Speaker encourages students to stop social media

“I think we’ll look back in five years and think it was crazy we gave kids smartphones so young and that we had smartphones out and about in schools. I think we will look back on that as kind of a cigarettes moment,” Matt Stossel, founder of Social Awakening, told audience of parents, students and educators at Greybull High School on Thursday, Aug. 21. 

Stossel, a former strategist who specialized in social media, now gives talks on social media’s impact on young people’s lives and offers solutions. He was able to visit Greybull as part of a grant through the state of Wyoming and visited with middle and high school students last week, along with a special seminar for all community members. 

Greybull schools have implemented no cell phone policies in their classrooms in the hopes of keeping their students present and active in school. Cadence Wipplinger, Greybull Middle School principal, reminded parents to call the school office rather than texting or calling their kids during school hours if they need to reach them. Stossel was a proponent of this method, which is gaining popularity internationally, and gave insights as to why social media has become such a negative distraction in our lives. 

“Once these companies have your attention, they’re very good at holding it inside of these environments … A lot of the most popular apps for young people, this is for Instagram, Snapchat is the same way, are 24-hour environments,” Stossel said. Notifications, as well as the pressure to open messages before they become unavailable in some cases, can become a nonstop barrage. 

Stossel called this the gamification of our social lives, where a sort of “slot machine” system rewards us for staying glued to the screen. Occasionally, things we are interested in pop up on our feed, and the algorithms behind social media apps hope to hold our attention by continuing to push that content. 

Algorithms are adept at providing harmful content to children, Stossel has found. He showed an experiment where a new social media account was registered to a 13-year-old boy, and within seconds a feed including sexually explicit and violent content was presented. A public account made for an 11-year-old girl immediately began receiving potentially predatory messages. “Sexploitation,” where catfish accounts designed to look like teenage girls are used to obtain nude photos from young boys and blackmail them, has also become commonplace. 

“The phrase, ‘I love you, thank you for being brave enough to tell me,’ goes a long, long way. Kids’ worlds are already crumbling if this is happening to them, making sure that they get help makes a huge difference, because they’re already so afraid of being punished or having their lives ruined,” Stossel said. 

Kids don’t need to look for explicit content on social media; it is often pushed on them regardless. Social media, as a whole, would be considered NC-17 on a film rating, Stossel said. 

Stossel suggested Cyber Report as a tool to deal with exploitation or getting content taken down and online safety, such as making sure children’s accounts are set to private and they are not sharing their location. 

Stossel found that in one talk he gave, the majority of schools were dealing with property destruction due to a TikTok trend. 

“You hear a lot in the news about TikTok being a Chinese company. I’m not worried about data stealing, I am worried that a Chinese algorithm can influence what 98/100 schools in Michigan are doing to the point of defacing property and filming that,” he said. 

In the case of AI chatbots, Stossel said he is less worried about people using them as a tool than using them as a substitute for human companionship. As part of the education process, he hoped schools could get ahead of the curve and teach the processes to come to an answer are just as important as the conclusion, because AI will offer that conclusion in seconds. 

Modeling good smartphone use is also important, Stossel urged. Children are not the only population affected by their addictive nature. One attention-grabbing way social media algorithms operate is by providing increasingly extremist viewpoints based on general interests. 

Misinformation researchers have found if they started watching Donald Trump videos, they eventually got pushed to extreme authoritarian videos and pro-Klu Klux Klan videos. If they started at Bernie Sanders, they ended at conspiracies about planes dropping chemicals in the sky. From a diet video, they were eventually pushed to a pro-anorexia video. 

“What does our country look like when 360 million people are pushed towards the most extreme versions of whatever they were already likely to believe? I think we’re living inside of that now,” Stossel said. 

Stossel suggested doing an audit of what apps actually make you feel good after using them. Studies show these are typically utility apps like a calendar or weather app, while social media, dating and gaming apps tend to produce more negative feelings. 

“Measuring everything by screentime isn’t really helpful, because an hour on Spotify is really very different than an hour on TikTok,” Stossel said. Focusing screentime on apps that promote learning or act as tools is generally more important than limiting overall screentime for teenagers and adults. 

However, making screen-free zones in the house, such as the dinner table and bedrooms, has worked for other families Stossel has encountered. Offering a family charging station in a shared space was another suggestion. 

Options to limit social media use include the use of “dumbphones” for younger kids, that still allow basic phone capabilities but no additional apps. Stossel also offered the apps Qustudio and One Sec as options to control screen time. 

Some communities implement “Wait Until 8th” campaigns, where they pledge to keep their kids smartphone-free until the end of eighth grade. Some also have their children wait until 16 for social media access. 

It is also important to offer activities to fill the space outside of screentime, Stossel said. There has been an overall decline in free play, as children are over protected in the physical world and under protected online. One principal reportedly told Stossel that after removing phones from their classrooms, the students started talking to each other again – even dating. 

 “We’ve come to accept so little,” Stossel said. “We just came to accept that kids weren’t doing that anymore, and that was normal? It’s not.”