Teen Social Media Addiction Is Big Business

Social media companies deliberately worked to recruit and addict teens, the New York Times reported yesterday, citing internal documents from social media companies uncovered in recent court cases.

• Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta paid “teen ambassadors” to promote their products and hand out gifts at school.
• Snapchat sent out alerts to teens during school hours, encouraging them to post about what was happening in the classroom.
• TikTok parent company ByteDance sponsored school events about online safety. This wasn’t to help but to “positively raise ByteDance’s profile among parents,” the internal documents stated.
• TikTok also decided against disabling notifications during school hours, while Snapchat discussed how best to use “under the desk” time when students were discreetly looking at their phones instead of paying attention to their teachers.

“The outcry, long focused on social media’s harm to mental health, has now shifted to its upending of the classroom,” wrote the New York Times. “Many school districts are banning smartphones, and some are reevaluating their reliance on devices like Chromebooks, the inexpensive laptops made by YouTube’s parent company, Google.”

As teachers and parents struggled with the epidemic of distracted and influenced students, app makers actively worked against them.

• In 2012, Snapchat cofounder Evan Spiegel said he was “thrilled to hear” that most of their users “were high school students who were using Snapchat as a new way to pass notes in class.”

An Alabama school superintendent summed up what was happening in a note to parents:

Snapchat is the No. 1 cause of drama in school-aged children. If you want to protect your child, make them delete it.

Social employees alerted their bosses to the danger. One was told, “If we assume teens are going to do this anyway, we’d rather them be here on TikTok.”

“By designing a fire hose of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears, and by displacing physical play and in-person socializing, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale.”
—Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation

• These internal documents give us a good look at how intentional this process was. Teens weren’t accidentally swept up as social media marketed itself to more mature adults. They were the target.

Ephesians 5:16 warns us that we must be “[r]edeeming the time, because the days are evil.” Yet in these most evil days, we have the most addictive time-wasters.

Free yourself from them. The May-June Philadelphia Trumpet can help: Read our infographic “Social Media Destroys Young Minds” and article “The Quiet Gains of Logging Off.”