As of last month, more than 2,400 claims were pending in the overseen by a judge in California. More than 10,000 individual cases and nearly 800 school district claims were pending across . And more than 40 have filed or joined lawsuits against the companies.

The lawsuits allege that the platforms were deliberately engineered to maximize addictive use among children and teenagers, and that the companies knowingly designed them to drive young people’s prolonged engagement, despite mounting evidence that they can be harmful.

Their recommendation algorithms amplify harmful material, the lawsuits allege. And weak age-verification systems have allowed underaged users broad access. The companies that run the platforms knew about these risks, they say, but failed to warn users and families about the mental health risks, often revealed by their own research. 

The companies have disputed these claims, maintaining that their platforms include safety tools. But one of them, Meta, which runs Facebook, acknowledged that the lawsuits could be costly, this year with the Securities and Exchange Commission warning investors that the lawsuits and mass arbitration demands could “significantly impact” its finances.

That could happen soon. In late March, two landmark verdicts came down within 24 hours of each other: On March 25, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for designing that harmed a 20-year-old woman who started using them as a child. The jury awarded her $6 million. The companies that run Snapchat and TikTok were also named as defendants, but reached undisclosed settlements before trial.

A day earlier, a New Mexico jury for failing to protect kids from child exploitation and ordered it to pay $375 million for consumer-protection violations. “You add it all up and it could be hundreds of billions of dollars,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt recently.

As with the tobacco and opioid lawsuits, one major question is emerging: Where will the money go? Will the proceeds benefit children, or will they end up simply padding states’ and school districts’ budgetary bottom lines?

To answer this, The 74 turned to Elizabeth Gaines, founder and CEO of the , a nonprofit focused on helping governments and communities figure out how to pay for programs and services that support children and youth. The organization doesn’t run the actual programs, but helps leaders and policymakers build sustainable funding systems to establish and keep these programs going, such as early childhood education, afterschool programs and mental health services.

It specializes in so-called “strategic public financing,” which pushes communities to examine how much they spend on children, how much they actually need and where they can find or generate more funding for, in Gaines’s words, “deeper investments” for kids. 

A lifelong child advocate, Gaines has worked in the field for 30 years, from think tanks to state-level advocacy. She founded the funding project eight years ago. “I looked around and realized that no one at the national level was really focusing on the public financing of child and youth development and programs and services writ large,” she said.

The project now tracks more than 300 federal, state and local funding streams that support children and youth from cradle to career.

Gaines began her career in her home state of Missouri, where she worked on ensuring one key goal: that proceeds from the 1998 benefited children. 

Spoiler alert: They didn’t. A budget shortfall prompted lawmakers to redirect millions from the settlement into the state’s general fund. Gaines now admits, “We did not get involved early enough in that process to really be able to shape the outcome of those dollars.”

Nearly 30 years later, with thousands of cases focused squarely on the harms of social media, she is working to build a coalition of groups that can persuade governors, lawmakers, educators and attorneys general to keep the focus on uplifting kids, not filling budget holes. The coming legal settlements, she said, are payback for that harm. “And [when] they pay back in, it needs to go back into the public good.”

The 74’s Greg Toppo recently sat down with Gaines for a wide-ranging conversation on her work and the “game-changing” potential of the social media payouts.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

First let’s talk about the tobacco payouts. You were in Missouri at the time. As you look back on that now, what were the mistakes?

The tobacco settlement was the Wild West. I remember we had $20 million that the governor and the legislature had committed, and they were like, “Yes, we’re going to put that towards positive youth development — and it’s going to be huge!” Back then, that was big dollars for Missouri. And then there was a little budget crisis, and the governor withheld those dollars. It was like, “Oh, sorry.” But that was happening all over the country at that time. There are some states that did a good job of setting tobacco settlement dollars aside and having a real method to how they dispersed them, but for the most part, those dollars went into the general fund and never really tracked in any significant way. 

What about the opioid settlements?

They’ve gotten better, and I think we’ve been really guided by in the opioid settlement, which was like, “Here are the 10 things that these dollars are intended to be used for.” And so states have taken that, some of them more seriously than others, as the funds roll out. 

So let’s assign a number, a score of one through 10 to the tobacco settlements in terms of where the money went. 

Writ large, that’s so hard. I mean, anecdotally, because I haven’t done a full research study, my sense is probably three out of 10. States weren’t putting funds towards something that was prevention-oriented or reinvesting in the community. 

I want to make sure I understand what the Children’s Funding Project does. I know what your objective is. I wonder: Do you have any leverage, or is this all just advisory? Are you on the outside looking in, saying, “Hey, governors, you should do this”? Or do you have power to make these things happen?

We have no real hard power in this. What we are attempting to do is go around and get regulations in place. And what we really need is to then replace that with deep investments in young people. We’re narrowing in on the attorneys general who are going to be at the table, because they’re leads among the states in the suits, making sure that they understand that it’s not just a settlement to punish the companies and then wherever those dollars go, so be it. There’s a safety aspect that they’re working on: Protect young people, change the platforms, make sure we’re not having faulty products like we’ve had. 

But then there’s a youth justice component to this too.  And people just haven’t gotten there yet. So I think we’re just ahead, honestly, of where zeitgeist is on this, and when we do get it in front of people, they’re like, “Yes, that’s where the money needs to go.” We’ve got a former attorney general who’s advising us on how the A.G. world works because it’s new to our field.

So no, we are not involved in the suits directly, and that’s intentional. That’s somebody else’s job. Our job, as the people who care about funding for kids, is to focus on making sure that money goes to the right place.

So let’s talk about that. What are the things we should be buying with it?

Spokane, Washington, has this thing that they started out of their schools called . Basically what this buys is some joy and some curiosity and some investment in things for a group of young people that have kind of had a rough decade. It’s not been awesome to be a young person. And so this is to say, “You want to learn to play the trumpet? You want to learn to code? You want to learn to build trails out in the woods? Whatever it is that’s speaking to you as a young person, we want to put an infrastructure in place that actually allows you to go and explore that.” And so they’re doing it in Spokane, which is great. 

You talk about a “rough decade” for young people. It sounds like you want to offer them opportunities that maybe even their predecessors, their parents, didn’t have. 

I will just say this: There are special cases where young people have gotten to do it. I ran youth programs 30 years ago. The program that I ran became one of the very first . And there are people who I hired that work there to this day who are incredibly talented youth workers, who now for generations have been saving young people and really helping them find their calling. And to have young people in relationships with talented adults who know how to do that — and other talented young people, what we call “near peers,” who can provide that kind of guidance — is something we’ve never had.

21st Century Community Learning Centers have basically been since years ago. It’s kind of crazy to think that we’ve never invested more than a billion dollars in that as a country.

If you went to an attorney general, and they said, “Just lay it all out for me,” what are the possibilities? Obviously there is a constituency that will say, “Just give the schools more money.” Just make classes smaller, improve buildings, put in HVAC, and on and on and on. Pump money into the system. Do you find yourselves in opposition to that?

They should, just as a matter of course, pay for HVAC systems for our schools, and so using this special pot of money to do that is not going to have the intended impact that we want to have. And given the direct link between the harms related to youth mental health and what we know about investing in prevention and upstream opportunities,  this is a chance to really make a significant investment in those kinds of things. So the coalition that we’re building is really trying to bring together the people not only that are in the comprehensive afterschool funding community, but into sports and play, outdoor education, arts, civic engagement leadership, youth in service types of activities. There’s a bunch of stuff that’s always been underfunded. This is a chance to quadruple down on it.

Quadruple down? 

Well, I’ll just go ahead and admit it’s going to be more than that. 

You’re talking about the harms of social media, and obviously thinking of ways to to remedy that. Who are the people you would work with to make some of these things happen?  

Let me be clear: We are really trying to coalesce any organization. Largely they’re community based organizations. There’s the names that people know: the Boys and Girls Clubs and the Y’s, but there’s also really organically grown, community based organizations that, in many cases, are the most effective at reaching young people that are hard to reach in the places where they are. And those folks have always just done that work and found ways to do it, but have been deeply underfunded. And so if I was the boss of social media litigation, I would say investing in those homegrown, local organizations would be a really powerful thing to do. We’re trying to bring all of those folks to one table, and then there’s going to have to be state-by-state approaches. 

Could you envision a landscape where offering funding to public schools is in opposition to the Girl Scouts or the Campfire Girls or Boys and Girls Clubs?  

Certainly that could happen. But our intent is to make this like what they’ve done in Spokane. That’s superintendent-led. I think the schools are going to have to get that this is an opportunity to really do some things that they get pressured to focus on, when really they have a job to do already and they can’t seem to layer the social-emotional well-being of young people on top of what they’re trying to do. 

I was talking to somebody today about something totally unrelated, and they used the term “human flourishing.” That sounds kind of like what you’re talking about.

Yeah. I mean, listen: With the onset of AI and the way that the world is shifting, I think there’s going to be a huge need that becomes so clear for folks about just the value of being human and how we raise good humans. It’s going to become increasingly important.

You talked about attorneys general. Are there any who you feel are leading the way?

You probably saw [New Mexico Attorney General] , the New Mexico case, which is not actually part of the larger case, . [A jury in March found that Meta had failed to protect young users from child predators on Instagram and Facebook.] It was the first one at the state level out of the gate that has gotten an early verdict. And it was pretty powerful. He was only looking at one set of harms related to child exploitation. So just on that one harm alone, they said was owed. And then if you extrapolate that to all the other harms, it’s significant. Certainly Kentucky’s, A.G., Colorado’s, California’s. But it’s a truly bipartisan group of A.G.s that are leading on this. 

These strike me as not just life-changing numbers but just system-changing numbers. I mean this has a potential to really just change how we even consider what’s possible. 

That’s the point, and that’s, I think, why people get very excited about this as a solution, as a chance to really dream and to get young people excited and engaged. “Game-changing” is how we’ve been describing it to the field. And we’ve got to stop thinking about just like, “Let’s fight for those little afterschool dollars that we’ve had all this time.” No, this is about a bigger play.

The “dangerous and untested” chatbot, the mother said, “abused and preyed on my son, manipulating him into taking his own life.” It essentially assisted his suicide, the mother alleges, prompting him to isolate from friends and family and at one point even asking if he had a suicide plan, according to the lawsuit.

In its Oct. 29 , the company said the change will go into effect no later than Nov. 25. Character.AI will limit teen users to two hours per day with chatbots before then, ramping it down in the coming weeks.

It also said it will establish its own AI Safety Lab, an independent non-profit “dedicated to innovating safety alignment for next-generation AI entertainment features.”

To offer perspective on the move and on issues surrounding AI safety, privacy and digital addiction, The 74’s Greg Toppo spoke with , a Seton Hall University law professor and director of its . Bernstein has also created a school outreach program for students and parents, introducing many for the first time to the idea of “technology overuse.” 

An intellectual property lawyer, Bernstein noticed around 2015 or 2016 that “things were changing around me” when it came to technology. “I had three small kids, and I realized that I would go to birthday parties — the kids are not talking to each other. They’re looking at their phones! I’d go to see school plays, and I couldn’t see my kids on the stage because everybody was holding their phones in front of them.”

Likewise, she felt less productive “because I was constantly texting and emailing instead of focusing.”

But it wasn’t until whistleblowers began revealing the hidden designs behind so many social media tools that Bernstein considered how she could help herself and others limit their use.

In 2021, the whistleblower , the primary source for The Wall Street Journal’s series, told congressional lawmakers that her employer’s products “harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy.” Creating better, safer social media was possible, Haugen said, but Facebook “is clearly not going to do so on its own.”

In her testimony, Haugen zeroed in on the social media giant’s algorithm and designs. In her writing and speaking, Bernstein maintains that tech companies like Facebook — rebranded as Meta — manipulate us to keep us online as long as possible, with invisible designs that “target our deepest human vulnerabilities.” For instance, they use a tool called , prominently on display on Facebook and Instagram, in which the page never ends. “We just keep scrolling,” she wrote recently. “They took away our stopping cues.”

Similarly, video apps such as YouTube and TikTok rely on , in which one video automatically follows another indefinitely.

In 2023, Bernstein put her findings into a book, . Since then, dozens of state attorneys general and school districts have sued to force social media companies to reform — and Bernstein says this approach may also help parents and schools battle the growing threat of AI companion bots. 

Late last month, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators to make AI companions off-limits to minors. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo, a co-sponsor, said more than 70% of kids now use them. “Chatbots develop relationships with kids using fake empathy and are encouraging suicide,” he wrote. “We in Congress have a moral duty to enact bright-line rules to prevent further harm from this new technology.”

The move comes weeks after the said it was investigating seven chatbot developers, saying it was looking into “how these firms measure, test and monitor potentially negative impacts of this technology on children and teens.”

In her conversation with The 74, Bernstein said the FTC probe amounts to “another pressure point” that may help change how tech companies operate. “But it’s not just the FTC. It’s the lawsuits, and it’s bad PR that comes from the lawsuits, and hopefully there’ll be regulation. Litigation is expensive. Investors might not want to invest in these new products because there’s risk.”

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

The obvious interest we have in this is that we’re seeing Character.AI’s new policy, which limits access to its chatbot companions to users 18 or older. I imagine folks like you would say it’s only the first step.

Just the fact that they are taking some precautions means hopefully some kids will not be exposed to what’s been happening — convincing them to kill themselves, convincing them to not talk to their parents, to stay away from their friends. That’s a good thing. 

On the other hand?

I’ve researched how tech companies, especially Meta and other companies, have been behaving for years. So I’m a bit suspicious, because we tend to see these kinds of moves when they’re threatened legally. So it’s not so surprising that it’s happening. They’re under pressure.

In my mind, there are two questions: First of all, what will this look like exactly? In the past, for example, you would see Meta, every time there’s a big privacy breach, they would apologize and say, “We’re fixing it,” and they’ll fix something small and not fix the big thing. So what are they really doing? What kind of age verification mechanisms are they going to use? Secondly, they said they’re creating some space for teens. What is this going to look like? We don’t know. And I believe that until there’s real regulation at stake, we can’t be sure that they will take real precautions. 

I read a earlier this year in which you used the phrase “collective legal action,” saying that this is what’s needed to exert pressure on tech companies to change their designs, which trap users into “overuse.” That’s a fairly recent development, correct?

At the beginning, the people who were writing on this were mostly psychologists. Parents thought it was their own fault. The idea was, “Let me just fix my habits.” It’s self-help. The books that came before me were mostly talking about self-help methods. And when I was thinking about collective action, I realized: Parents can’t really change things by themselves, because you can’t isolate your kid and not give them a cell phone, not give them social media. It becomes an endless fight. And so I thought this has to be changed through collective action, through pressure — through governmental pressure, litigation. 

Jonathan Haidt’s book talks about collective action through parents doing things together in order to not have your kid be the only one who does not have social media or a phone. The idea is that it’s not our fault. It has to be done differently.

And to your point, a lot of this is by design, whether it’s social media or games or AI companions. By design, they’re meant to keep you there, keep you in place, keep you engaged. That’s something that, until recently, was not on a lot of people’s radar.

It took after to come out and explain how it works, to understand it as a business model. There’s no accident. We’re getting these products for free: Gmail for free, Facebook for free. We are paying with our time and our data. They collect data on us in order to target advertising — that’s how they make money. And they need us online for as long as possible so they can collect the data — and also so we will see the ads. So they need to find ways to keep us online. And there are different mechanisms like the infinite scroll. And they come up with new ones. AI companions have new addictive mechanisms: the way that they , they always flatter you. For kids it’s even more addictive, but even for adults it’s, “You’re always doing a great job.”

