Shalini Ramachandran

It was almost like once they get on those shorts, it's like they couldn't look away.

And, you know, one of the children that I talked to is actually beginning specialized treatment for Internet addiction at Boston Children's Hospital.

One day, he scrolled through more than 200 videos between 9 and 11.40 a.m.

on March 6th, so before lunchtime.

You know, what's interesting is Google, even prior to the pandemic, was aware there were some problems with the YouTube educational push.

Like I saw documents where they fretted about how the YouTube experience in K-12 schools was broken.

Like, you know, we saw some internal documents from 2018 and 2019 where there's like a Google user experience team detailing all the ills that affected viewer well-being on YouTube online.

And among them, they named that addictive gaming content was being sought out by inappropriately aged children.

Children were entering therapy after watching sexually graphic content and exposure to videos decreased attention spans.

And there's a whole presentation I've seen about that.

And they were basically detailing ills affecting viewer well-being based on external research.

And when we talked to folks, we heard that it's free for Google partner districts, but others have to get it through these kind of premium tiers from other third-party providers.

Basically, there's some administrative hurdles.

But it's also about the fact that many of the schools felt like the controls that Google offers and that's offered by third parties isn't enough to tame YouTube.

What's really hard to roll back is devices entirely in the classroom because of the fact that state assessments are digital.

So until those roll back to bubble sheets, you know, or paper sheets or whatever.

But what's fascinating is there have been some studies that have shown that kids just do worse on online tests versus paper.

So Los Angeles recently passed a resolution to block student-led use of YouTube.

There's a school district in North Carolina called Granville County Public Schools where the superintendent just made the decision to block YouTube for the upcoming year for student browsing.

And Watertown Public Schools in Massachusetts put in a district-wide block.