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Work in Progress
It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber
Test scores have been falling for years-even before the pandemic.
By Derek Thompson
A student looking at their phone
Darrell Eager / Gallery Stock
December 19, 2023
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For the past few years, parents, researchers, and the news media have paid closer attention to the relationship between teenagers' phone use and their mental health. Researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have shown that various measures of student well-being began a sharp decline around 2012 throughout the West, just as smartphones and social media emerged as the attentional centerpiece of teenage life. Some have even suggested that smartphone use is so corrosive, it's systematically reducing student achievement. I hadn't quite believed that last argument-until now."
"Emmanuel Macron is facing a backlash after threatening to cut off social media networks as a means of stopping the spread of violence during periods of unrest.
Élysée officials and government ministers responded on Wednesday by insisting the president was not threatening a "general blackout" but instead the "occasional and temporary" suspension of platforms.
The president's comments came as ministers blamed young people using social media such as Snapchat and TikTok for organising and encouraging rioting and violence after the shooting dead of a teenager during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb last week."
"This all presents big questions for which we don't yet have answers. "At what point should kids know better?" asked David Dockterman, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "When should a person's 'permanent digital record' start recording, if ever? To what extent should social media be a space for trial-and-error exploration around identity and social behavior?"
"These are fantastically difficult moral dilemmas for teenagers who act impulsively, using tools that are not fully under their control, leading to consequences that perhaps none of us can anticipate," said Sonia Livingstone, professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "This is the first time we've had a society in which almost by default, everything is recorded and shared and aggregated in ways that create a lifelong profile. Children should have the right to make mistakes.""
"But it isn't just major retailers deploying facial recognition software. Backlash to private use of facial recognition culminated on Wednesday when Livonia skating rink in Michigan was accused of banning a Black teenager after its facial recognition software mistakenly implicated her in a brawl.
Lamya Robinson told Fox2 that after her mom dropped her off at the skating rink last Saturday, security guards refused to let her inside, claiming her face had been scanned and the system indicated she was banned after starting a fight in March."
"This is the longest I've spent on Facebook in about four years. Finally, I've decided to delete it. In my 30s, it's started to stress me out that my profile still exists. Drunk pictures of me on display for people I haven't thought about in a decade. Whatever teenage me saw worthy of a status update just out there, searchable, findable, obscured only by privacy settings that I don't fully understand."
"Facebook knows its systems lead teenagers to anorexia-related content.
The company had to "break the glass" and turn back on safety settings after the 6 January Washington riots.
Facebook intentionally targets teenagers and children under 13.
Monday's outage that brought down Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp meant that for more than five hours Facebook could not "destabilise democracies"."
"As adolescents and young adults fled Facebook for platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, Facebook knew its long-term survival depended on winning over that demographic. But the savvy business move had a different, less public price tag.
Caught up in recommendations from a powerful algorithm designed to keep them engaged, some teen girls found Instagram worsened their body image, according to a new Wall Street Journal investigation. Users even pinned feelings of increased depression, anxiety, and suicidal thinking on the app."
""We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls," said a slide from one internal presentation in 2019, seen by the Wall Street Journal. "Thirty-two per cent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse," a subsequent presentation reported in March 2020."
"John became increasingly radicalised by an online barrage of far-right disinformation. "Posts of homeless British soldiers were set against Muslim families being given free homes. Now I know the posts were all fake, but the 15-year-old me didn't bother to fact-check."
The worry is that John's contemporaries won't either. A surge of online extremism and disinformation has arrived at a time of lockdown-induced isolation, loneliness and home-schooling, creating what police call a "perfect storm". One British far-right group has even started pushing an alternative white-supremacist school curriculum for lockdown learning."
"There has been a great amount of research and resources dedicated to mapping social media "pipelines" into far-right and reactionary politics. Less thought, however, has been dedicated to a leftwing alternative. This is a huge gap in how the left, broadly, thinks about online politics. While the problems of online rightwing radicalization are very real, I believe that the mechanisms of social media also offer a path for progressive and leftwing politicization."
"According to Wikipedian MJL, another administrator on the site, AmaryllisGardner had created or edited 49% of all the articles on the Scots Wikipedia. "Speaking as an admin there, here's what happened with Scots Wikipedia," they tweeted after the story broke on Reddit. "Nobody cared about maintaining it. Someone stepped up because no one else did. That person was never given any guidance. Articles ended up being very poorly mistranslated.""
"An American teenager who is using makeup tutorials on TikTok to spread awareness of China's detention of at least a million Muslims in internment camps in Xinjiang has claimed her videos are being censored by the platform."
"Police in the east Malaysia state Sarawak said the girl, who has not been named, posted the poll on the photo sharing app with the message: "Really Important, Help Me Choose D/L". After most responders voted for "death", she killed herself."
"Based on data from over 17,000 teenagers, the study "casts doubt on the widely accepted notion that spending time online, gaming or watching TV, especially before bedtime, can damage young people's mental health.""
"The ethics of Facebook's micro-targeted advertising was thrust into the spotlight this week by a report out of Australia. The article, based on a leaked presentation, said that Facebook was able to identify teenagers at their most vulnerable, including when they feel "insecure", "worthless", "defeated" and "stressed"."
"My personal coding projects have presented similarly thorny ethical questions. Should I write a computer program that will download the communications of thousands of teenagers suffering from eating disorders posted on an anorexia advice website? Write a program to post anonymous, suicidal messages on hundreds of college forums to see which colleges offer the most support? My answer to these questions, incidentally, was "no". But I considered it. And the glory and peril of computers is that they magnify the impact of your whims: an impulse becomes a program that can hurt thousands of people."
dr tech on 29 Dec 23"ns Work in Progress It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber Test scores have been falling for years-even before the pandemic. By Derek Thompson A student looking at their phone Darrell Eager / Gallery Stock December 19, 2023 Saved Stories This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America's biggest problems. Sign up here. For the past few years, parents, researchers, and the news media have paid closer attention to the relationship between teenagers' phone use and their mental health. Researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have shown that various measures of student well-being began a sharp decline around 2012 throughout the West, just as smartphones and social media emerged as the attentional centerpiece of teenage life. Some have even suggested that smartphone use is so corrosive, it's systematically reducing student achievement. I hadn't quite believed that last argument-until now."
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