I’m sure some schools already have something like this already. I don’t mean implement body searches.

[LarryMullins]

> I mean make it a policy to not allow people to have their phones out in class.

These policies already exist but they're practically unenforceable. Individual teachers are incentivized to ignore it because enforcing these rules causes trouble for them. And even the most enthusiastic enforcement will fall flat; discrete phone use is trivial. Even paranoid proctors can't keep phones out of classrooms during exams; asking a teacher to do such policing while also trying to teach a lesson isn't going to work. This is what they're already trying to do (or were trying to do, before giving up) and it isn't working.

[tempsy]

Ok

[KyeRussell]

This didn’t even work 10 years ago and it certainly won’t work now. A typical Seattle kids data plan is probably better than the school WiFi anyway.

[finnh]

Social media is awful and terrible; no argument there. But SPS has much larger problems to address internally before tackling this broader societal issue.

[tempsy]

You can do two things at once.

[b1ue64]

You can't do them well if you're incompetent.

[remarkEon]

I don’t think anyone is imagining that SPS is going to implement social media regulation, it’s asking the courts (and indirectly Congress) to do that.