It’s meant to keep you talking, meant to keep you engaged. You focus a lot on games and social media, but it strikes me that AI companions make those things seem quaint in terms of their addictive qualities, or the potential for real peril.

I agree with you. If you have a spectrum where social media is addictive — people spend many hours online, and they’re not interacting face-to-face — that’s an issue. And you see this with AI companions too. But what’s concerning about AI companions is that it’s much worse for kids. If you think about it, if you’re a kid and you go to middle school, kids are not nice. It’s much nicer to chat with somebody who’s always nice to you. Falling in love and getting your heart broken is not fun. There are many websites that just offer girlfriends that cater to you. So for me, the scariest thing is that kids will just never really develop the skills to have these relationships. And some adults may also stop preferring them.

About a year ago, I wrote a piece in which I talked to a college student, maybe 19 or 20 years old, who admitted that essentially he had outsourced advice about his romantic life to ChatGPT — he had a girlfriend, and whenever they had a fight or disagreement, he would excuse himself, go into the bathroom and ask ChatGPT what he should be doing. I can see that both ways: On the one hand, it just seems incredible. On the other hand, I can see where he’s basically looking for good advice. He’s looking for guidance. What do you make of that?

People say you can get advice, and you can practice your dating skills. I’ll give you something that happened to me, which is on a different scale: I was traveling abroad, and I was in this restaurant, and the menu was in a different language. So what did I do? I took a picture of the menu and uploaded it to ChatGPT and got it translated to English. While I was doing it, a young man came up to my partner and asked to translate. So what happened? I was already busy looking at my phone because I had a translation. My partner was speaking to this young man who was very happy to speak, and they were having a great conversation. 

That’s an example of the kind of things we’re giving up. This guy you wrote about, instead of going to the bathroom, maybe could have asked a friend, developed a deeper relationship with a friend. Maybe they would share experiences. But he gets used to getting the immediate answer from somebody else, and you didn’t develop these relationships. 

We miss out on the possibility of having a human interaction. 

Yes.

In its announcement, Character.AI actually apologized to its younger users, saying that many of them had told the company how important these characters had become to them. And I’ve heard that before. I wonder: How do we as adults start to think about the flip side of this, that it’s difficult for young people to tear themselves away from these things they’ve created? Do you have any sympathy for that?

I have concern, actually, because these kids, sometimes they kill themselves for these bots. So I am concerned about what will happen to kids who are very attached when these bots are suddenly gone. And you hear news stories even of adults who suddenly lost characters they were attached to. It’s a bit like how do you get people who are addicted off the addiction when you suddenly cut them off? These are things we’ve never even thought of.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you think is an important piece of this?

An important piece of this is that you don’t yet have every teen, every kid, attached to an AI companion. So there’s a window of opportunity to create change. Social media is much more difficult, because by the time we realized how bad it was, everybody was on social media. The money interests were so big that they would fight every law in court. So it’s really important to move fast and also understand that Character.AI is a small part of the problem. Because it’s not just these specialized websites like Character.AI. It’s ChatGPT — one of the last lawsuits was . The AI bots in ChatGPT are becoming more human, so it’s important that any action is against these bots, against the type of characteristics they have and to regulate how they behave. Just getting rid of Character.AI is not going to solve the problem.

The author of two college textbooks and five books for non-academic readers, she is equally at home researching and writing about adolescent mental health, sleep disorders, digital technology, homework and narcissism. She was one of the first experts to warn nearly that smartphones could hold negative consequences for our mental health. A decade after the advent of the iPhone, Twenge went viral in 2017 with an that asked, provocatively, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”

A professor at San Diego State University, she has collaborated for years with the researcher and author Jonathan Haidt, whose 2024 book was a mega-bestseller that has helped build momentum for school cellphone bans in a growing number of states — .

And she is one of the few experts in the education and mental health world to have appeared on HBO’s .

Twenge’s 2017 book, , looked at how modern teens are somehow both more connected than previous generations and less prepared for adulthood. In it, she theorized that depression rates among teens are rising because they spend more time online, less time with friends in person, and less time sleeping — a problematic combination. 

The dilemmas Twenge identified in 2017 are only getting worse: By 2023, the typical American teen was spending nearly five hours a day using social media, recent research finds, with severe depression rates rising. In , girls who were heavy users of social media were three times as likely to be depressed as non-users.

Her , out Tuesday, offers practical guidelines for parents raising kids in the age of ubiquitous connectivity and sophisticated — some would say addictive — social media.

Twenge doesn’t shy away from challenging harried parents to do better. Among her suggestions: No one — parents included — should have electronic devices in the bedroom overnight. Likewise, she says, the first handheld device a kid should receive is a “basic phone” that allows calls, texts and not much else.

“It’s a really big myth out there that if kids are going to communicate, it has to be on social media,” she said. “That’s just not true.”

Ahead of its publication, Twenge spoke with The 74’s Greg Toppo about her rules, her work with Haidt and her belief that we need stiffer laws that keep young people off social media until they’re old enough to drive.

Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  

I wanted to start with a quote from your book. It’s a parent’s description of his 10-year-old after she got her first smartphone: “She suddenly wasn’t playing with her younger siblings as much. Novels were promptly cast aside. She wasn’t around to help with dinner anymore. She danced less, laughed less. She was quieter. Our home was quieter.” That’s so heartbreaking, but I’m guessing it’s not unusual.

I don’t think it is. Many, many parents describe how their kids are different after they give them a smartphone. And it’s especially heartbreaking when that’s a 10-year-old, but even when it’s a 16-year-old who might otherwise be ready. It’s very noticeable how they change after they get that phone in their pocket.

Were there any particular data points about smartphones and social media that persuaded you they were causing a mental health crisis?

It was a slow process for me, and it wasn’t an immediate conclusion when I first started to see these trends in adolescent mental health. It was first a process of ruling out obvious causes, like the economy, which wasn’t aligned at all, and any other big events that might happen. I would trace it, really, to the big that I work with on teens, where there was just this combination all at once of not just rising depression, but teens spending less time with each other in person and less time sleeping. And then realizing, “Well, wait: What might explain all of those things happening at the same time?” 

And it seemed clear that a good amount of that answer is probably smartphones and social media, particularly after I found a Pew Research Center poll about the ownership of smartphones, that [it] in the U.S. at the end of 2012. And that’s right around the same time all these changes were happening.

I want to dig into a few of your rules. No. 3: “No social media until age 16 or later.” That seems a lot tougher than what most families practice. Why 16? And what do you say to parents who worry about their kids’ social isolation and FOMO or Fear Of Missing Out?

I have not found that with my kids — that they’ve been socially isolated for not having social media. Most other parents I talked to who have put off social media have also not found that with their kids. Social media is just one mechanism for communicating. There’s so many others. Kids can call each other, they can text each other — they do a lot of texting. They can FaceTime each other, they can get together in person. Usually that ends up tilting toward texting, but it does not have to be social media. It’s a really big myth out there that if kids are going to communicate, it has to be on social media. That’s just not true.

And that leads to rule No. 4, where you advocate “basic phones” — your phrase — before smartphones. In a world where even school assignments need Internet access, is that practical for most families?

Yeah, because kids have laptops. And if the family can’t afford to buy them a laptop, almost all schools provide a laptop. So they have Internet access on their laptop even if they don’t have it on their phone. And laptops have come so far down in price too, that if you haven’t bought a laptop recently, or if you use Mac laptops like I do and my kids do now, you might not realize you can get a . So that’s another big thing: Maybe 10 years ago, if a kid doesn’t have Internet access on their phone, then they don’t have Internet access at all. That’s just not true in the current landscape.

Although you do have problems with school laptops.

Oh, yes. I mean, this is a thing! They get Internet access on the laptop, whether it’s a school laptop or a personal one, and then that opens a whole other can of worms. Absolutely true. Laptops are the bane of my existence as a parent, particularly the school laptop, although they’ve gotten a little bit better, at least in my district. 

Actually, that was going to be my next question, this parental controls thing. It sounds like your district is being responsive.

Well, on that issue, they still don’t have a coherent phone policy during the school day. In the high school, it’s especially bad. That’s something I’m hoping will change. It is changing in a lot of schools around the country, thankfully. A lot more schools are doing “no phones during the school day, bell to bell,” which is what needs to happen.

A big message of the book is phone-free schools. And I know you’ve worked with , who has pushed for schools to get rid of phones. A few critics have said that this is a to a complex problem, and that it’s not entirely clear that phones are actually causing the mental health issues that Haidt has become a best-seller writing about. How do you respond to that criticism?

There are a couple of things to unpack there. For one thing, even if you take mental health out of the equation, kids should still not have their phones at school for academic and focus reasons, for the reason of developing social skills by talking to their friends at lunch, for the reason that a bell-to-bell ban is actually easier to enforce than a classroom-by-classroom ban. There are so many reasons for it that don’t even include mental health. 

The second question is [about] the research on phones and social media and mental health: We’ve known for quite a while that teens who spend more time on social media are more likely to be depressed or unhappy. Almost every single study finds that. Where you sometimes get more debate is, “O.K., that’s correlation. What about causation?” But in the last 10 years, we’ve gotten a lot more studies, and the studies that ask people to cut back or give up social media for at least three weeks a month or so, almost all of those studies show an improvement in well-being. And I don’t want to get too in the weeds here, but that’s actually a little bit shocking, because by definition in those experiments, you’re taking people who are at average use and having them cut back to low. 

That’s actually not where we see the biggest effects in the correlational studies. The heaviest users are much more likely to be depressed than the average or light users. So, you know, you can’t ethically do an experiment that would really answer the exact question: You can’t take 12-year-olds, randomly assign them to spend eight hours a day on social media, and then see what happens. At least I hope not.

In the book, you talk about the 10 rules “creating a firewall for kids against anxiety, attention issues and constant insecurity.” I think most parents would get behind that. But let’s be honest, they’re users of these tools themselves. How do we craft rules around web dependence and social media without being hypocrites?

Parents have to be role models. Parents are also allowed a small amount of what I call “digital hypocrisy.” Because they’re adults, they have jobs, they may be responsible for elderly parents, etc. But that said, parents should think about their technology use as well. They should get their phones and electronic devices out of their bedroom at night. They should also consider doing things like not having social media on their phone. If they want to use Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, do it on your laptop. That’s what I do. I mean, I don’t have much social media to begin with. I have X, but I don’t have it on my phone, and that’s very much a purposeful decision. During family dinners, unless there’s a really specific reason for me to have my phone with me, it’s upstairs.

That seems to be an easy one: Phones away at dinner.

Well, you’d think so, but you’ve got to get the whole family on board, and sometimes husbands are not really into that.

I want to skip to Rule No. 8: “Give your kids real-world freedom,” which will probably be met with some resistance. I have a 4-year-old grandson, and when I read your recommendation to let 4-to-7-year-olds go find items a few aisles away in the grocery store, I shouted, “Hell no!”

Why? Why is there, do you think, a resistance to that idea?

I have nightmares about this child being snatched from me at Safeway. I guess I want you to just pull me back from the edge, if you would.

I mean, that is not just unlikely to happen — the chances of that are so infinitesimal it probably shouldn’t even factor into our decision making. There’s one stat in there, and I forget the exact number, but someone calculated that if you wanted your kid to get kidnapped, how many hours — it turned out to be years — would they have to be in your front yard for that to happen? It’s something like 100,000 years. 

O.K., well that helps.

And a four-year-old loves that stuff! They love being grown up. I mean, look, even if you don’t do the grocery store thing, make sure they learn how to tie their own shoes, that they know how to get dressed. I remember when my girls were that age, and it occasionally amazed me when I would be with other moms in various situations and their kids couldn’t dress themselves at that age, and that’s where it starts. 

At pretty much every age, the great thing is that giving kids independence makes it easier for parents. It is easier as a parent if your 4-year-old can dress themselves. It is easier if your teenager makes dinner once a week. It’s good for everybody.

A lot of people might see this freedom rule as somehow contradictory to some of the other rules, in which you talk about adults being “in control.” Can you parse that?

For sure. Jon has said this as well — and I completely agree: We have kids in the real world and underprotected them online, and these principles are just trying to get those two to balance. When you’re talking about the real-world freedom thing, it’s not a matter of letting kids completely run wild and do whatever they want. We’re talking about giving kids some of the freedoms that parents themselves had when they were kids, and to build independence in a way that is really good for kids and good for them as they grow up. 

I can’t even remember who said this to me when I had young kids: “You’re not raising children, you’re raising adults.” And that’s just so true. That is your job as a parent. Giving kids some freedom and independence is a really, really key part of raising an adult.  

I wrote a whole book about learning games, and one of the powerful ideas that I took from that reporting is that many adults don’t realize video games have become. You acknowledge that, saying gaming is the primary way that some kids spend time with friends. But I gather that you see the risks as well. And I wonder if you could talk about that.

It really comes back to the principle of “Everything in moderation.” Many games are not as obviously toxic as social media. Games tend to be more in real time, more interactive. But is it a good idea for kids to be spending five or six hours a day gaming? Probably not. There have to be some limits.

You quote , the Facebook founder, admitting they’re “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” to keep users on the app. Given social media’s sophistication, are mere parental rules sufficient? I mean, don’t we need a bigger hammer, like legislation and policies? 

Absolutely! Yes! Yes! It would be absolutely amazing for parents and for kids if we had laws that verified age for social media. I mean, ideally, that would be age verification to make sure they’re 16 or older, to raise the minimum age to 16. But even if we just enforced existing law with the minimum of 13, that would be progress, given the enormous numbers of 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds who are on social media, often without their parents’ permission — often explicitly against their parents’ permission — and actually against the law [Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule] that was passed in 1998.

What is the biggest obstacle to getting better regulation, or, to your point, to enforcing the existing regulations?

It’s interesting. The barrier is not the inability to verify age or the inability to verify age without a government ID. There are so many companies that will verify age now that they have their . It can be done in many different ways. The biggest barrier is tech companies themselves. Any time a state passes a law about verifying age on social media or even pornography sites, the companies — every single time. They have sued to keep those laws from going into effect.

Are any emerging technologies that parents should be concerned about? Do your rules need updating for AI or virtual reality or whatever comes next?

AI chatbots are what a lot of parents are rightly worried about. And yes, you could certainly modify or add to the rules and say, “No AI chat bots until 16 or 18 — probably 18.” And of course, it depends on what we’re talking about. It is common for kids to use ChatGPT when they need to look up something for homework or even have it write their essays — that’s a whole other horrible discussion. But what I’m specifically referring to is the many chatbots out there right now that are supposed to be AI friends, or worse, . There’s already been a tragic case of a child who , apparently due to one of these AI girlfriends. It’s just really scary to think of kids having their first romantic relationship with an AI chatbot. It’s terrifying.

The good news is, if you follow that rule about your kids having basic phones, if you give them one of the phones that’s designed for kids, those phones do not allow AI relationship chatbots. It’s on their banned apps, just like social media and pornography and violence apps. Parents have such a tough job, and it’s nice that there are at least a few tools out there that can make their lives easier and keep their kids off of things like AI girlfriend and boyfriend chatbots.

In keeping with the theme of overwhelmed parents, I wonder: If I were to come to you as a parent and say, “Oh my God, Jean, 10 rules is a lot. If I could only do two or three, where would I start?” Is that even a smart thing to do? And if so, where would you start?

I would say, “No electronic devices in the bedroom overnight.” Start there, because the research is so solid on it, and it’s such a straightforward rule, and it works for everybody, of all ages. Your teenager can’t say, “Well, you do it differently,” or, “You get to be on social media.” No, actually, my phone is outside my bedroom when I sleep at night too. So that’s a great place to start. And then, just because they have so much utility, I would probably say the second rule, about basic phones, because even with all of the mess of the laptops, I’m just so happy and grateful that my kids did not have the Internet or social media in their pocket until they were older.

