How social media platforms keep students hooked: Notifications during school hours and paid ‘teen ambassadors’

TikTok executives decided not to disable notifications during school hours, ignoring recommendations from their own safety team, and paid millions of dollars to parents’ and teachers’ associations to promote the social network in schools. Snapchat sent alerts to teenagers while they were in class urging them to share what was happening in the classroom. Google executives knew that YouTube was recommending videos to students during the school day that were unrelated to their lessons. Meta paid “teen ambassadors” to promote Instagram and hand out gifts to their classmates.

These are some of the practices revealed in a set of internal documents obtained by The New York Times and included in the class action lawsuit filed by more than 1,400 U.S. school districts against Meta, Snap (Snapchat’s parent company), TikTok, and YouTube. The lawsuit, filed in 2023, targets the four platforms most used by young people for harming their academic performance and mental health. The documents analyzed by the NYT disclose some of the platforms’ tactics to ensure, at all costs, that they become part of young people’s daily lives.

School districts argue that the apps’ addictive design undermines teachers’ work. “It is so constantly tempting to these kids to be on a platform that promises endless, infinite, varied entertainment rather than actually focusing on what they should be at school to do,” one of the schools’ lawyers told The New York Times.

The companies, for their part, say they have strengthened safety on their platforms with parental controls and restrictions on minors’ accounts. However, as Bloomberg reported last week, the four companies reached an out-of-court settlement with the schools in Breathitt County, a small Kentucky district with about 1,500 students that had sought $3 million in damages. The companies agreed to pay Breathitt $27 million: $9 million from Meta, $8 million from Snap, another $8 million from TikTok, and $2 million from Google.

More legal fronts

The wave of lawsuits facing social networks in the U.S. has three prongs. One is the school districts’ cases, some of whose documents were released on Friday. Another, focused on the platforms’ harmful effects on mental health, is being brought by parents and relatives of teens who have suffered mental health disorders, eating disorders, or even suicide.

The third, aimed at Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram and Messenger), was filed by the attorneys general of 41 states — governed by both Democrats and Republicans — for harming children with its products and failing to disclose those dangers. “Meta has profited from children’s pain by intentionally designing its platforms with manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in October 2023 after filing the joint lawsuit. “Social media companies, including Meta, have contributed to a national youth mental health crisis and they must be held accountable.”

“We expect many more documents to come to light this summer as evidence in the California trial [the jurisdiction where the main suits are filed],” engineer Frances Haugen, who leaked 21,000 Facebook documents, said last week in an interview with EL PAÍS. “We will also see the start of the federal part of the class actions by families, individuals, and school districts. So over the next few months we will see how the different pieces of the puzzle fit together. That will be the next major legal front in this battle.”

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