The New York Times is reporting that various social media companies have actually made it a policy to try to engage school-aged users during the school day. “Snapchat sent phone alerts to adolescents during school hours, urging them to share what was going on in their classrooms. Meta paid “teen ambassadors” to promote Instagram and hand out swag to their friends at school. TikTok gave the National PTA millions of dollars, in part to throw school events about online safety and provide favorable comments to journalists.”

Ok, as if social media’s threat to kids’ focus, attention, and capacity for socialization wasn’t enough, now we find out that our children’s educations are being purposefully undermined.

While I am not, in general, a person who uses the concepts of good and evil in my life, I can say without hesitation that THIS is evil.

To intentionally grab children and teenagers’ attention away from their teachers and their work at school? For the purpose of larger usership and thus larger profits? 

Evil.

“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.”

Evil.

No matter how good a teacher is, they cannot compete with YouTube. And no matter how interesting the conversation might be in the cafeteria, evidently, it also cannot compete with social media. During class, kids are indeed looking at their phones under their desks, and during free time, according to the reports of some teens I know, many are sitting in silence, looking at their own phones.

Evan Spiegel, who co-founded Snapchat is quoted in the New York Times article as having said of the early users of his ap: “We were thrilled to hear that most of them were high school students who were using Snapchat as a new way to pass notes in class.”

Ok, maybe evil is not the best word to describe the motivation behind the creation of this and other social media platforms. Perhaps it takes more words: for example, the relentless pursuit of users at any cost. Or amoral business practices that treat human users as mere avenues for growth rather than as sentient creatures whose well-being matters.

According to one article in The Journal of the American Medical Association, phone use during school hours is associated with negative academic outcomes. The study states the obvious, that phones create distraction from learning. This study found that even kids with restrictions placed on their phone use through an app that limits the amount of time a child can spend on their phone averaged 1.5 hours on smartphones during the school day. And a quarter spent two hours or more per day with social apps being the most frequently accessed. Subtract this from the estimated 8.5 hours that kids ages 13 – 18 generally spend on their phones per day (Jackson, 2026), and you have 6.5 hours of phone use at home, when many kids might be doing homework.

Yet another study (Tezler et al, 2026) found that kids use their phones during every hour of the school day, spending a third of their day on their phones. This resulted in what they called “reduced cognitive control”, that is, poorer self-regulation and challenges to cognitive development.

This is an enormous problem.

And not just for school kids. College students and even medical and law students, I’ve seen in my practice have complained to me about how hard it is to study. They feel compelled to check their phones quite literally every other minute. Some have resorted to deleting all their aps, some have had to put parental restrictions on their own phones and some just put their phones in another room when they study. But inevitably, many tell me they give in and add back the aps or bring their phones back into the room with them. Their self-control is insufficient in the face of the demand and the allure of the smartphone.

The word addiction has been used.

So – the evidence, both research-based and anecdotal, is clear. As Tezler et al said,  ” These findings highlight the need for school-level policies and digital literacy programs that address not only overall screen time but also habitual smartphone-checking behaviors that fragment attention.”

Amen.

It is time to take phones away from kids during school hours. It is time to educate kids as well as adults as to the effect of frequent social app use and app checking. And it is time to bring the companies that purposefully manipulate all of us to justice.

References

Kaitlyn Burnell, et al (2025). Smartphone engagement during school hours among US youths. JAMA Network Open.Vol. 8, No. 8

Jackson, J. (2026) Smartphone use cuts into school hours with social media leading the way. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-smartphone-school-hours-social-media.html

Tezler, E. et al (2026. Smartphone use duing school hours and association with cognitive control in youths aged 11 to 18 years. JAMA Netw OpenPublished Online: March 9, 2026