As a parent and a grandparent, I really appreciate you using your real life to inform a lot of these rules. In a way, it hardens them a bit, makes them more durable. Anything I haven’t asked you about that you feel needs to be in the mix?

Two things I’ll throw out there just in terms of pushbacks: With “No phones during the school day,” the pushback is often “What about school shootings?” And it’s actually less safe for students to have access to their phones during an active shooter situation. And I go through the reasons for that in that chapter. 

And then the real-world freedom piece: When you look at the things that I’m suggesting in terms of how to give your kids freedom, obviously letting them go off on their own in the real world is important, and you should do that too. But there are lots of things in that list of suggestions you can do without even leaving the house: teens making their own doctor and hairstylist appointments, for example, or middle-school kids, or even elementary school kids, cooking dinner for the family. Those are great experiences for kids to have without too much parental interference. 

You do have to — and I know this by experience — step back, especially with the cooking piece, and let them do it by themselves and learn how to make mistakes. It’s tempting to just be there when they’re doing that, but you learn quickly that if you leave them alone, they’ll figure it out. And then you can go do something else. Go and read that book you’ve been meaning to read for a while. Go for a walk. Watch TV. Have some relaxation time that you wouldn’t otherwise get. 

I wrote a piece a couple weeks ago on unschooling, this idea of pulling kids out of school and letting them find their own level and their own interests. This almost strikes me as unparenting.

It is — and I’m not a huge fan of unschooling, because it’s a rare kid it would actually work for — but it is. It’s the general idea that not being up in your kids’ business all the time is better for both parents and kids. It’s something we really have to consider more.

Ritika Shroff had the typical Gen Z experience with social media. At 13, she signed up for Instagram, then Snapchat. Later, she downloaded TikTok and worked her way through other popular platforms.

But in high school, she began to see downsides, feeling pressure when comparing her number of followers, test scores and experiences with those of her peers online.

“They’re doing X, Y and Z with their lives, and I think I got pulled into it,” Shroff said.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

Today, Shroff, a 19-year-old sophomore at American University in Washington, D.C., still sees the benefits of social media, such as allowing her to stay in touch with hometown friends from Des Moines, Iowa, and family in India. While she thinks there should be more rules around social media, she doesn’t think individual state actions, such as a state suing a platform, would make much difference.

“These small things won’t make an impact in the broader landscape,” Shroff said.

More states are hoping to rein in the harm that social media can do to teens’ mental health and privacy by approving laws that require age verification or parental consent, prohibit “addictive feeds” or ban the apps for minors. They also are taking social media companies to court.

But some experts say such efforts won’t make social media any safer. Instead, they fear the moves might infringe on people’s privacy and First Amendment rights — while potentially making the platforms harder for everyone to use.

“This is global media, and trying to regulate it at the micro level … the fear for a lot of people is that we’re going to end up with different rules for different states, which is just going to undercut the whole promise and potential of internet-based media and communication,” said Kevin Goldberg of the Freedom Forum, a nonprofit aimed at protecting First Amendment rights.

Some social media disputes are playing out at the federal level. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a bipartisan federal law banning TikTok, a popular video sharing platform, unless its China-based parent company agreed to sell the app. The ban briefly went into effect before President Donald Trump, who had tried unsuccessfully to ban TikTok by executive order in his first term, signed an executive order it for another 75 days.

But absent other federal action to curb social media’s effects on young people, many states are considering new legislation. In New York, a enacted in June prohibits social media platforms from providing to minors so-called addictive feeds without parental consent. New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, is drafting to enforce the law.

Social media feeds are designed to keep kids scrolling longer and longer to drive up ad revenue, noted state Democratic Sen. Andrew Gounardes, who sponsored the . Kids who are addicted to social media suffer mental health issues, and people who spend more time scrolling tend to struggle to navigate real-life relationships, he argued.

“So social media, for all the positives that might exist, has some real, deeply negative and dark downsides that we are finally seeing manifest, and we have to reconcile it,” Gounardes said.

But tech developers are concerned new state laws could weaken privacy protections for users, take away online mental health resources for marginalized communities and restrict the flow of online information, said Paul Lekas, the senior vice president and head of global public policy and government affairs at the Software & Information Industry Association, a trade association representing the digital content industry.

“The bills are all different, so it’s hard to say that all of them are good or all of them are bad,” Lekas said. “But a lot of concerns come up in a number of these bills.”

Age restrictions

Some research suggests that excessive is worsening young people’s mental health. Teens who spend the most time on social media are significantly more likely to exhibit negative emotions, such as sadness and anger, according to a 2023 Gallup .

A Florida that went into effect this month prohibits kids who are under 14 from having social media accounts. A user who is 14 or 15 would have to get parental consent before starting an account.

Ashley Moody, Florida’s Republican attorney general at the time, agreed not to enforce the law while a alleging it would restrict minors’ freedom of speech plays out. Moody was sworn into the U.S. Senate this week to replace Sen. Marco Rubio, the new U.S. secretary of state.

More measures are expected across the country during 2025 legislative sessions.

A new bill in would prohibit anyone under the age of 16 from creating social media accounts without verified parental permission. A similar bill was introduced in , but with an age limit of 18. A prefiled bill in would set the age at 13.

To verify age, some apps may require all users to upload a photo of their ID. This could be of particular concern for adult users who would have their full legal identity tied to their social media account, said Ash Johnson, a senior policy manager at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a think tank focused on public policy surrounding technology.

Rather than an outright ban on social media accounts for users under a certain age, increasing transparency and accountability measures for social media developers would improve the safety of the apps, Johnson said.

She pointed to California as an example. The state’s Age-Appropriate Design Code Act was partially from enforcement by a federal appeals court last year. It would have required companies to ensure that online services likely to be accessed by children are designed to eliminate the risk of harm to them.

Parental controls, Johnson said, also could make it easier for parents to oversee their child’s media presence by deciding what content they can access.

Instagram’s new , for example, automatically place teenage users into an account that limits who can contact them and the content they see — and anyone under the age of 16 will have to get parental permission before changing any of the safety features.

“It would give children a really customizable experience on social media depending on their individual developmental needs,” Johnson said.

A lot of the laws around the country are specifically designed to prevent younger people from either accessing certain content online or entire social media platforms, said Goldberg, of the Freedom Forum. Changing the way in which social media developers control who can and can’t have an account could change what people see on their feeds.

“We’ve seen a lot of this, especially at the state level, which is concerning,” he said. “Many of the laws that we are seeing proposed — and even passed — raise First Amendment concerns.”

States go to court

States also are turning to lawsuits to address social media effects on young people.

In October, attorneys general in California, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia TikTok, alleging violations of state consumer protection laws.

Led by California Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta and James of New York, the lawsuits allege that TikTok exploits and harms young users and deceives the public about the social media platform’s dangers.

Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a similar suit that same month accusing TikTok of violating a protecting children online. The law prohibits digital service providers from sharing, disclosing or selling a minor’s personal information without permission from a parent.

TikTok has disputed the claims, calling them “inaccurate and misleading” in a . The company says its platform is safe for kids and offers time limits and parental controls.

States have also taken aim at Snapchat and Meta. In September, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, a Democrat, filed a against Snap Inc., Snapchat’s parent company, alleging the app’s developers were ignoring reports of sextortion, failing to implement age-verification rules, admitting to features that connect minors with adults and more.

And in 2023, more than Meta, claiming Instagram and Facebook worsened the youth mental health crisis.

The social media companies need to be held accountable, said Julie Scelfo, of Mothers Against Media Addiction.

Scelfo, a career journalist who covered youth mental health for years, said she was disturbed after finding out that more and more young children wanted to commit suicide as social media became more mainstream.

“Social media can connect people for positive things, but it has also been a very convenient conduit for all of the worst forces in society,” Scelfo said.

But tech companies are winning some fights — and going on the offensive.

In addition to the partial block of the Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, a federal judge has until Feb. 1 another California law designed to protect children from addictive feeds. The Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act would prevent social media platforms from providing minors with “personalized feeds.”

Across the states, companies are challenging dozens of laws restricting social media — and in some cases, they’re winning.

“I think that shows that courts are skeptical that either there’s no proof behind the goals of the legislators or that they’re not being precise enough,” Goldberg said. “So, I’m skeptical. I don’t think this is going to help because there will always be ways for children to access content on the internet or social media — it’s almost impossible to truly enforce.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

Everywhere you look, it appears that the U.S. teaching profession is in a state of crisis. While the severity varies by state, the nation continues to see in teacher education program enrollment and perceptions of teaching as a prestigious career. From my regular interactions with students, it’s clear that negative messages about the profession are deeply ingrained in their minds. So where are these messages coming from? Why aren’t young people interested in teaching? While these are complex questions without simple answers, TikTok, the ultimate message spreader, offers us a window into one part of the puzzle.

Over half of Americans aged 18-34 . However, the fate of the app is now uncertain. On Sunday, TikTok shut down as a nationwide ban was set to go into effect. On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order granting a 75-day extension, allowing the Chinese company more time to consider selling. Whatever the future holds, it’s crucial to reflect on what it taught us about the field of education.

TikTok has been a paradoxical tool for education: both damaging and useful. For every report about the app’s negative effects on teaching and learning (e.g., mental health concerns and “destructive challenges”), there are reports of the app’s benefits (e.g., open-source instructional strategies and community engagement). When I began researching teachers’ use of TikTok, I was struck by how videos tagged with the hashtag epitomized this duality.

#TeacherQuitTok, with over 400 million views, serves as a digital repository of teachers’ resignation stories. Scrolling through these videos reveals raw emotion and unfiltered truths. Teachers across the U.S. share their journeys of leaving the profession, often capturing poignant moments packing up classrooms, bidding farewell to students, or speaking directly to the camera through tears. These videos combine personal footage with text overlays, music, and storytelling to underscore the gravity of resignations and expose systemic challenges that push educators to the brink.

Teachers’ reasons for quitting echo decades of : unmanageable workloads, insufficient pay, deteriorating mental health and a lack of support. One teacher shares, “I quit my teaching job in the middle of the year because of the daily stress. I developed anxiety and fell into a depression. I had to take meds just to cope.” Her story is far from unique. Many educators on TikTok describe similar struggles, reflecting a profession under immense strain.

In a sense, #TeacherQuitTok has become a digital picket line, allowing teachers to bypass traditional exit interviews and speak directly to the public. The sheer volume of posts transforms individual resignations into a collective statement: The U.S. teaching profession is unsustainable under current conditions.

While some may dismiss these posts as venting, I argue that #TeacherQuitTok plays a vital role in shaping public discourse about the profession. TikTok’s algorithm amplifies these stories, enabling some to reach millions of viewers. For instance, one viral video of a teacher resigning has garnered over 13 million views––an unprecedented audience for a workplace grievance.

This amplification is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it reinforces the perception that teaching is a profession riddled with stress and systemic obstacles, potentially deterring young people from pursuing it. On the other hand, it validates educators’ struggles, fosters solidarity, and pressures policymakers to address the systemic issues driving teachers away. For researchers, social media platforms like TikTok provide valuable data to gauge public sentiment about teaching and identify critical areas for reform.

In this case, the popularity of #TeacherQuitTok is a clarion call for urgent action. These stories underscore that teacher well-being is inexorably linked to the quality of education students receive. Schools cannot function without teachers, and if the profession continues to erode, the consequences for students and communities will be severe. To create an environment where teachers can thrive, schools must address foundational issues such as manageable workloads, competitive salaries, and mental health support.

Whatever happens to TikTok, let’s not forget the lessons it taught. Teachers are voting with their feet and sharing their decisions online. Whether it’s on TikTok or another app, teachers are no longer leaving quietly. By sharing their resignations online, they expose the challenges of the profession to the next generation. At a time when recruitment is plummeting, the country cannot afford for young people to be disillusioned before they even begin. Reforming the profession is no longer optional; it is essential for safeguarding the future of our education system.

If so, your sensitive data — like Social Security numbers and medical records — . Their target was education technology behemoth PowerSchool, which provides a centralized system for reams of student data to damn near every school in America.

Given the cyberattack’s high stakes and its potential to harm millions of current and former students, I teamed up Wednesday with Doug Levin of the  to moderate a timely webinar about what happened, who was affected — and the steps school districts must take to keep their communities safe.

Concern about the PowerSchool breach is clearly high: Some 600 people tuned into the live event at one point and pummeled Levin and panelists Wesley Lombardo, technology director at Tennessee’s Maryville City Schools; Mark Racine, co-founder of RootED Solutions; and Amelia Vance, president of the Public Interest Privacy Center, with questions. 

PowerSchool declined our invitation to participate but sent a statement, saying it is “working to complete our investigation of the incident and [is] coordinating with districts and schools to provide more information and resources (including credit monitoring or identity protection services if applicable) as it becomes available.”

The individual or group who hacked the ed tech giant has yet to be publicly identified.

Asked and answered: Why has the company’s security safeguards faced widespread scrutiny? What steps should parents take to keep their kids’ data secure? Will anyone be held accountable?

In the news

Oklahoma schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, who says undocumented immigrants have placed “severe financial and operational strain” on schools in his state, proposed rules requiring parents to show proof of citizenship or legal immigration status when enrolling their kids — a proposal that not only violates federal law, but is likely to keep some parents from sending their children to school. | 

• Not playing along: Leaders of the state’s two largest school districts — Oklahoma City and Tulsa — rebuked the proposal and said they would not collect students’ immigration information. Educators nationwide fear the incoming Trump administration could carry out arrests on campuses. | 
   
• Walters filed a $474 million federal lawsuit this week alleging immigration enforcement officials mismanaged the U.S.-Mexico border, leading to “skyrocketing costs” for Oklahoma schools required “to accommodate an influx of non-citizen students.” | 
   
• Timely resource guide: With ramped-up immigration enforcement on the horizon — and with many schools already sharing student information with ICE — here are the steps school administrators must take to comply with longstanding privacy and civil rights laws. | 

A federal judge in Kentucky struck down the Biden administration’s Title IX rules that enshrined civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students in schools, siding with several conservative state attorneys general who argued that harassment of transgender students based on their gender identity doesn’t constitute sex discrimination. 

Fires throw L.A. schools into chaos: As fatal wildfires rage in California, the students and families of America’s second-largest school district have had their lives thrown into disarray. Schools serving thousands of students were badly damaged or destroyed. Many children have lost their homes. Hundreds of kids whose schools burned down returned to makeshift classrooms Wednesday after losing “their whole lifestyle in a matter of hours.” |  

• At least seven public schools in Los Angeles that were destroyed, damaged or threatened by flames will remain closed, along with campuses in other districts. | 

Has TikTok’s time run out? With a national ban looming for the popular social media app, many teens say they’re ready to move on (and have already flocked to a replacement). | 

Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta restricted LGBTQ+-related content from teens’ accounts for months under its so-called sensitive content policy until the effort was exposed by journalist Taylor Lorenz. | 

The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday announced the participants in a $200 million pilot program to help schools and libraries bolster their cybersecurity defenses. They include 645 schools and districts and 50 libraries. | 

Scholastic falls to “furry” hackers: The education and publishing giant that brought us Harry Potter has fallen victim to a cyberattacker, who reportedly stole the records of some 8 million people. In an added twist, the culprit gave a shout-out to “the puppygirl hacker polycule,” an apparent reference to a hacker dating group interested in human-like animal characters. | 

• Dig deeper: Here’s how AI is being used by cybercriminals to rob schools. |  

Not just in New Jersey: In a new survey, nearly a quarter of teachers said their schools are patrolled by drones and a third said their schools have surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities. | 

The number of teens abstaining from drugs, alcohol and tobacco use has hit record highs, with experts calling the latest data unprecedented and unexpected. | 

ICYMI @The74

Emotional Support

New pup just dropped.

