How YouTube Took Over the American Classroom

 Parents find their kids captive to the video streaming site on their school-issued devices; for one, it was 13,000 YouTube videos in three months

Story in the Wall Street Journal, reporter Shalini Ramachandran. Full story is here.

AMY WARREN’S “mom siren” went off when her seventh-grader in Wichita, Kan., seemed to know too much about Fortnite, a battling-and-shooting videogame he is barred from playing.

When Warren signed into his school Google account, she was aghast: Her son Ben had accessed more than 13,000 YouTube videos during school hours from December 2024 through February 2025, according to viewing data she provided the Journal.

His feed was rife with inappropriate content. Videos glorifying gun culture, asking about silencers on Nerf guns, “head shots” where children realistically portray being killed, a video with sexually explicit jokes about neighbors sleeping together. 

YouTube had served up “shorts”—video after video that it algorithmically determined that he might like.

“It made me cry,” Warren said. “All of a sudden it’s this kind of gun slop, by no fault of his own. ” She later ran for school board and won in November, eager to galvanize change.

And:

When Warren asked about blocking YouTube altogether from student devices last spring, she heard back that teachers depended on it for parts of lesson plans. 

Wichita Public Schools is “working to restrict open YouTube browsing,” a spokeswoman said, after learning over time that the platform’s own “restricted” content-filtering mode “isn’t sufficient for the way algorithms and short-form content have evolved.”

In Ben Warren’s science class, nearly all educational content has been on the iPad: instead of live science experiments, the teacher showed a YouTube video. “Everything is a simulated experience,” the now-eighth grader says. “I would rather use paper and pencil. It’s easier to focus.”

And:

THE YOUTUBE OVERLOAD runs counter to what is clear in several scientific studies: Learning analog is better than digital.

Neuroscientist Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, who has co-written several studies on screen use and child brain development, said introducing digital tools too early to children may prevent basic neural networks related to executive functions and language abilities from building. Her research has shown that screen-based learning can interfere with children’s attention. “You know how to push buttons really fast but don’t have the attention level to focus on your teacher,” said Horowitz-Kraus, head of the educational neuroimaging group at Technion, an Israeli university.

Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist and educator who recently testified before Congress, found in an analysis that as states switched over to digital testing between 2011 and 2019, national test scores for reading and math slid in the ensuing years through 2024, even excluding the pandemic year test. This “digital lock-in” forced more screen time and distraction into the classroom, he theorizes. 

Breaking: Montgomery County Public Schools Join Federal Lawsuit Against Social Media Companies

SAN DIEGO, June 14, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Frantz Law Group announces that the Montgomery County Public School District joined 500 school districts nationwide in a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in San Francisco against Meta, TikTok, Snap, YouTube, and other social media companies. In the lawsuit the plaintiff school districts allege that these companies are knowingly causing emotional harm to children through their platforms.

With over 160,550 students in 210 schools, the Montgomery County Public School District is the largest school district in the state of Maryland. The lawsuit alleges that various social media companies have caused a mental and emotional health crisis marked by higher proportions of anxiety, depression, thoughts of self-harm, body dissatisfaction, disordered eating behaviors, and low self-esteem among children and students. Many are further subjected to often harmful, exploitative and addictive content that encourages disorderly behavior, unhealthy social comparison, and cyberbullying. This litigation seeks to provide the funding and staffing resources needed to mitigate the damage that school districts are currently encountering.

In May of this year, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a new Advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health, in which he states, "…there is growing evidence that social media use is associated with harm to young people's mental health." The Advisory cites research finding that one-third or more of girls aged 11-15 say they feel "addicted" to certain social media platforms, that 46% of adolescents aged 13-17 said social media makes them feel worse, and that 64% of adolescents are "often" or "sometimes" exposed to hate-based content through social media. The Advisory also points to studies that show "a relationship between social media use and poor sleep quality, reduced sleep duration, sleep difficulties, and depression among youth."

Moreover, in October 2021, former Meta employee Frances Haugen testified before Congress that Meta's own internal research indicated how harmful their products are to the mental health of child users and, in particular, teenage girls.

Montgomery County Public Schools Join Federal Lawsuit Against Social Media Companies (prnewswire.com)

Young YouTube influencers are increasingly marketing junk food to fellow kids, study finds

(CNN)Kid influencers on YouTube are marketing junk food and sugary beverages to their fellow kids, and they're racking up billions of page views, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

The study demonstrates how advertisers are seeking to take advantage of new avenues to market their wares to children.

"We should approach YouTube influencer videos with skepticism, even with videos that seem to be educational or kid-friendly," said senior author Marie Bragg, an assistant professor of public health nutrition with joint appointments at New York University's School of Global Public Health and Langone Medical Center...

 https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/26/health/youtube-influencers-junk-food-wellness/index.html

What Changes at YouTube Mean For Kids, Creators, and the Rest of Us

The biggest lesson of this settlement and its aftermath? The way we make and think about media for children needs to change.

In 2018, CCFC, the Center for Digital Democracy and a coalition of 23 advocacy groups filed a complaint urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate YouTube and Google for massive, ongoing violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. We weren’t trying to catch anyone on a technicality – we were blowing the whistle on one of the most powerful companies in the world for knowingly and illegally profiting off of kids’ personal data.

