The Death of the Internet’s Early Promise

We’ve known for a long time that cell phones, the internet, and social media can be more than distracting — they can be addictive, too. The early promise of the internet as an open, free, and nonpredatory or nonexploitative space free from commercialization and psychological trickery has long dissipated.

We belong to the web and its owners now. It’s their space. Websites, platforms, and the devices we access them on have been carefully designed and engineered to capture and hold our attention for as long as possible, maximizing the number of eyeballs and the time they spend glued to content, whether videos, photos, tweets, breaking news, or flash sales. The entire enterprise is like one big slot machine feeding us hits of the chemical reactions our brains crave and making it almost impossible to separate ourselves from it.

This month, the Canadian province of Alberta is set to ban cell phones in the classroom from kindergarten to twelfth grade, starting next fall. The move by a right-wing government underscores just how widespread the understanding of the dangers of cell phones and social media has become. The province’s education minister cites the distraction phones cause and the cyberbullying they enable as reasons for the ban; he’s worried about the mental health and pedagogical costs of the devices, recognizing that their harms outweigh their benefits.

Earlier this spring, Ontario adopted its own classroom cell-phone ban. It wasn’t the first jurisdiction to do so. In 2018, France banned phones for students between three and fifteen years old. Finland, China, and Australia also have their own bans. In the United States, Florida was the first state to adopt such a measure, with other states considering similar actions. This week, the Los Angeles Unified School District passed its own ban, which will apply to nearly 430,000 students.

As Good for Our Health as Tobacco

There’s limited research on whether cell-phone bans work, and experts disagree to what extent phones and platforms harm the mental health of young folks. Writing in the Conversation, researchers Marilyn Campbell and Elizabeth Edwards discussed their deep dive into the evidence thus far, concluding that their study “suggests the evidence for banning mobile phones in schools is weak and inconclusive.”

Campbell and Edwards argue that decisions on banning phones should be made school by school, tailored to local needs. They also suggest that cell phones are “integral” to our lives and that “we need to be teaching children about appropriate use of phones, rather than simply banning them. This will help students learn how to use their phones safely and responsibly at school, at home and beyond.”

That’s a fair enough approach. But as Surgeon General Murthy notes, social media platforms — which are functionally inseparable from cell-phone use among young people (and older people, for that matter) — have “not been proved safe.”

If Murthy’s claim is true, and we have every reason to believe it is, can we ethically justify generations of young people worldwide as guinea pigs for potential risks? Dozens of US states are now suing Meta for allegedly targeting its addictive product at teens, and one whistleblower says the company has data proving that it is harmful to children. Last week, the New York Times ran a deep dive looking at how badly Meta has allegedly exploited young users. Are we ok with leaving minors to be unwitting test subjects for the effects of these platforms on their mental health and development, while the companies behind them rake in fortunes?

Consider the historical parallels with tobacco in the middle years of the last century. In retrospect, was it wise to let use of the product spread among the population, particularly young people, without any checks? Think of how many years tobacco companies fought against studies, fabricated bogus data, and ignored or downplayed the danger of their product.

What if platforms and cell phones are the new tobacco? Do we want to find out by way of running natural experiments on young people?

A Break From Scrolling to Study Its Effects

Cell-phone bans in schools allow us time to study the issue further and determine to what extent devices are deleterious to mental health and psychosocial development, to academic achievement, and to safety in schools. And it’s more than a reasonable hypothesis that, overall, the platforms and devices do more harm than good.

While banning phones and limiting platform access may limit personal freedoms to a small degree, these measures are reasonable and justifiable if they help curb addictive behaviors among minors. Addiction isn’t freedom-maximizing — addiction is both pathological and constraining by definition. Indeed, arguments rooted in promoting liberty could easily be mustered to restrict cell-phone use in schools, helping young people to develop with less influence by addictive technologies and enabling them to make informed choices about their use in the future.

Implementing cell-phone bans in schools will give us time to research their effects on young users — and all users — and determine whether they’re safe to have in the classroom. The case for using minors as unwitting research subjects for a potentially dangerous product pushed by Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires looking to capture as much of their attention as possible is, to say the least, weak.