Meet Woodford, who, at just 9 weeks, has already aged like a fine bourbon. I’m told that Woody — and the duck, obviously — have come under the good care of 74 reporter Linda Jacobson’s daughter.

Inhale. Exhale. 

If you’re reading this, that means you’ve made it through 2024. (Congrats!) But don’t get too comfortable, because in 2025, the student safety and well-being beat is in for some major changes.

With Donald Trump’s second inauguration just weeks away, I figured I’d take a moment to highlight the defining developments in the School (in)Security universe over the last year — and how the landscape could evolve over the next 365 days.

1. The first-of-its-kind sentencing of a school shooter’s parents

Michigan parents Jennifer and James Crumbley became the first in U.S. history to be sentenced on criminal charges stemming from a mass school shooting perpetuated by their child. Each was sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter. 

• Prosecutors accused the Crumbleys of ignoring warning signs that their son had a desire for violence when they gave him the gun he used to kill four classmates and injure seven others. | 
• In Georgia, the father of a 14-year-old accused of carrying out a mass shooting that left four dead was arrested on murder charges. Authorities alleged the father “knowingly allowed” the teenager to possess the gun that was used to carry out the attack. 
• Parents not liable in Santa Fe: The parents of a former student accused of killing 10 people at his Texas high school in 2018 were sued for negligence, but a jury found them not responsible. |  
• The big picture: I wrote a deep dive into the history of holding parents accountable for their kids’ bad behavior — and why the Crumbley case was unprecedented. | 

2. An Apology from Big Tech — and a failed bid for new online safety rules

Amid heightened concerns over social media’s impact on youth mental health, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg did something this year that perhaps nobody saw coming: He apologized. | 

• The apology to parents who say their kids suffered, or died, because of their social media use came during a heated Senate hearing where lawmakers accused Big Tech of failing to prevent youth suicides and child sexual exploitation. It was part of a larger panic over teens’ TikTok addictions. | 
• Despite the outcry, a federal effort to implement new online safety rules for children has faltered again. And again. And again. | , , 

3. Did somebody say TikTok?

The Supreme Court is set to hear 11th-hour arguments about whether the government’s effort to ban the Chinese social media app violates the First Amendment. Justices will hear the case Jan. 10, nine days before the prohibition is set to go into effect. | 

• Claiming it posed a surveillance threat from the Chinese government, President Joe Biden signed a law in April to ban the enormously popular video-streaming app in the U.S. unless parent company ByteDance relinquished ownership. | 

4. Scrutiny of AI’s role in student well-being

Try going 10 seconds without reading something about artificial intelligence. I dare you. As emerging AI tools promise — or threaten — to disrupt K-12 education as we know it, they’ve also been oversold, misused and unevenly supervised. 

• The Federal Trade Commission reached a settlement with Evolv Technology, the maker of an AI-powered security screening system used in some 800 schools, after accusing the company of making false claims about its ability to detect weapons and keep kids safe. | 
• Joanna Smith-Griffin, the founder and former CEO of the once-celebrated education technology company AllHere, was indicted on charges she defrauded investors of nearly $10 million as the maker of AI chatbots for schools fell into bankruptcy. | 
  • Why you should care: AllHere had only a few customers, court records reveal, before it was hired to build a buzzy, $6 million chatbot for the Los Angeles school district. A former-employee-turned-whistleblower told me the overwhelmed startup took shortcuts that put students’ privacy at risk. | 
• In a first-of-its-kind criminal case, two teenage boys were arrested in Florida and accused of creating AI-generated nude images of middle school classmates without their consent. | 
• ‘Distrust, detection & discipline’: As students increasingly turned to generative AI like ChatGPT for help with assignments, educators said they lacked clear instructions on how to thwart tech-assisted cheating. | 

5. School-based police officers under fire

The Department of Justice released a scathing report on the police response to the 2022 school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. “Cascading failures” defined a slow police response, the report stated, and officers acted with “no urgency” to confront the gunman. | 

• A harrowing investigation found that predatory school resource officers have routinely used their position and authority to meet and groom students. | 
• Impact, baby! In response to the article, the department issued guidance urging that school police be trained on setting appropriate boundaries with children. | 

6. A small school cybersecurity grant program attracted massive interest

As schools and libraries nationwide fell victim to a surge of cyberattacks, the Federal Communications Commission rolled out a $200 million pilot program in a bid to stop the hackers. Illuminating the scale of the problem, demand far exceeded the available federal funds: The commission received more than 2,700 applications for some $3.7 billion in requests. | 

7. The Trump effect comes back into focus

• After Trump faced backlash for his family separation immigration policy in his first term, the president-elect has floated the idea of deporting all members of mixed-status families — a policy with the potential to affect millions of households with at least one U.S.-born child. |   
• The incoming president has pledged to impose wide-ranging restrictions on transgender students and roll back Biden-era civil rights protections. | 

Emotional Support

Editor Bev Weintraub’s party animal Marz rang in the new year with something a little stronger than catnip.

So Cormack, who teaches at Stevens Institute of Technology and just on civic engagement, was surprised when they expressed excitement. They were “all on board” — with Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice president, who had yet to become Trump’s direct challenger.

No matter. They thought the VP was, in a word, hilarious — and worth their attention.

Harris’ 2023 “” video had already gone viral. In it, she recounts her mother giving her sister and her “a hard time sometimes,” saying, “‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’” Harris cracks up, then continues with her mother’s lesson: “‘You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.’” 

Cormack’s students not only knew the video — they could recite it from memory. She thought to herself, “O.K., there’s .”

What Cormack witnessed was the ascension of Harris in the minds and social media feeds of young people. It was the prequel to a new phenomenon: the candidate-as-meme, at a time when both candidates desperately need young people to pay attention to them. Whether it translates into votes from this stubborn demographic in November remains an open question.

At the moment, it seems to be working for Harris, 59, whose social media effort is driven by an army of volunteers creating a firehose of memes on her behalf.

By the time Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, Harris had actually been young people’s feeds for weeks. Fans posted cleverly cut treatments of her speeches, her , (in and out ), even her love of .

As early as , one X user posted, “I’m ready to fall outta the coconut tree for you, girl. Stop playin.”

‘It’s hard not to love her’

For one fan, the attraction began much earlier.

Ryan Long, 22, a senior at the University of Delaware, discovered Harris in November 2016, when she won her Senate seat. She popped up on his cultural radar in earnest four years later, when she became Biden’s vice president. Her appearances often took on a life of their own, he recalled: She’d say “a lot of silly and amusing things” in official settings. “I’ve always found her so, so funny.”

Harris’ self-professed geek tendencies soon prompted him and his housemates to decorate a whiteboard with the saying, “I love Venn diagrams.” It stayed up for about a year. The hilarity of the “Coconut Tree” video made it “really popular on ” about a year and a half before it hit the mainstream, he said.

Long admitted to not typically following politics. But by the beginning of July, when a poll in his X feed suggested that Harris had a better chance of beating Trump than Biden did, he got excited.

“It was a silly, unrealistic excitement,” he said. But that night, he spent about three hours cutting together his favorite bits of Harris footage.

why did I stay up till 3am making a von dutch brat coconut tree edit featuring kamala harris and why can’t I stop watching it on repeat

— ryan (@ryanlong03)

���DzԲ�’s of Harris speaking, laughing and dancing has garnered about 4.3 million views on X and helped create a template for the genre. “She is a fresh face at a time that there [is] so much disillusionment in politics, especially among young people,” he said. 

Now that she’s the Democratic nominee, she offers the potential to bring a lot of young people along for the ride, Long said. 

In that sense, she is much like Trump, who “has this huge cult of personality. He’s able to make riffs, say things off the cuff, make people laugh, make people excited, make people sad, make people just feel their emotions. And I think Kamala Harris does that for a whole other subsection of voters.”

By comparison, Biden’s push to reach young voters via social media and all but non-existent to many.

For his part, Trump has benefited from the efforts his own devoted fans, who have reveled in his ties to and his after the attempt on his life last month. The campaign has also gotten a boost from a small on the right who have become a “shadow online ad agency” for his campaign, spending the past year producing similar content for the GOP nominee. The group, which calls itself , operates anonymously, its memes “riddled with racist stereotypes, demeaning tropes about L.G.B.T.Q. people and broad scatological humor,” The New York Times last December.

‘Authentic and true’ narratives attract Gen Z

To be sure, the reaction to Harris on social media has been unprecedented. Jessica Siles, a spokesperson for the Gen-Z-led advocacy group , said she had stopped counting how many conversations she has had with people about what it means to be “brat.”

That adjective comes compliments of British singer Charli XCX, who on July 21 , “kamala IS brat,” defining the term as “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some like dumb things sometimes.” She’s honest, blunt — and a bit volatile.

It all adds up to a kind of authenticity “that young people really resonate with,” said Siles. 

Even U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona tried to get in on the act, posting on X in the lime green color of the moment that “Defending public education is part of the essence of brat summer.” To some, it appeared, as the kids say, a little cringe. One critic, invoking the iconic scene from “30 Rock,” , “How do you do, fellow kids?”

Defending public education is part of the essence of brat summer.

— Secretary Miguel Cardona (@SecCardona)

Most Gen-Zers were indeed kids the last time a meme-worthy candidate ran for president. Siles, 24, was just 8 years old when Barack Obama ran his first presidential campaign. She said seeing a candidate talk about who they are unapologetically while boasting impressive career accomplishments “is just super refreshing to young voters.” 

Gen Z grew up with these. “So I think we’re kind of uniquely qualified to be able to tell who’s posting something authentically or not,” she said. Young people don’t take the time to create, edit, post and share videos of “people they’re not truly excited about.”

Harris began resonating with Siles after she watched a video of the vice president talking about her mother’s cancer. Siles remembered that it “showed a different side that we don’t always see of elected officials and politicians that I thought was really powerful.”

In the three days after Harris announced her candidacy, Siles’ organization got more applications to join and start new chapters than in the prior two months.

The group, whose chief of staff is all of 16, earlier this year by making mischief in the race: It scooped up unused Web domain names for groups such as GenZforTrump.org and guided viewers to that targets young voters in battleground states. It also launched a digital ad campaign on Instagram and Snapchat.

David Paleologos, director of the in Boston, said there’s no question that social media has trained young people’s attention on Harris, who needs the votes: Exit polls from 2020 suggest that Biden beat Trump by 24 percentage points among voters ages 18-29. Harris hasn’t quite reached those margins among potential young voters in the recent polling, he said, but she’s close — up by about 20 points. 

In order to reach 2020 levels in the next three months, she’ll need a social media strategy of “messaging memeology,” Paleologos said, which strings together “a seemingly haphazard sequence of posts that paint a picture, much like the colorful stones in a mosaic.”

However, he said, one risk of that is staying power: “It only lasts until the next meme about someone else captures that young person’s short attention span.” Research also shows that young voters are the least participatory in elections.

Just like clockwork, since she announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate on Aug. 6, the have .

‘I hate how I can feel the propaganda’

To be sure, not all young people are totally sold on the coconut memes or the high energy. In , a 19-year-old user from southwestern Missouri who goes by the username “Meatball” looks into the camera and confesses, “I hate how I can feel the propaganda of the Kamala campaign working on me.” 

In the video, posted July 24, she continues, “Part of me is like, ‘Yass queen, purr! Brat Summer! Kamala Harris!’ And then I’m like, ‘Oh my God, that’s a politician, actually. That’s the vice president of the United States.’ Like, I’m still going to vote for her, but I don’t like feeling like I want to vote for her.”

In an interview via text messages, Meatball, who asked to withhold her name for safety reasons, said she posted the video after getting “countless” Harris-related videos on her “For You” page — a few from Harris’ official account. “I wanted to see if anyone else was experiencing this disconnect between wanting to participate in something fun and not trusting politicians,” she said.

It’s safe to say they do: In three weeks, her video garnered 1.8 million views and more than 289,000 “likes.” 

But Meatball said she wishes older generations understood that Gen Z’s opinions “aren’t less thought out just because we share them in unconventional ways” like TikToks. “Meme culture is complex and has been developing since the creation of the internet chat room. Just because an older person doesn’t understand what we’re saying doesn’t mean we aren’t saying anything at all.”

Long, the Delaware student who posted the X video of Harris, predicted the memes and videos will have a big effect. 

He has worked in e-commerce marketing and has seen the power of social media to convert views into sales. “I think the same principle applies for elections: It’s going to turn people out. It’s going to get them excited.”

“Perhaps it’s the cell phones?” we wonder. “And the TikTok?” 

Sure, screens — and how kids engage with them — are part of this story. And yet, and especially, America tolerates levels of child poverty compared to peer nations. because of their families’ low incomes. And yet, as has become custom, Congress recently missed a bipartisan opportunity to do something about this shameful, persistent American problem. 

To explain this latest congressional stumble, we need some history. In 2021, the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan cut U.S. child poverty rates by significantly expanding the . Critically, the expanded credit was administered in , giving families a steady stream of new resources instead of a once-annually infusion at tax time. As Dr. Shantel Meek and I put it in , “[M]easured against its goal, the expansion of the child tax credit is one of the great policy successes in recent memory. Few other big federal ideas have so suddenly achieved precisely what they intended.” 

But the measure expired after one year, and to reinstate it have floundered in Congress. 

Then, this year, a bipartisan group of House representatives drafted a giving progressives a partial reinstatement of the expanded credit in return for a handful of corporate tax breaks prized by conservatives. The bill passed with in the House, but — at least partly because of conservative concerns that it might help President Biden in an election year. “I think passing a tax bill that makes the president look good — may allow checks before the election — means that he can be reelected and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts,” . 

Whatever else you think is causing young Americans’ pessimism these days, it pales in comparison with the impact of this sort of cynicism. Put aside the hand wringing about culture wars and polarization and “woke” indoctrination embedded into K–12 history curricula. U.S. kids don’t distrust Congress because their schools tell them an honest account of America’s complicated past. They Congress because, when confronted with a tested policy solution to that affects their lives, elected representatives dither and find politically expedient excuses. 

Make no mistake: the case for providing cash support for families with young children is empirically airtight. Researchers have known since at least that families’ socioeconomic resources significantly shape children’s educational performance and outcomes. that increases in family income produce better developmental, academic and life outcomes for children. As a policy matter, regular cash transfers to families like the Biden Administration’s expanded child tax credit —known as “child allowances” — a to . 

At this point in the waves of evidence, conservatives sometimes argue that, sure, perhaps there’s a case for investing more funding in low-income families, but only if we apply conditions and require that it be spent on particular things. Won’t families “waste” new resources unproductively? But this, too, is cynical and baseless political posturing: analysis showed that families .

And yet, here we are, stuck. Legislative failures like these are the operational definition of a failing democracy. When democracies struggle to do simple things that we know would improve citizens’ — especially children’s — lives, they’re undermining their main institutional selling point. If representative government cannot accurately represent the public’s interest by identifying and addressing its problems, why bother with the messiness of organizing our political lives this way?
U.S. kids are not alright. But it’s not just because they’re living in an information sphere increasingly shaped by technology. Without a shift to a more pragmatic approach to these problems, that trust will only continue dropping — however well legislative sclerosis serves conservatives’ short-term political needs.

Taken together, the trio would create sweeping restrictions on children’s access to social media, impose new requirements on social media companies to ensure their products aren’t harmful to youth mental health and bolster educators’ digital surveillance obligations to ensure kids aren’t swiping through their favorite feeds in class. 