Our complaint detailed how Google was, for years, intentionally violating COPPA by pretending obviously kid-directed channels like Little Baby Bum, ChuChuTV Nursery Rhymes, and Ryan Toys Review weren’t actually for kids. This was a huge money-maker for YouTube: at the same time Google falsely said in its TOS and to the FTC that YouTube wasn’t for kids, the company was charging premium prices for ads on child-directed content and bragging to advertisers that YouTube was the new Saturday morning cartoons. We asked the FTC to investigate YouTube and Google, not the channels of individual creators, because we believe that YouTube as a platform is ultimately responsible for making sure its data and ad policies follow the law. (And even when rumors of this settlement were first swirling, we urged the FTC not to shift the burden of compliance to creators.) We also focused only on channels that were obviously child-directed, because those are the channels where the audience is overwhelmingly the kids that COPPA was intended to protect.

Now that the FTC has investigated and found that Google and YouTube were violating the law, there are big changes underway on YouTube, including restrictions on data collection and advertising on child-directed content. Advocates, lawmakers, and child development experts recognize that this is a long overdue step to enforce COPPA — which has been the law for years — and end the insidious practice of collecting personal data from kids in order to target them with manipulative behavioral ads...

https://commercialfreechildhood.org/what-the-youtube-changes-mean-for-kids-creators-and-the-rest-of-us/

YouTube’s child viewers may struggle to recognise adverts in videos from ‘virtual play dates’

As child vloggers have risen in fame and fortune, more and more content has been targeted at younger viewers, however research shows that children often struggle to recognise embedded advertising and there have been no attempts to introduce a disclosure system that is more tailored to child audiences, writes Rebecca Mardon. Rebecca is a senior lecturer in marketing and strategy at Cardiff University. Rebecca’s research explores emerging consumer behaviours in digital contexts, in particular ownership and possession in the context of digital materiality and emerging forms of commercialisation within online communities. [Header image credit: M.-Newman-CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0.jpg]

YouTube’s highest earning star in 2018 was a seven-year-old boy named Ryan. That’s right – a child out-earned the likes of the infamous Logan Paul, video game vlogger PewDiePie, and even make-up mogul Jeffree Star. Between June 2017 and June 2018, Ryan is estimated to have earned an impressive US$22m from the platform.

Guided by his parents, Ryan presents his own YouTube channel, Ryan ToysReview, where he unboxes and plays with the latest toys. Since joining YouTube in 2015, Ryan has amassed more than 18.5m subscribers, the majority of whom are, unsurprisingly, children. Discussing the appeal, Ryan’s mother explained that viewers feel like they’re “on a play date with him and going on fun, pretend play adventures”.

Advertising literacy

Ryan’s channel has become a lucrative business, complete with 25 employees, including video editors, writers and production assistants. It achieved initial commercial success by allowing more traditional “pre-roll” adverts to appear before its videos, which mostly saw Ryan playing with toys – which his parents say they buy. The channel later began to embed advertising content for major brands, such as Walmart, within Ryan’s own videos. More recently, the business launched a range of Ryan’s World toys that often feature in his video content.

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/parenting4digitalfuture/2019/09/25/youtubes-child-viewers-may-struggle-to-recognise-adverts/

Google to pay $170 million to settle charges it violated kids’ privacy law on YouTube

Google will pay $170 million to settle allegations it illegally collected data about children younger than 13 who were watching toy videos and television shows on YouTube, state and federal officials announced Wednesday, part of a record punishment that some in government criticized as too lenient.

Regulators charged that Google knew certain YouTube channels were popular among younger viewers, touted this fact to brands and advertisers, and tracked kids’ viewing histories for the purpose of serving them targeted advertisements, ultimately raking in “millions of dollars” as a result of its repeated violations of federal children’s privacy laws.

In response, Google agreed to the record fine to resolve charges with the Federal Trade Commission and the attorney general of New York, which are set to announce their findings at a news conference in Washington. The tech giant also must adapt its business practices, halting data collection on YouTube videos that are clearly created with kids in mind and requiring video creators to label content that’s intended for young audiences...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/04/google-pay-million-settle-charges-it-violated-kids-privacy-law-youtube/

Essentially what the seemingly benign “if you like that, you’ll like this” mechanism is doing is training young children – practically from birth – to click on the first thing that comes along, regardless of the source.

In November of last year, I read an article in the New York Times about disturbing videos targeted at children that were being distributed via YouTube. Parents reported that their children were encountering knock-off editions of their favourite cartoon characters in situations of violence and death: Peppa Pig drinking bleach, or Mickey Mouse being run over by a car. A brief Google of some of the terms mentioned in the article brought up not only many more accounts of inappropriate content, in Facebook posts, newsgroup threads, and other newspapers, but also disturbing accounts of their effects. Previously happy and well-adjusted children became frightened of the dark, prone to fits of crying, or displayed violent behaviour and talked about self-harm – all classic symptoms of abuse. But despite these reports, YouTube and its parent company, Google, had done little to address them. Moreover, there seemed to be little understanding of where these videos were coming from, how they were produced – or even why they existed in the first place...

...Take YouTube’s recommendation system for starters, which doesn’t differentiate between Disney movies and a grainy animation cooked up by a bot farm in China. Essentially what the seemingly benign “if you like that, you’ll like this” mechanism is doing is training young children – practically from birth – to click on the first thing that comes along, regardless of the source. This is the same mechanism that sees Facebook slide fake political ads and conspiracy theories into the feeds of millions of disaffected voters, and the outcome – ever more extreme content and divided viewpoints – is much the same. Add the sheer impossibility of working out where these videos come from (most are anonymous accounts with thousands of barely differentiated uploads) and the viewer is adrift in a sea of existential uncertainty, which starts to feel worryingly familiar in a world where opaque and unaccountable systems increasingly control critical aspects of our everyday lives...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/17/peppa-pig-youtube-weird-algorithms-automated-content?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other