‘Teachers Are Going to Hate It’: How Social Media Apps Hooked Teens at School

Article excerpt

Internal documents reveal how major tech companies engineered their social media apps to capture and hold teenagers' attention during school hours, deploying tactics that schools say have severely damaged educational outcomes. The strategy, detailed in confidential materials obtained by researchers, shows deliberate design choices meant to maximize engagement and time-on-app among minors. School administrators and teachers report that constant notifications and algorithmic feeds have fragmented student focus, tanked academic performance, and created behavioral problems in classrooms. Tech giants built these features knowing they would compete with learning, according to the disclosed documents. The findings intensify ongoing debates about whether schools should ban phones or whether the burden falls on tech companies to redesign their products.