The three separate digital safety bills have bipartisan support and lawmakers could greenlight them as part of the FAA reauthorization legislation, which faces a Friday deadline. If passed, the legislative package could potentially end years of debate on these thorny questions and would mark the most consequential effort to regulate tech companies and children’s online safety in decades.

“Parents know there’s no good reason for a child to be doom-scrolling or binge-watching reels that glorify unhealthy lifestyles,” Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican who is co-sponsoring The Kids Off Social Media Act, said in . “Young students should have their eyes on the board, not their phones.” 

The move comes as lawmakers across the political spectrum sound an alarm over concerns that teens’ addiction to their social media feeds — complete with algorithms designed to keep them hooked and coming back for more — have exacerbated mental health issues in young people. It follows congressional testimony by of knowing that apps like Instagram inflamed body image issues and other negative triggers among youth but failed to act to mitigate the harm while upholding a “see no evil, hear no evil” culture.

The controversial and heavily debated bills saw new life in January after social media executives were grilled during a contentious congressional hearing and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized to parents who said their children were damaged, and in some cases died, after the company’s algorithms fed them a barrage of pernicious content. 

But critics contend the provisions amount to heavy-handed and unconstitutional censorship that fails to confront the root cause of young people’s anguish — and in some cases could hurt them by limiting their access to educational materials, blocking information designed to help them deal with mental health issues or by subjecting them to greater online surveillance.

The three amendments are:

• The Kids Online Safety Act would require tech companies to “exercise reasonable care” to ensure their services don’t surface in children’s feeds material deemed harmful, including posts that promote suicide, eating disorders and sexual exploitation.
  
  First introduced in 2022, the legislation would also require tools that would give parents greater ability to monitor their children’s’ online activities and mandate tech companies enable their most restrictive privacy settings for their youngest users by default. 

• The Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, also known as COPPA 2.0, amends a 1998 law that requires tech companies receive parental consent before collecting data about children under 13 years old. COPPA 2.0 would extend existing requirements to children under 16, ban targeted advertising for children and require tech companies to delete data collected about children upon parental request. 

• The Kids Off Social Media Act, introduced last week by Cruz and Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz, would prohibit children under 13 years old from creating social media accounts and restrict tech companies from using algorithms to serve content to children under 17. It would also require schools that receive federal internet connectivity funding to block students’ access to social media sites on campus networks. 

The bill’s provisions have faced widespread pushback from digital rights and privacy advocates, including the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, which called it an unconstitutional infringement that “replaces parents’ choices about what their children can do online with a government-mandated prohibition.” 

On Tuesday, TikTok and its Chinese parent company that bans the popular social media app in the U.S. unless it sells the platform to an approved buyer, accusing the government of stifling free speech and unfairly singling it out based on unfounded accusations it poses a national security threat.

In March, — including Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and Utah — to impose new parental consent requirements for children to create social media accounts. The Georgia law also bans social media use on school devices and creates age verification requirements for porn websites.

Aliya Bhatia, a policy analyst at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, said that each bill now included in the FAA reauthorization act has been the subject of debate and opposition. Including them in unrelated, must-pass legislation with a short deadline, she said, “undermines the active conversations that are happening” about the bills, which she said are “just not ready for prime time.”

The Kids Online Safety Act, which has the bipartisan , is endorsed by a host of , including the American Psychological Association, Common Sense Media and the American Academy of Pediatrics, who argue the rules could protect youth from the corrosive effects of social media. 

At the same time, the legislation, which has differing House and Senate versions, has also received and those representing LGBTQ+ students. The groups argue the bill amounts to government censorship with a likely disparate impact on LGBTQ+ youth and students of color. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has endorsed the legislation as a way to restrict youth access to LGBTQ+ content, that “keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids.” 

Privacy advocates have warned the legislation could result in age-verification requirements across the internet that could require online users of all ages to provide identifying information to web platforms. 

Meanwhile, social media’s effects on youth mental well-being remain the subject of research and debate. In last year, the American Psychological Association noted that while social media use “is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people,” the platforms should not surface to their young users content that encourages them to engage in risky behaviors or is discriminatory. 

In , Surgeon General Vivek Murthy noted that social media use is nearly universal among young people, with more than a third of teens saying they use the apps “almost constantly.” While its impact on youth mental health isn’t fully understood, Murphy said, emerging research suggests that its use can be harmful — perpetuating a national youth mental health crisis “that we must urgently address.” 

The Kids off Social Media Act, which would prohibit youth access to sites like Instagram, is that requires schools and libraries to monitor and filter youth internet use as a condition of receiving federal E-Rate internet connectivity funding. In response, schools nationwide have adopted digital surveillance tools that use algorithms to sift through billions of student communications to identify problematic online behaviors.

Meanwhile, a recent found that web filters regularly used in schools do more than keep kids from goofing off in class. They also routinely limit students’ access to homework materials, educationally appropriate information about sexual and reproductive health and resources designed to prevent youth suicides. 

For years, privacy advocates have called on the Federal Communications Commission to clarify how the rules apply to the modern internet and have argued that schools’ tech-driven monitoring efforts go far beyond their original intent. 

When the law went into effect in 2001, monitoring “quite literally meant looking over a kid’s shoulder as they used the computer,” said Kristin Woelfel, a policy counsel of the Center for Democracy and Technology, but in 2024 student monitoring has become “a very specific term that now means really pervasive and technical surveillance.” 

of students, parents and teachers last year, the nonprofit found a majority supported digital activity monitoring in schools yet nearly three-quarters of youth said that filtering and blocking technology made it more difficult to complete some homework, a challenge reported more often among LGBTQ+ students, and that the tools routinely led to disciplinary actions and police involvement. 

“They don’t work as people think they do,” she said. “That, coupled with data that shows it’s actually detrimental to students, indicates even more that this is not the right path forward.” 

In a letter to lawmakers last week, a coalition of education nonprofits including the American Library Association and the Consortium for School Networking expressed concern about attaching social media limitations to E-Rate funding, which schools rely on to facilitate learning. 

“Schools and libraries will face delays or denials of E-rate funding due to allegations of non-compliance,” the groups wrote, arguing that it would give federal authorities control over social media policies that should be left to local officials. “The bill’s provisions seem to suggest that technology-driven learning models are always harmful, even when carefully crafted to promote educational purposes. In fact, there are several social media uses that can be beneficial for education and learning.”

In a announcing the legislation, Schatz offered the opposite perspective.

“There is no good reason for a nine-year-old to be on Instagram or TikTok,” he said. “There just isn’t. The growing evidence is clear: social media is making kids more depressed, more anxious, and more suicidal.”

In justifying the legislation, Schatz cites reporting by the psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, who argues in his new book that young people — and girls, in particular — face a “tidal wave” of anguish that can be traced back to the rise of smartphones. 

Haidt’s characterization of tech’s role in youth well-being has , including by developmental psychologist Candice Odgers, who argued in that claims “that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science.” 

Among the evidence is on the well-being of nearly 1 million people ages 13 to 34 and 35 and over as it was being adopted in 72 countries and found “no evidence suggesting that the global penetration of social media is associated with widespread psychological harm.”

Lindy Hockenbary is the author of and an instructional technologist who helps educators and schools learn how to better use technology. A large part of Hockenbary’s work is finding new ways for students to feel connected to their teachers so that can occur.

One strategy Hockenbary encourages is instructor-created videos.

A 2014 found that instructor-generated video content improved overall student engagement and satisfaction in higher-ed online courses. Both the number and depth of responses for student discussions increased when teachers incorporated videos they created themselves. 

Jennifer Levanduski, head of marketing for , an ed tech company for digital learning, says that as society and culture change, so does education. As TikTok has popularized shorter, less formal videos, Levanduski and Hockenbary encourage teachers to follow suit. They believe that while more professional videos from platforms like Khan Academy are beneficial for students, more casual and personal videos from teachers can create a deeper sense of connection. Hockenbary cites that found students feel a greater bond with their teacher when teachers incorporate videos they created themselves than in classes where instructor-produced content wasn’t used. ClassIn allows teachers to record and edit videos, as well as create virtual worksheets, create polls, take attendance, offer an interactive blackboard, give out quizzes and grade assignments.

“I think that meeting students where they are has always been super important,” Levanduski says. “And right now, where students are is they’re digesting so much bite-sized video content across platforms. If you can use some of that video content to almost establish a parasocial relationship with your students, that is another way to help you feel connected to them.”

Hockenbary says teachers can create videos for a variety of purposes, including introducing themselves to their class at the start of the year, explaining lessons, going over the syllabus and providing one-on-one feedback to students. She says she encourages teachers not to worry if they stumble over their words a bit while they are recording, because when they are lecturing face-to-face they wouldn’t restart if they mess up. 

During a ClassIn webinar on Jan. 22 moderated by Levanduski, Hockenbary discussed strategies for increasing student engagement in remote, hybrid and in-person classes. Hockenbary noted that engagement is determined by whether students feel like they belong and will be successful in completing assignments. That’s why teachers need to foster a sense of personal relationship and community in their classrooms, she notes, whether it’s face-to-face or virtual.

Though nearly all schools have gone back to in-person instruction, Hockenbary says classroom technology is more relevant than ever. She believes the only way schools are going to increase student engagement is if teachers use a blended format that includes lecturing face-to-face, creating videos or podcasts and using other forms of technology so that learning and engagement can come in multiple forms. 

Another way technology can be useful in boosting students’ interests is by letting those who may be less inclined to speak in class due to social anxiety or being naturally introverted to participate. Levanduski says a student may never raise their hand in class but may chat online or contribute in other nonverbal ways. Hockenbary says technology can also enable students to give teachers feedback anonymously.

“Everybody gets to input, versus if you’re doing that in a lecture environment,” Hockenbary says. “You may only have time to call on one or two students, and it’s not going to be the ones that are shy.”

Jeff Yass, of the trading and technology firm Susquehanna International Group, has spent energetically to promote private school vouchers over the past few years. With his wife Janine, he also founded the , which sponsors around the country, and dedicated to school choice in his home state of Pennsylvania. 

On March 1, the mega-donor at a retreat organized by the Club for Growth, a major conservative advocacy organization that Yass has donated to in the past. Yass as a reconciliation of sorts between Trump and the Club’s leadership during the 2022 midterm elections. 

Just a week later, Trump announced his support for TikTok on Truth Social, his own social media site. “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook…will double their business,” Trump wrote. “I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better,” he added, offering no evidence for such a claim. 

In addition to being one of the GOP’s biggest financial backers — he gave to the party’s candidates and committees in the 2022 cycle, then made to Gov. Greg Abbott that the Texas Republican called the richest donation in his state’s history — Yass is a major TikTok stakeholder, . Those shares were recently valued at $21 billion, accounting for most of Yass’s net worth of $28 billion. 

That interest is potentially imperiled by the passage of the , a piece of bipartisan legislation that was introduced in the House of Representatives earlier this month. The bill, which Wednesday afternoon in a 352-65 vote, in the U.S. if ByteDance does not sell it within 180 days. If not a straightforward TikTok ban, this would have the effect of ensuring that the platform would pass from Chinese control. 

Strikingly, the bill is a near-copy of a measure that Trump himself attempted to enact during his administration. In August 2020, citing concerns that the app captured metadata and search histories from American users on behalf of the Chinese government, the then-president that would have required ByteDance to find a buyer for TikTok within 45 days. President Biden later , which had already been blocked by federal judges, but now says if it were passed by Congress. 

Bart Epstein, an education technology entrepreneur and former professor at the University of Virginia, said he believed Trump’s shift was motivated by a need to mend fences with the Republican financial establishment as he wages both a national campaign and . 

“He is facing more than half a billion dollars of legal judgments against him as well as dozens of felony counts,” Epstein wrote in an email. “He needs major donors to help him fund his re-election campaign. 

Both and have warned in recent years that TikTok, which provides users access to millions of short videos, is addictive and potentially harmful to the mental health of young people. In testimony before a House committee this week, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said she that the Chinese Communist Party would attempt to use the app as a tool to influence the upcoming elections. 

The New York Post that Yass has personally called Republican House members this month in an effort to derail the anti-TikTok law. He has who have come out against the ban, including Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, to the tune of millions of dollars. The head of the Club for Growth has , alleging that the campaign is being driven by social media competitors like Meta, which owns Facebook. 

A spokesman for the Yass Prize, declined to comment for this story, saying the legislative negotiations around TikTok are “not our area of focus.” An email to President Trump’s campaign was not returned, though in , he denied speaking with Yass about TikTok at the Club for Growth retreat. 

Whatever the former president’s clout within his party, several prominent House Republicans that his change in position would have no effect on their decisions. Still, Paul and other Senate conservatives or even quash the legislation.

At least one conservative education observer said that a ban was appropriate. Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, celebrated the overwhelming House passage on Wednesday and said he was “hugely disappointed” by Trump’s about-face.

“We need to take the problems with social media much more seriously, and this applies many times over to TikTok, which doubles as a security threat and a propaganda platform for the Chinese government,” Hess wrote in an email.

Epstein voiced even greater worry about the app, warning that it had a “disparate impact on impressionable children and teens.”

“Allowing China to own or control TikTok or have access to its data is a huge mistake that should be remedied immediately,” Epstein said. “And then we should turn our attention to social media more generally.”

Recent surveys of young people show that parents’ concerns may be justified: More than half of U.S. teens spend at least four hours a day on these apps. Girls, who are , spend an average of nearly an hour more on them per day than boys. Many parents are searching for support. 

Perhaps more than anyone, Carla Engelbrecht and Devorah Heitner are qualified to offer it. They’ve spent years puzzling over how families can help understand media from the inside out, and how schools both help and hurt kids’ ability to cope.

Engelbrecht is a longtime children’s media developer. A veteran of Sesame Workshop and PBS Kids Interactive, she spent seven years at Netflix, most recently as its director of product innovation. Engelbrecht was behind the network’s Black Mirror “” episode in 2018, which allowed viewers to choose among five possible endings. 

Engelbrecht is now in public beta testing for , a new social media platform for kids under 13. She calls it a “course correction” for young people’s social media, aiming to teach them to be more mindful, thoughtful and responsible online.

Heitner is an who specializes in helping parents and educators understand how digital technology, especially social media and interactive gaming, shape kids’ realities. Her books include 2016’s and her new work . 

Speaking to either one would be enlightening, but we decided to facilitate a broader conversation by inviting them to come together (virtually) to share insights and offer a bit of advice for both parents and schools. 

Their conversation with The 74’s Greg Toppo was wide-ranging, covering the effects of the pandemic, the pressures kids feel online and the women’s experiences communicating with their own children.

The solutions they offer aren’t simple. In Heitner’s words, parents seeking to learn more about their kids’’ media usage should pull back their surveillance and “lead with curiosity.” 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Devorah, tell us a little bit about your new book.

Devorah Heitner: I wrote Growing Up in Public because I was speaking for years about Screenwise in schools and all these other environments, and people said, “O.K., I get that we want to think about quality over quantity with screen time. But we also want to understand what kids’ subjective experience is and not just focus on how many minutes are good or bad.”

People lie about that anyway. People are sort of oblivious to their own screen use sometimes and get over-focused on their kids’. A lot of adults are recognizing: If I could have had a Tumblr or a Twitter or Instagram as a kid, I could have really done a lot of damage to my prospects and opportunities by so openly sharing.

What are we doing to our reputations?

As I started digging into that question, I recognized that parents are really part of the surveillance culture with kids. So are schools, with grading apps like or [which keep track of kids’ location, among other functions]. I really started understanding in a fuller way how kids are scrutinized. Kids are growing up very searchable, very public, and some of that is awesome. They have a platform, they can be activists. Some of it is problematic. 

The title of your book, Growing Up in Public, says so much about kid’s lives these days. I saw this term the other day: not FOMO, “Fear of Missing Out,” but FOMU, “.” Are those competing interests for young people?

