Shutting Down Social Media to Prevent Destruction in Schools?

[dlgoff]

In my opinion social media sites that are creating destruction at schools, etc. should be shut down. I know, I know ... Free speech is the problem for not shutting them down, but still, we don't need what these sites are doing with our youth. Any thoughts or comments?

see, for example:
https://www.wrdw.com/2021/09/21/local-schools-fight-avoid-destruction-latest-tiktok-fad/

from https://www.concordmonitor.com/Social-media-and-school-43007843

As schools across the country are seeing an increase in behavior problems associated with social media “challenges” that encourage theft, vandalism and sometimes even violence, New Hampshire educators are expressing concern over the negative impact of social media on students during an already turbulent pandemic year.

 

[Office_Shredder]

we don't need what these sites are doing with our youth,

This is surely the first time such an opinion has been expressed by the preceding generation.

It's easy to pretend that if social media didn't exist, all bad behavior would just go away, but it's obviously nonsense. Some kids get into trouble always. Surely the increase in social unrest is unrelated to the fact that society is kind of literally slowly collapsing. If they would just get off the TikTok everything would be fine.

Sorry. I find these kind of things a bit silly. Levels of violence in schools are maybe (no national data is compiled yet) increasing off of historic lows.
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/what-do-data-reveal-about-violence-schools

I'm sure the kids look at some of the stuff that adults are up to and don't like what social media is doing to the old people either :)

 

[dlgoff]

I'm sure the kids look at some of the stuff that adults are up to and don't like what social media is doing to the old people either :)

Thanks. Interesting.

 

[f95toli]

One "issue" with social media when it comes to kids is that most kids/teenagers don't want to be on the platforms used by "old people" and -with the exception for Tiktok- and don't seem to using one-to-many platforms such as Facebook, Instagram much anymore.

Instead, they seem to prefer WhatsApp, Telegram and other messaging platforms where they have more control over who can see what they are up to, As far as I understand, this how many of these "challenges" are spread since TikTok etc are reasonably good at taking down content that they deem illegal.

Here in the UK, some of the issues related to knife crime among kids (including violence between gangs) is being largely "organised" (for lack of better word) on messaging apps ~(in groups of say ~100 people) since -for obvious reasons- that content is quite quickly taken down when posed on the larger platforms

This means that cracking down on say Facebook would only have a marginal effect. As Office_Shredder has already pointed out the main problems with Facebook, Instagram are more related to information sharing between older teenagers and adults; the kids don't want to get involved.