Gym teachers telling kids not to have premarital sex or smoke drugs isn't teaching them. You can teach kids how condoms work and that STDs stay with them for life. You can teach kids that drugs these days can be laced with fentanyl and how to acquire and use fentanyl test strips.

Those things won't stop kids from having sex or doing drugs, but they can certainly and do mitigate some of the harm.

You can take a similar approach to social media. Gym teachers telling them not to use TikTok will obviously not work, but you can teach them about how their data is shared and monetized. You can show them examples of people who posted things on social media and had their lives ruined over it. If the leaders of a school district have adopted the approach that you just can't teach kids anything they don't want to hear, I think they ought to find different jobs.

As for the lawsuit, sure, you can sue a social media company? Will you win? Maybe, after extensive and costly litigation. Will those companies be forced to change their behavior in meaningful ways that will impact your students? Maybe, or maybe they'll just pay a fine and make superficial changes that last until the next lawsuit concludes in half a decade, then repeat.

And besides that, even if you manage to win and dismantle Facebook, TikTok, etc., you'll have an infinite number of other companies coming in to fill the void. You can sue a tech company, but you can't sue a general class of software. You can legislate against it, but at best that is a long, hard road.

Exactly. A student will sit there, arms crossed, internally opposing everything the administrator is saying because they've convinced themselves already its bullshit. They already think they will just find work as an influencer:

https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/arts-culture...

> Though I do agree that if school districts actually cared enough today they should start by banning social media use on school premises and more aggressively monitor phone usage during class.

AFAIK they do, but it is extremely challenging for teachers. Phone use can be very discrete, "aggressively monitoring phone usage" just isn't practical. And when teachers do confiscate phones the backlash against them is frequently strong and fierce. They face hyperbolic rhetoric about such confiscations being dangerous because "what if somebody needs to call 911!?" Even when administrators don't fold to the pressure, the teachers still need to put up with deranged rants and accusations from the parents. It's much easier for teachers if they pretend they didn't see the phone.

And schools can hardly screen every kid entering the school for a phone, every day. It would be invasive, slow, and expensive. Imagine having to go to school an hour early every day because you need to stand in line for TSA before entering the building. Not practical. We can't even keep cellphones out of prisons where invasive cavity searches are permitted. Jamming cell signals on school grounds is out of the question, it isn't legal. So given all these problems, why not sue tech companies for making these systems and services available on school grounds during school hours? I think it probably won't work, but it's worth a shot.