Heitner: Well, there’s definitely a fear of messing up and especially being called out. There’s a lot of “gotcha” culture going on, and kids documenting each others’ screw-ups. And as much as you patiently explain, as I have to my own 14-year-old, the concept of mutually assured destruction, if you’re on a group text with somebody for long enough, both of you have probably said a few things you don’t want repeated outside of that context.

I think it’s modeled by adults, but this kind of “gotcha” culture is very insidious and terrifying. And it should be terrifying. 

Carla, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Carla Engelbrecht: I’m a longtime product developer and researcher in the kids’ space. I’ve spent a lot of time making products for kids. I’ve seen for years kids wanting access to Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and , all through the generations of social media. And they always want what is not made for them. They’re aspirational.

Kids are just plopped into this. And just as you wouldn’t give a new driver the keys to the car and just say, “Go!” — you need to teach them how to drive — there’s the same concept for me with media use. We need to teach our kids. Parents don’t know what they’re doing, because none of us have really been through this before, and they abstain. They need support in learning how to do this. Where Devorah talks about things from that guidance perspective, I’m looking at: How can we build a product for kids that helps them learn? 

It seems to me like Betweened is a site for parents as much as anybody. 

Engelbrecht: There’s definitely two audiences here. There’s absolutely a path where I could build a product for kids and launch them onto it. But I wouldn’t be addressing all the pain points.

Kids want short-form content. They want to create. They want to connect with their peers. In order to successfully set kids up to do that, parents need tools, too. And so it is really a product for both kids and parents.

Carla mentioned all these different apps coming down the road. Devorah, I’m thinking about you saying to someone recently how you’ve been working on this book for five years. A lot has changed in five years. We didn’t have TikTok five years ago. 

Heitner: Screenwise came out in the fall of 2016, which was a memorable time for many reasons: a lot of social forces happening in our world with Trump’s election. 

And then you have the pandemic in 2020. That’s around the time I had sold the book and was trying to interview people. Suddenly, I’m not in schools anymore. I’m on Zoom with kids, which is a whole research problem: How do you get a wider range of kids, not just the super-compliant kids who show up to a Zoom? And the pandemic was an accelerant to a lot of things happening already with kids in tech.

It was certainly not the beginning of kids being too young and not [the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act gives parents control over what information websites can collect from their kids]. But it accelerated, and there was kind of a push toward things like Kids Messenger [on Facebook] and other things that I even experimented with at the time. 

The pandemic started when my son was 10. We were like, “Oh, what can we do to help him communicate with friends?” We experimented with Messenger. It was a fail for us, but I also talked to the people at and [two mobile phone companies marketed for children]. There are people, in different ways, trying to come up with solutions because they have understood that both the adult apps and the adult devices, like a smartphone that does all the things, might not be the ideal thing to give a 10-year-old. 

What’s changed since 2016 is there used to be more worry about one-to-one computing in schools. Now, every school pretty much is one-to-one. It’s really the outlier schools that don’t have tech or aren’t giving kids individual tech. Even as late as 2015, 2016, I was helping schools negotiate that with parents. And parents were like, “I don’t know. I’m not sure about screen time. I don’t know if I want my kid getting a Chromebook.”

Try to find a school now that doesn’t give kids iPads or Chromebooks or something. That’s probably one of the bigger differences. And then just the explosion in server-based gaming like Roblox and Minecraft and the ways kids interact in those digital communities. You see a lot of very complicated, weird ideas among adults who care about children. Like “I’ll wait until eighth grade to give a kid a phone. Meanwhile,my third-grader plays Roblox on a server with strangers.” 

Engelbrecht: Or has access to text messaging through their iPad.

Heitner: Exactly. And they’re very smugly waiting till eighth grade and I’m like, “For what? For your kid to make voice calls?” That’s the one thing they don’t want to do.

Carla, you come from a game design background. People have lots of terrible takes about video games, which I’m sure you’re used to. How has that background informed what you’re doing and what Betweened looks like?

Engelbrecht: A lot of people come to video games and they’re just like, “They’re evil,” or “They’re awful,” or “They’re violent.” And you can say the same thing about television. You can also say the same thing if you only eat broccoli. Anything in excess is not good for you — like running a marathon every day. I take a very pragmatic approach to most things we can actually find good in.

When I look at video games, I can’t classify them as evil. I instead look for the good things. And it’s the same with social media. Social media as part of a balanced media diet gives parents a lot of opportunities to connect, gives kids a lot of opportunity to express creativity and develop skills. 

I’ll give you an example on the games side of things: Years ago, I did a South by Southwest talk called “What Can Teach Us About Parenting.” Left 4 Dead is not a game that kids should ever play. It’s a violent, first-person zombie apocalyptic shooter. It’s also one of the most beautifully designed cooperative games ever. I’m terrible with thumb sticks on video game controllers. I can’t walk in a straight line in a video game. I’m not great at the actual zombie-killing side of things. But I’m really good at running around and picking up health packs and checking in on people who have been damaged by zombies.

So there are different roles that people can play. I can still participate in the game, even though the primary way of playing Left 4 Dead is not what works for me. 

Also, if I’m playing with people, it fosters communication. I have to talk to people and someone needs to say. “Hey, I need help,” and I can come over. That’s what I’m looking for in games and social media: What are those underlying skills that, with a thoughtful perspective, you can leverage for good?

I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about something you mentioned earlier, Devorah: casual surveillance. I think about the stories we hear about parents not even just surveilling their kids — tracking their phones or their cars — but just keeping up in a way that we never even dreamed of. I wonder: Where did this come from? And how do you think a site like Betweened is going to help? 

Engelbrecht: I wish I knew exactly where it came from, but it certainly seems it’s symptomatic of the same thing: Everything has just kind of crept up on us. It’s like, as phones started to be introduced, we just thought, “Oh, well, I need to charge my phone, so I’ll charge it next to my bed.” And then the next thing you know, you’re checking it first thing when you wake up. It’s this slippery slope without the mindfulness of what it’s doing. Something has to happen to stop you, to make you take a step back and think, “How far have I gone? What boundaries have I crossed or what new boundary do I need to establish?” And to Devorah’s earlier point, the pandemic accelerated a lot of this.

Heitner: Part of it is we do it because we can. Even in relationships. I’ve known my husband since before we each had cell phones, but we didn’t used to check in as often because we didn’t have cell phones. It had to really rise to the level of an emergency before I would call him at work.

Remember the days of 9-to-5 office jobs? He left in the morning and was at his job. I was a grad student then and I would go up to Northwestern and not even really have any reachability by phone. Now we have phones, and the expectation is pretty much down-to-the-minute: If I’m 11 minutes late, I’ll probably text and say, “I’m 11 minutes late.” There’s just so much expectation for contact and communication and knowing where other people are. We don’t use location surveillance for that, but a lot of families do, and a lot of people have watches and will check into each other’s location on watches.

Because it’s there, people do it. And then there’s also just tremendous worry right now about kids. Given that we as a society think it’s a good idea for everyone to have assault weapons, parents are a little nervous. That anxiety creeps into everything.

My older daughter is 31, and I remember getting her first cell phone when she was 12 or 13. I remember the intense peer pressure she felt to have a phone. And I really didn’t like it at all. But I kind of justified it by saying to myself, “This is going to keep her safe.” And I remember thinking to myself, “You’re so full of shit. You’re just really trying to smooth things over.” And I guess I wonder: As parents, do we have an overextended sense of peril about our kids these days?

Heitner: There’s a sense of peril. Also, the Internet and online news and targeted algorithms just fuel that worry and outrage. It’s a bit of a vicious cycle.

Engelbrecht: In some ways, it’s almost like there are more risks that could stick with you. There wasn’t social media when I was in college. A bad decision in college couldn’t chase me through my entire life. In that sense, there are risks that feel much larger.

I think about my daughter and I don’t want something to chase her for her entire life. That part of it feels very real. And then it feels out of control. I don’t have the tools or know exactly how I can best help her except for having hard conversations and trying to put some bumpers around her. But there’s not a lot of tools to put the bumpers around her.

Devorah, one of the things you have said is that the kind of surveillance a lot of parents are undertaking is really undermining the trust their kids feel, and backfiring because kids won’t open up to them when they really need to. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Heitner: You just see kids really getting focused on going deeper underground. If their parents are like, “I’m going to get Bark and read every single thing they text,” then you see some kids who are like, “O.K., I need to go deeper underground, I need a VPN or to only text on Snapchat, or I need to do something where I can be more evasive.” And that concerns me, because then there’s no way to make use of the parent when the parent might be useful.

Engelbrecht: I think about how to create space to allow the kid to have a second chance at telling me the truth. For example, if there’s an empty bag of gummies and the kid is the only one who could have eaten it but says they didn’t, how can I create space to talk about making mistakes versus lying or intentionally hiding the truth? Saying, “I’m going to ask what happened to the gummis again, but first I want you to take a moment to think about your answer — it’s OK to change your answer, because I want to understand the truth. We all make mistakes and we can talk about it. But intentionally hiding the truth has consequences.”

If I later find out that the child lied, then there’s consequences. The hope is that eventually, a parent can say, “If you end up at a party where there’s alcohol, don’t drive home. Call me for a ride home. If you try to hide that there was alcohol and make poor decisions, then there’s additional consequences.”

It’s important to be able to say, “I made a mistake” and talk about what to do from there. Hopefully, that provides an alternative to the arms race of increasingly sneaky strategies that Devorah described.

Heitner: That makes a lot of sense. I was just going to say: The surveillance — schools just push it really hard. Every time I go to a school, they’re like, “Are you logged into ?” or “Are you logged into ?” They’re just really pushing it so hard.

Are schools culpable in this? Sounds like you’d say, “Yes.” I don’t know if you’d call it surveillance, though. One of the functions of schools is to keep track of things, right?

Heitner: But what about the location tracking? My kid has to scan a QR code to get into the cafeteria. I skipped lunch every day of high school and ate with my drama club friends in the theater. Was that so bad? They have 3,500 kids QR-coding themselves into study hall. It’s pretty locked down. It’s pretty Big Brother, or if you read Cory Doctorow. 

Engelbrecht: Homework tracking means having full visibility of my daughter when part of what she needs to learn is the executive function skills to actually be able to plan and follow through and do her homework. I don’t want to be in the place where I’m policing her homework. Now that she’s in seventh grade, it’s time for her to be learning those skills before there’s the consequences of missing your homework in high school or college.

So to me, it’s kind of that same thing: The information is there. Should it be provided? How do you use it? And, for me it’s: How do we better equip administrators, teachers or parents to stop and think about how to leverage this information? So maybe a kid who’s consistently missing their homework, yes, the parents should have more visibility as part of a support program to get the kid back on track and help them learn the skills. But to Devorah’s point, it doesn’t mean everyone needs to be badging into lunch.

Devorah, your message to parents is: There are all these things happening. There are all these things you have to keep track of. There are lots and lots of risks to kids being on social media, especially teenagers. But you shouldn’t panic. And I wanted to just throw this out to both of you: Instead of panicking, what should parents do? 

Heitner: Carla, you’re talking about creating a new community space for kids that’s more of a learning space, and that’s one alternative. Another alternative, in addition to, or potentially instead of, for parents who don’t have access to that, is just leaning into one or two spaces they really want to mentor their kids in.

Maybe their kid’s really involved in Minecraft. And if they want to join [a free voice, chat, gaming and communications app], the parents are waiting and saying, “O.K. You can join your library Discord with or your school Minecraft club on Discord, but not general Discord.”

Parents will tell me their kids are playing or they’re on YouTube. But I’m like, “What channels? It’s just like if somebody says, “I’m watching TV.” Well, what are you watching? Because that really is a big differentiator in terms of the experience.

Engelbrecht: It goes back to your “Fear of Messing Up.” I think so much about how it’s important for parents to wade in and get involved with their kids. This has been the advice for decades, whatever the newfangled thing was. I was just doing some writing about encouraging parents to actually do with their kids. It’s an opportunity to bond. It actually requires some planning and practice. It’s physical activity. I assume most parents are like me, that they’re not a great dancer and it’s uncomfortable and you don’t want to mess up.

But modeling that I’ll do something that’s out of my comfort zone and connect with you over something that I know you enjoy, can be very simple. It doesn’t mean a parent has to suddenly learn all aspects of Roblox or Discord, because they can be intimidating. But just find an entry point and connect with the child and participate with them. It just has so many benefits. It’s true whether they’re into Tonka trucks or Roblox. Parenting means, “Get in there with your kid.”

Devorah, you use the phrase, “Lead with curiosity.”

Engelbrecht: Oh, I love that.

Heitner: You want to be curious and have your kid share it with you. Their expertise and experience as well and their discernment — what do they like or not like about this app? How would they change it if they could? Staying curious is an alternative to spying — being curious and asking kids to be curious even about their own experience. Do I actually feel less stressed when I scroll this app? That’s maybe a lot of mindfulness to expect of kids, who have a lot going on and a lot coming at them. But it’s important for all of us to be curious about how our experience is going.

Engelbrecht: That’s one of the ways I’ve been thinking about it from a product perspective: just how to help build in some scaffolds for mindfulness — things like when you start an app, actually having a timer that’s like, “How long do you want to spend on it right now?”

I set a timer for myself when I use TikTok because I spend a very long time on it. So being able to put that in there as a scaffold, to start being mindful and thoughtful about it. We’re posting content, but we’re actually not posting endless scrolls where you could spend all day.

I don’t want to prioritize the traditional tech metric of “time on task.” To me, success is like, “You can come and use Betweened for 20 minutes and then know you can come back another day and there’s lots of interesting stuff for you.” But it’s not all-consuming, must-do-this-all-the-time. And that’s a different perspective on tech products. It’s not how most products are developed.

Castillo, who is in her fourth year of teaching, says she finds joy in making her classroom a safe haven not only for herself, but for her students by creating a well-equipped, stimulating and hands-on environment for learning.

Castillo teaches middle school physical science and Earth space science at the Florida A&M University Developmental Research School in Tallahassee. The K-12 laboratory school, located on the campus, is affiliated with the university’s College of Education, Castillo’s alma mater. She received her bachelor’s in biology education there in 2021.

During her first year of teaching, she designed her classroom based on the Cartoon Network show Total Drama Island and posted pictures on social media. Her received over a quarter-million likes — and she’s never looked back. She documents her elaborate, hand-made classroom decorations on TikTok —  typically based on favorite childhood shows and movies such as Stitch from Disney’s Lilo and Stitch or the characters from Disney Channel’s hit show The Proud Family —  and posts videos of special Friday projects that teach students essential skills like cooking, sewing, proper table etiquette and balancing a checkbook. 

Would you cook with your students?

Castilllo has received so many messages from teachers asking for tutorials that she posts theme concepts on TikTok and offers custom borders and posters on Etsy.

My classroom reveal for my Proud Family Themed Classroom

Her social media presence also garnered the attention of Grammy Award-winning rapper Megan thee Stallion, who sent Castillo and her students a special in 2021. 

That moment you and your students get a special shout-out from Megan Thee Stallion @theestallion

Castillo also uses her Instagram account, @ScholarDreams_, to keep her students and parents informed about school events such as sports tryouts, weather-related cancellations and class supply lists.

Making her classroom as lively as possible is no small feat. It typically takes Castillo the entire summer to prepare, and she spends between $300 and $400 for decor each school year, plus about $100 for every “life skills” project. Support from the college and online donations help to offset the cost.

It’s totally worth it, she says, to always make her students feel welcome and know that someone took the time to invite them in and make them comfortable.

TikTok could soon be expelled from Louisiana’s colleges and universities under a bill advancing through the legislature.

