April 25, 2024 – North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein visited the Career Center on Wednesday morning to participate in a panel with district leaders and students about the mental health impacts of smartphones and social media.
Social media has become a deeply entrenched part of billions of people’s lives over the past two decades, and in many ways, it’s a valuable tool for teenagers and adults to create and maintain connections with friends and loved ones around the world. However, it’s also changed the rules of social interaction in ways that can cause significant psychological harm, especially in younger users. Studies have found greater rates of depression, anxiety, and feelings of isolation in users who spend more than 30 minutes a day on social media. Considering that the average American high schooler is on their phone for over eight hours each day, that’s an especially troubling figure.
“Online support can be beneficial to students,” said Director of Psychological Services Heather Schwickrath. “But extended use over time can prove a bit detrimental.”
Stein is especially concerned about the structure of social media platforms, which he says have been specifically engineered to create addiction in users. As part of a bipartisan coalition of 33 state attorneys general, he helped sue Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta last year, alleging that the company utilized practices that they knew were harmful to young children and encouraged them to spend unhealthy amounts of time engaging with their apps. There’s a lot of money to be made in the battle for young people’s attention, and lawmakers, educators, parents, and other concerned adults need to actively oppose efforts to exploit children in that marketing campaign.
“TikTok, Instagram, and these other social media apps are designed by brilliant engineers to addict you, to keep you on, to keep you scrolling, because every minute you stay on their social media platforms, they are making more money off of you,” Stein said. “They don’t care about your health and wellbeing. In fact, they don’t even see you as people. They see you as products, which they can exploit to make money – and it’s working.”
WS/FCS students have nuanced opinions about striking a balance between maintaining connections with their friends through their phones and social media while also cutting down on the mental health drawbacks they’ve experienced from overuse. Those opinions fueled productive conversations at the panel, where representatives from the superintendent’s Student Advisory Council asked questions about existing pilot programs for removing phones from classrooms, safeguards against online exploitation, how phone usage rules would apply to teachers as well as their classes, and how to ensure consistent enforcement of policies across different campuses. Superintendent Tricia McManus stressed the need for these conversations to continue and for the future of phone use policy in schools to be as practical and evidence based as possible.
“We have to make sure we are smart as we make these policies,” McManus said. “Not just reactive, but really smart and intentional about how we’re going to actually not police the use, not fight against it so much, but learn to work with it.”
The risks of cultural saturation of technology are worrying, but to some degree, they’re inevitable. Social media and smartphones are too integral to the way we live our lives today to fully eliminate them, and many experts expect that artificial intelligence isn’t far from reaching the same status. However, schools can do students a world of good by preparing them to live in a world where those technologies exist by facilitating responsible use.
“Where we are is at a place of not asking the question of whether or not we should be using these things like ChatGPT and social media, it’s the how,” said Board of Education Vice-Chair Alex Bohannon. “It’s being able to not stop where the road is progressing to, but to equip you with the tools to be able to face and embrace that world in a positive way.