, sponsored by Rep. Daryl Deshotel, R-Marksville, would ban the app on all state-owned devices and state administered networks, meaning the popular video sharing app could soon be inaccessible on university WiFi.

Deshotel has pitched the bill as a security measure, pointing to FBI Director Christopher Wray’s that China could use the app to control data from U.S. consumers, control software and drive political narratives.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

“This is a tool that is ultimately within the control of the Chinese government, and… it screams out with national security concerns,” Wray told the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee in March.

“The risk of exposure to our constituents’ private data is too much and too high of a price to pay for the sake of a funny video,” Deshotel said Tuesday when he pitched the bill to the House Appropriations Committee.

The bill was advanced without objection from the Appropriations Committee and had previously been unanimously advanced from the House and Governmental Affairs Committee last month. It will next go before the House of Representatives for a floor vote, where it is likely to be approved.

If the bill passes through the legislature, it would take effect when it’s signed by Gov. John Bel Edwards, who previously ordered TikTok banned on all state-owned devices and networks under his control, meaning Louisiana’s 275,000 college students will likely be returning to a TikTok-free school in the Fall.

The bill has so far received no testimony in support or opposition. The public will next have the opportunity to comment on the proposal when it is heard in a Senate committee.

The proposal would also ban any other app or service developed by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance Ltd, or entities the company owns.

Deshotel’s proposal carves out exceptions to the ban for academic uses of the app. The bill includes language that provides exceptions for “legitimate scientific, educational or law enforcement purposes” to be determined on a school-by-school basis.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on and .

Whether he’s hopping on the or filming a , Schexnaydre uses TikTok to improve school culture at Harry Hurst Middle School as students recover from pandemic learning loss.

With over 2 million views, , Schexnaydre has been able to leverage his social media presence to build trust with students.

“Whether it’s academics, test scores or mental health, your initiatives will not work unless the school culture is right,” Schexnaydre told The 74.

Schexnaydre’s strategy has not only strengthened his connection with his students, but has also helped him retain and recruit new teachers.

With a 95% teacher retention rate, Schexnaydre’s TikTok videos have created a positive learning environment for the 107 faculty members at Harry Hurst Middle School.

However, when there are vacancies, Schexnaydre often uses his social media presence as a way to entice prospective teachers.

Schexnaydre said his TikTok often became the “conversation starter,” noting that his videos engaging with students and faculty give applicants a clear picture of the school community they’d be joining. 

“It’s been a good tool for us,” Schexnaydre said. “We’ve had really good applicants where four or five schools want them but they pick us because they saw our TikTok and how great of a school we are.”

You never know what you might see on a Friday at

Katie Martinez, a 7th grade English teacher at Harry Hurst Middle School, said teachers rarely ever leave.

“He’s definitely a fun boss and just fabulous all the way around,” Martinez told The 74. “He even involves the teachers in his TikToks and really brings together this school culture and community that people want to come work at.”

Martinez noted how much her students adore Schexnaydre’s TikTok videos.

“It might seem like a silly thing and it might seem like no one cares, but the buy-in from the kids is monumental and it means the world to them,” Martinez said. 

“They idolize David because he takes the time to figure out what’s important to them and it makes them more willing to do what’s important to him.”

Martinez also said Schexnaydre’s initiatives show how useful TikTok can be in schools.

“There’s definitely a way to use TikTok effectively and David has shown that it can grow a positive school culture among students and faculty,” Martinez said.

Brandy Dufrene, a 6th grade science teacher at Harry Hurst Middle School, agreed with Martinez.

“Especially in the middle school environment, students already think their teachers aren’t cool and we don’t understand them at the social-emotional level,” Dufrene told The 74. “So I feel like if we can relate to them and build those relationships through their interests, TikTok can be helpful.”

Jenny Bouler, the parent of a 6th grade student at Harry Hurst Middle School, supports Schexnaydre’s TikTok presence as a way to connect with students.

Bouler said Schexnaydre’s TikTok video by chasing after one he tossed in the air is one of many examples of the positive effect it can have on students.

“My initial thought was that it was brilliant and he’s a very creative principal,” Bouler told The 74. “He brings topics that can be a little bit bland or dry or boring and really puts a spin on them that catches the kids attention and gets them more engaged.”

Did a technology PSA on morning announcements this week

Jane Chauvin, the parent of a 7th grade student at Harry Hurst Middle School, agreed with Bouler.

“Are there things on TikTok that are inappropriate for children? Absolutely. But our kids are smart and canny and denying access will make them want to use it more,” Chauvin told The 74.

Chauvin said Schexnaydre’s TikTok videos, such as his , reflects how other school administrators should approach the social media platform.

“His videos help him connect with our students in this digital world,” Chauvin said. “Our kids need to know that their teachers and administrators know what’s relevant to them.”

Students get innovative when they forget their IDs!!!

Schexnaydre believes having access to TikTok is ultimately up to students’ parents.

“I’m not trying to encourage students to make a TikTok, but a lot of them have it already,” Schexnaydre said. “So if you really want to reach people you have to go where they are, and that’s where our kids are.”

Because of the overwhelmingly positive response, Schexnaydre said he has more TikTok ideas in the works.

“Just being able to do that extra little thing has made such a big difference,” Schexnaydre said. “And if I can get the kids to be happy and excited to come to school on a Monday morning, the proof is in the pudding.”

At least eleven school districts, one county, and one California county system that oversees 23 smaller districts have filed suits this year, representing roughly 469,000 students. 

Two others in Arizona are considering their own complaints, one superintendent told The 74. Eleven districts in voted to pursue similar litigation, as did . Many others across the country are on the verge of doing the same, according to a lawyer representing a New Jersey district.

“Schools, states, and Americans across the country are rightly pushing back against Big Tech putting profits over kids’ safety online,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, co-sponsor of the , bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act, told The 74. “These efforts, proliferated by harrowing stories from families amid a worsening youth mental health crisis, underscore the urgency for Congress to act.” 

Algorithms and platform design have “exploited the vulnerable brains of youth, hooking tens of millions of students across the country into positive feedback loops of excessive use and abuse of Defendants’ social media platforms,” Seattle Public Schools claimed in the first suit filed this January.

Districts in Washington, Oregon, Arizona, New Jersey, and , , as well as say tech companies intentionally , exacerbating depression, anxiety, tech addiction and self-harm, straining learning and district finances. 

But the legal fight, whether tried or settled, will not be easy, outside counsel and at least one district leader said. 

“We don’t think that this is a slam dunk case. We think it’s going to be an uphill battle. But our board and I believe that this is in the best interest of our students to do this,” said Andi Fourlis, superintendent of Arizona’s largest district, Mesa Public Schools. “It’s about making the case that we need to do better for our kids.” 

Just how badly Mesa’s teens are hurting is laid out in detail in court filings: More than a third are chronically absent, 3,500 more were involved in disciplinary incidents in 2021-22 than in 2019-20 and the district has seen a “surge” in suicidal ideation and anxiety. 

Buried in the 111-page lawsuit, a high school senior’s video essay illustrates the painful impacts of social media addiction: risky or self-destructive behavior, disconnection from friends.

Simultaneously, and lawmakers are proposing bills to make platforms safer. Senate are underway, featuring parents whose children died by suicide. TikTok’s CEO this month to address concerns about exposure to harmful content. President Joe Biden flagged “,” in his last State of the Union Address.

Both legislative and legal efforts are after similar goals: changing the algorithms and product design believed to be hurting and kids. Through lawsuits, districts also seek financial compensation for the increased mental health services and training they’ve “” to establish. 

“The harms caused by social media companies have impacted the districts’ ability to carry out their core mission of providing education. The expenditures are not sustainable and divert resources from classroom instruction and other programs,” said Michael Innes, partner with Carella Byrne, Cecchi, Olstein, Brody & Agnello, a firm representing New Jersey schools.

Previous complaints against opioid and e-cigarette companies, which levied public nuisance and negligence claims as districts’ social media filings do, resulted in multimillion dollar settlements. 

But some legal experts say there’s a key distinction in this case: Big Tech companies aren’t the ones producing content on these platforms, individuals are. Companies have some hefty . 

“School districts are not in the business of suing people … the threshold for initiating litigation is very high,” said Dean Kawamoto, a lawyer for Keller Rohrback, the Seattle-based firm representing four districts, and thousands of others in Juul litigation. 

“I do think it says something that you’ve got a group of schools that have filed now, and I think more are going to join them,” Kawamoto added. 

Some outside counsel are . 

“I think there are questions about whether the litigation system is even a coherent way to go about this,” First Amendment scholar and Harvard Law professor Rebecca Tushnet told The 74. “It’s very hard to use individual litigation to get systemic change, excepting in particular circumstances.” 

The exceptions, she added, have clear visions and specific outcomes, like requiring a doctor on-call for safer prison conditions. Those kinds of metrics are difficult to name when it comes to algorithms and mental health. 

What precedent (or lack thereof) tells us

Social media companies’ lawyers are likely to assert free speech protections early and often, including in initial motions to dismiss.

“The conventional wisdom is that if motions to dismiss are denied in cases like this, [companies] are much more likely to settle … reality is actually a little more mixed,” Tushnet said, adding if the claims come after business models, companies fight harder. 

An added challenge is proving causal harm — that social media companies have caused student depression, anxiety, eating disorders or self-harm. The link is one that neuroscientists and researchers are , though experts say there’s an urgent need. 

“This is a watershed moment where schools can really roll up their sleeves and do something because — not that they haven’t been in the past — but because it’s so obvious. It’s right in front of them. It’s impacting students’ education,” said Jerry Barone, chief clinical officer at Effective School Solutions, which brings mental health care to schools. 

About 13.5% of teen girls say Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse; 17% of teen girls say it makes eating disorders worse, according to Meta’s leaked internal research, first revealed in a via .

Even if districts are able to provide proof, they may not ever see a judgment made. 

Public nuisance claims in tobacco and opioid mass torts were more successful in “inducing settlements, rather than in courthouse outcomes,” according to Robert Rabin, tort expert and professor at Stanford University. 

While he’s not “dismissive” of districts’ efforts, “the precedents don’t supply clear-cut support for the claims here.”’

The interim

As lawyers work out the details, students are left in the balance. Some are skeptical the suits will amount to anything at all, at least in their adolescence. 

“Why do you guys waste so much time on these useless things that you know get nowhere, when you can do it with things that you know will get somewhere?” said Angela Ituarte, a sophomore at a Seattle high school. 

Many young people interviewed by The 74 described their social media use like a double-edged sword: affirming, a place where they learned about mental health or found community, particularly for queer students of color; and simultaneously dangerous, a place where they connected with adults when they were 14 and saw dangerous diets promoted.

Social media, Ituarte said, makes it seem like self-harm and disordered eating, “are the solution to everything. And it’s hard to get that out of those algorithms — even if you block the accounts or say you’re not interested it still keeps popping up. Usually it’s when things are bad, too.”

In a late February letter to senators, Meta touted a promising initiative to on one for extended periods. Only 1 in 5 teens actually moved to a new topic during a weeklong trial. 

To curb cyberbullying, users now get warnings for potentially offensive comments. People only edit or delete their message 50% of the time, according to the company’s responses to Senate inquiries. 

Meta, YouTube and Google did not respond to requests for comment. TikTok told The 74 they cannot comment on ongoing litigation. The company has just started requiring users who say they are under 18 to enter a password after scrolling for an hour.

In a statement to The 74, Snap said they “are constantly evaluating how we continue to make our platform safer.” Snap has partnered with mental health organizations to launch an in-app support system for users who may be experiencing a crisis, and acknowledged that the work may never be done. 

The process has only just begun. If the suits move to trial, some districts will be chosen as bellwethers to represent the many plaintiffs, tasked with regularly contributing to a lengthy trial. 

Still, there’s no doubt in Fourlis’s mind. 

“Sometimes you have to be the first to step forward to take a bold leap so that others can follow,” she said. “Being the superintendent of the largest school district in Arizona, what we do often sets precedents, and I have to be very strategic about that responsibility.”

Disclosure: Campbell Brown, Meta’s vice president of media partnerships, is a co-founder and member of the board of directors of The 74. She played no role in the editing of this article.

“Ten years and two months ago, I survived the Sandy Hook shooting,” Matthews says. “When I was crouched in the corner in school in Newtown, Connecticut, on 12/14/12, I was hunched in the corner with my classmates for so long that I actually got a PTSD fracture in my L4 and L5 in my right lower back. I now have a full-blown PTSD fracture that flares up anytime I have a stressful situation.”

“The fact that this is a second mass shooting that I have now lived through is incomprehensible. My heart goes out to all the families and the friends of the victims of Michigan State shooting. But we can no longer just provide love and prayers … [there] needs to be legislation, needs to be action. 

“It’s not OK. We can no longer allow this to happen. We can no longer be complacent.”

Monday night’s shooting took the lives of at least three students, with five others still critically wounded Tuesday. 

Matthews’s video quickly went viral Tuesday morning; a tweet from Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, had already seen 42,000 likes and nearly 14,000 retweets by 1 p.m. 

The Michigan State shooting occurred mere hours before the fifth anniversary of the Valentine’s Day school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which resulted in 17 deaths. Some of our previous coverage of the fallout from Parkland: 

—With reporting from Meghan Gallagher

A growing number of public schools and colleges in the U.S. are moving to ban TikTok – the popular Chinese-owned social media app that allows users to share short videos.

They are following the lead of the and , that are banishing the social media app because to spy on Americans.

The app is created by ByteDance, which is based in China and has

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

and have banned the app from campus Wi-Fi networks. the state’s university system to ban it.

Some K-12 schools have also blocked the app. Public schools in Virginia’s have banned TikTok on school-issued devices and schools’ Wi-Fi networks. Louisiana’s state superintendent of education recommended that and on school-issued devices.

As a who specializes in , I don’t believe these schools are overreacting. TikTok captures user data in a way that is .

The version of TikTok that is raising all these concerns is not available in China itself. In an effort to protect Chinese students from the harmful effects of social media, the Chinese Communist Party has issued a rule that limits the time students can spend on TikTok to . And they can view only such as science experiments and museum exhibits.

Aggressive tactics to capture and harvest user data

All for users.

But TikTok does more than the rest. Its default privacy settings allow the app to collect much more information than the app needs to actually function.

Every hour, the app accesses users’ . It also used to access the service and can scan hard drives attached to any of those devices.

If a user changes privacy settings to avoid that scrutiny, the app . Other social networking apps, like Facebook, don’t ask users to revise their privacy settings if they lock down their information.

How TikTok handles the data it collects from users also raises concerns. Ireland’s data protection regulator, for instance, is of European citizens’ data to Chinese servers and potential violations of rules protecting children’s privacy.

Cybersecurity vulnerabilities

As , researchers have found with TikTok.

In 2020, cybersecurity company Check Point found that it could send users messages that looked as if they came from TikTok but actually contained malicious links. When users clicked on those links, , get access to private information, delete existing content and even post new material under that user’s account.

Hackers have also taken advantage of that creates additional cybersecurity problems. For instance, a trend called the “Invisible Challenge” encouraged users to use a TikTok filter called “Invisible Body” to film themselves naked – assuring users their followers would only see a blurry image, not anything revealing.

Cybercriminals created TikTok videos that claimed they had made software that would reveal users’ nude bodies by reversing the body-masking filter. But the software they encouraged users to download actually just stole people’s from elsewhere on their phones, as well as files from victims’ computers.

National security concerns

Many U.S. lawmakers have objected to , saying it could allow the Chinese government to monitor – including members of the military or government officials.

If the Chinese government wants information about the , it does not need to hack anything.

That’s because China’s to .

Technology industry observers have also raised concerns that ByteDance, the company that makes TikTok, may be .

These problems take on even more importance in the context of the Chinese government’s alleged efforts to build a . China has been linked to several large-scale cyberattacks targeting federal employees and U.S. consumers. These attacks include the , 2017 attacks on the and the 2018 attack on hotel group .

Negative effects outweighing positive ones?

in some interesting, and useful, ways – such as connecting with students, building relationships, teaching about the risks of social media and delivering small, quick lessons.

But it is not clear whether those positive effects counterbalance the potential and actual harm. In addition to general concerns about , some school officials say increased TikTok use has to teachers.

Also, the app’s algorithm for recommending videos to watch next has increased students’ risk of . The “One Chip Challenge,” which asks TikTok users to eat a single chip containing , sent and made others sick.

TikTok videos have also led students to . In response to one viral challenge, some students from schools.

With all that potential for harm and damage, it’s not surprising school officials are considering a ban on TikTok.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

Gov. Greg Gianforte urged the Board of Regents to ban the social media app TikTok within the Montana University System citing security risks in a on Tuesday.

This follows Gianforte’s to Chief Information Officer Kevin Gilbertson last month that the app would be from state devices, for state business, and while connected to the state network.

“The ability of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to spy on Americans using TikTok is well documented. Using or even downloading TikTok poses a massive security threat,” Gianforte wrote in the letter Tuesday. “Given the risk use of TikTok poses to our public universities and our students, I request the Board of Regents support efforts by the Commissioner of Higher Education to prevent the use of TikTok by the Montana University System (MUS) and its campuses and while connected to the MUS network.”

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

In the letter, the governor cited recent testimony from Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Christopher Wray who warned the app is controlled by “a government that doesn’t share our values, and that has a mission that’s very much at odds with what’s in the best interests of the United States.”

A spokesperson for the Montana University System did not respond to a request for comment.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Daily Montanan maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Darrell Ehrlick for questions: info@dailymontanan.com. Follow Daily Montanan on and .

That’s the message that federal law enforcement officials touted Tuesday during a first-ever hosted by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a division of the Department of Homeland Security. While a demographic profile of school shooters doesn’t exist, according to , soon-to-be gunmen exhibit signs that can be identified prior to attacks — such as a fixation on violence or a history of depression. 

Officials endorsed “threat assessment,” an approach pioneered by the Secret Service that’s become a common but controversial strategy in schools to predict future perpetrators and prevent targeted campus violence. The Secret Service is part of Homeland Security.

“We’ve seen the tragedies that have happened when that information, on behavior that objectively elicits concern, was not acted on,” said Lina Alathari, chief of the . “But we also need to make sure we’re setting a lower threshold for what we want to intervene with — such as being bullied, depression, suicidality — because we’ve also seen those in the background of these students that resorted to violence.”

Following the mass school shooting in May at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school, districts statewide are set to receive for campus security, including for the creation of threat assessment teams. 

Yet the deployment of such teams, which generally include school administrators, mental health officials and police officers, has civil rights groups on edge. Critics warn the approach could misidentify struggling students as future gunmen and unnecessarily push them into the juvenile justice system. While school shootings remain statistically rare, student behaviors that are factors in threat assessments — like alcohol use and a history of mental health issues — are exceedingly common.

Such concerns were largely downplayed at this week’s summit, a three-day virtual event where law enforcement officials, educators and other experts gathered to offer recommendations in responding to a range of campus security risks, including mass school shootings, cyber attacks and online extremism. 

Steven Driscoll, the threat assessment center’s assistant chief, stressed that the approach is not “based on profiles or identifying types of students” but rather a focus on identifying threatening behaviors and intervening early. 

“Schools need training not only on the behavioral threat assessment process best practices but also on things like implicit biases which have historically permeated a variety of school-based programs,” Driscoll said. 

In a letter to the Education Department last year, a coalition of 50 student civil rights groups warned that the adoption of threat assessment in schools is “likely pushing many children of color and children with disabilities out of school, into the school-to-prison pipeline.” 

“These ‘threat assessments’ are likely to target large numbers of children who aren’t actual threats — including disproportionate numbers of children of color and children with disabilities — and cause them significant and lasting harm, while doing little or nothing to increase safety in schools,” according to the letter, which was signed by groups including the National Center for Youth Law, the National Disability Rights Network and the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates. “In addition, they may refer children to services that do not exist.”

Last year, a analyzed 67 school violence plots that were thwarted between 2006 and 2018, finding that plotters in each case were met with criminal charges or arrests. Yet the “primary objective” of threat assessments is not to administer discipline, the report notes, but to “identify students in crisis or distress and provide robust interventions, before their behavior escalates to the point of criminality.” 

Amy Lowder, the director of student safety and well-being at a suburban Charlotte, North Carolina school district, acknowledged during the summit that threat assessments conducted improperly can have detrimental effects on youth, including unnecessary student expulsions and juvenile justice referrals. That’s why it’s important, she said, for threat assessment teams to take “a whole-child approach in gathering the necessary information” about students causing concerns. 

Meanwhile, Greg Johnson, a high school principal from West Liberty, Ohio, said that school leaders must balance students’ civil rights against their need to ensure campuses are secure. Johnson was principal of West Liberty High School in 2017 when a classmate. 

“You’ve got that balance because you want to support student rights and individual rights but you also want to keep people safe and that’s a huge responsibility,” Johnson said. “That’s a huge responsibility to keep your students safe.” 

In an interview with The 74 that opened the summit, Homeland Security Secretary Alejando Mayorkas noted that there have been more than , more than any other year on record. 

Given the reality that school shooters often leak their plans to friends or online, summit panelists also endorsed a need to monitor students on the internet — a practice that has raised a separate set of civil rights and digital privacy concerns. That’s why it’s important for districts to employ experts in digital analyses, said Colton Easton, the project and training manager at Safer Schools Together, a Canadian-based, for-profit company that offers threat-assessment training and a team of threat analysts to assist districts in investigations. 

“Maybe a student made a threat involving a gun and we see that gun posted on TikTok, we would consider that behaviors consistent with the threat and law enforcement could obtain a search warrant and remove access to the means,” Easton said. “Today, digital leakage is that golden ticket for school safety and threat assessment teams.”

“For me, I really like corn,” Tariq said in an August now watched over 5 million times on YouTube. It’s “a big lump with knobs” and “has the juice,” he explained. “I can’t imagine a more beautiful thing.”

Since then, the maize craze has reached seemingly every corner of the internet. A made by Michael Gregory, a creator behind several other viral mashups like the song, has been played 73 million times on TikTok and used in over a million other videos. Brands such as , and have referenced the clip in their marketing. And Tariq, a New York City second grader, was officially named South Dakota’s “” in early September.

In the original video, holding the microphone for “Corn Kid” and asking questions was Julian Shapiro-Barnum, 23-year-old creator of the internet show , which 2.4 million Instagram users follow. Since April 2021, he has interviewed hundreds of young kids across NYC about everything from the meaning of life to peeing their pants — and countless other conversation starters in between, like fake mustaches, drones and Komodo dragons. 

Across those many exchanges in parks and playgrounds, Shapiro-Barnum has developed an interviewing style that allows his guests to share their authentic, very often hilarious selves and brings viewers into the wonderful world of being a kid.

“I don’t baby the kids and I don’t talk down to them. And I think that really does wonders,” he said. “It really empowers kids to open up and grow and test ideas.”

The 74 spoke with the show’s host over Zoom to hear what it’s like being online famous and find out what’s popping on the corn beat. He also shared how his unconventional family background shaped who he is today and what it meant to him to find out his videos are now being used to train young pediatricians.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

The 74: What originally inspired Recess Therapy?

Julian Shapiro-Barnum: I’d been doing on-the-street content for a couple years by the time I started Recess Therapy. I was really interested in the idea of talking to real people. … One of my first shows was , which was a democratized late night talk show. I’d sit on a corner with tables and chairs and whoever walked up was the guest.

By spring 2021, I had been playing around with these concepts for a while. I’d always been interested in interviewing kids. I was doing online school at the time (Shapiro-Barnum graduated from Boston University’s College of Fine Arts in 2021) and I’d do homework at the playground or something and see these kids playing around having so much fun. And I was always like, “How do they do it? How do they stay positive during all this?”

For a while, I was thinking about interviewing them about happiness and how they stay happy and eventually I did it. And it was immediately gold because they’re just so honest and authentic and sweet and funny all at the same time. And I was like, this might be something special.

There’s a lightness to the videos. What is it about how kids see the world that’s so fun and joyous?

Kids look at the world through a much less biased scope. I think a lot of their opinions are their own. … They’re not holding back about their own thoughts. They’re not trying to say the right thing — at least until they’re, like, 7. I feel like the interviews are laced with such honesty. You don’t really see that in adults and older kids. They’re not judging themselves.

How would you describe your technique as an interviewer?

I used to come prepared with a lot of questions. At this point, I come prepared with a lot of loose ideas and I really try to find what they’re most excited about. Once I find that, I just follow their joy and their interest. My job really comes in trying to find a way to make them feel comfortable and excited. And then, you know, playing until we find the thing that really is tantalizing for them to talk about for maybe 10 minutes.

One of the things I love about the videos is you validate so much of what kids say. Maybe they’re like, “It sucked when I dropped my ice cream on the ground.” And you’re like, “You’re right, that does suck.” How can adults better connect with kids and validate how they see the world?

I think what adults can do is just give them the space to feel the full expanse of their emotions, you know, let them tire themselves out. A lot of times adults try to make kids fit into the box or mode that they’re in. And so often, I find that they flourish and have so much more fun when they’re given their own space to run on their own energy. 

Also, I feel like a lot of adults don’t give kids the ability to have a full true conversation. So often, I’m told that people like that I don’t baby the kids, and I don’t talk down to them. And I think that really does wonders. It’s a very simple thing that one can do, but I think it really empowers kids to open up and grow and test ideas.

Are there any specific phrases or responses that you find really fruitful?

A lot of times when we’re talking about something, before I move on, I ask, “Is there anything else you want to say about that before we go?” And so often, there is. I might be done and I move on to something else, but they’re still thinking about the last thing. 

I also like to start my interviews by saying, “Is there anything you want to start by talking about?” Letting them bring whatever they’re toying with before I bring them to my conversation. I didn’t used to do that, I used to say, ‘What’s up?” Which really doesn’t work. 

I’ve wanted to ask how you find people to interview. Do you show up at a park and ask around?

My team and I, we show up and we really don’t discriminate. Anyone who walks by we offer the opportunity for an interview. We found that casting the widest net possible is the best strategy because so often, the kid that I think might be too shy, or the kid that I think looks perfect and is super boisterous is not the one that is going to be [best on camera]. I have no perception of it. Often, the really quiet kid is the one who has the most to say. I’m very outgoing. So I’m attracted to high energy, but that’s not everyone.

That’s so interesting. In some ways, that could also be a lesson to educators about how to treat kids in a classroom.

Definitely. I think giving everybody the same space does a lot.

To bring it to Tariq, the “Corn Kid” who has been our biggest video to date, I don’t know if out of 100 kids if he would be my first choice of who I thought would be the funniest, craziest, but he looked really sweet. I really wanted to talk to him. And, you know, he’s amazing. But I wouldn’t have known, you know?

When you made that video, you must have known it was pretty great. But did you expect it to go viral like it did?

Oh, I couldn’t have known. I loved it, it was a great video, but I love so many of the videos that we make. But this one has bewitched the world in such a special way. People just respond so well to his true honest positivity about something that isn’t grand. He’s hyping up something very sweet and small. And I think that’s very special and unique.

I’ve seen a bunch of spinoffs of it, obviously. What are one or two of your favorite pieces of content that have come about because of that video?

I mean, the Gregory Brothers, It’s Corn song reigns supreme in my mind. At this point, I’ve worked with them and I really like them. I think they deserve a lot of credit for making this as big as it got. Their song is the song that has created all the spinoff songs. 

Also, someone did a club remix at a rave. That was pretty funny. I liked that. There’s, like, hundreds of people moshing to It’s Corn. It’s crazy.

That’s awesome. So the video has been watched by millions of people, the remix listened to by millions of people. Tariq, I saw, is the corn ambassador of South Dakota. What have been the impacts of his fame for his family? I did see some of the proceeds from the remix on Spotify went to his family.

Yeah, I mean, he’s making money off of Spotify. He was a in The New York Times [last week]. It’s a good article. I try not to speak on behalf of Jessica and Tariq, but the article really speaks to the ways this opportunity has been beneficial to their family. 

I think they’ve had a lot of fun getting to go places for free. We just went to the Empire State Building together and got an amazing tour. Since the video a lot of companies and people have really welcomed them places, which has been really cool.

Other than It’s Corn, what are your top five favorite videos that you’ve done?

Oh my gosh, there’s so many. I feel really connected to all the kids. Some I’ve had on multiple times and I have a relationship with them and their families. 

But I guess I can give simple answers: 

2. Sloane is great talking about  
3. A , such a good clip
4. Dillon, the , is always a classic recess therapy clip 
5. The

Was there a point where it went from, “OK, this is something I’m doing for fun” to “This strikes a chord and resonates with people?”

The first time I did the in June 2021 (interviewing kids at New York City’s annual parade), the feedback was just so positive. So many people were saying how it meant something to them. And I hadn’t even been doing it very long at that point. I get so many sweet comments from people all the time. I think the show does mean a lot to a lot of people, which is very special and I genuinely appreciate (it) and makes me want to keep doing it. 

I think the first time anyone ever recognized me on the street was like September a year ago, probably. And I was like, “Oh, whoa, people have seen the show and know what I look like.” It’s funny that to some people I’m, like, an internet celebrity. It’s just a weird concept.

What’s the [viewer] note that most sticks with you?

Maybe eight months ago, I got a message from a children’s hospital that they were showing the videos to young doctors to teach how to talk to kids. I was like, “Oh my gosh, you’re using my video for professionals.” Whenever somebody like a child therapist or like a teacher or a doctor reached out and was like, “Hey, this really helped me with what I do,” it means a lot to me. I went to acting school, I did comedy improv. I didn’t go to school to do any of these things. It means a lot that people are learning and using my stuff to make people happy. 

Can you tell me a little bit about your family background? I know that you come from an unconventional family. How has that shaped you?

I have a very large family. I have five gay parents, three moms and two dads. Since I had so many adults in my life raising me, I was never talked down to in the same way. I had a lot of adults in my life I was friends with and who looked out for me and taught me things. The traditional power structure and dynamics weren’t there. 

I’ve definitely brought that into my interviews and my interview technique and the way that I work with kids. Just bringing them that respect and, like I said, not talking down to them. Because I wasn’t, and it meant so much to me when I was a kid. I like to bring that into my interviews.

How do you describe Recess Therapy to older relatives?

Well, they all know about it. My grandpa isn’t on Instagram or anything, but we’ve been on TV a couple of times for news spots and he always gets very excited. I say it’s an online, on-the-street kids interview show where I talk to kids [ages] 2 to 8 about things as big as the meaning of life to as silly as peeing your pants.

You’ve been in The New York Times, you’ve been on ABC, what’s something about yourself you’ve never told the media? 

I don’t think I’ve ever said this, but 9 out of 10 mornings. I have two Eggo waffles toasted with peanut butter and jelly and a glass of 2% milk.

Sandwiched? 

Open face waffles with PB&J. jelly and the peanut butter brand changes. 

You can include that I’ve never said that. That’s my weird thing.

And last, what’s next? Where do you go from here?

I would love to bring the show to other places. I want to travel with it. I want to bring it to TV. I’m a comedian and actor and I’m hoping to have careers in those fields as well. But right now, I’m just really focusing on the show and making fun content and having great conversations and letting the kids show me what I should do next.