A child logs 13,000 watched YouTube videos in a span of 3 months…during school hours.
The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
AMY WARREN’S “mom siren” went off when her seventh-grader in Wichita, Kan., seemed to know too much about Fortnite, a battling-and-shooting videogame he is barred from playing.
When Warren signed into his school Google account, she was aghast: Her son Ben had accessed more than 13,000 YouTube videos during school hours from December 2024 through February 2025, according to viewing data she provided the Journal.
His feed was rife with inappropriate content. Videos glorifying gun culture, asking about silencers on Nerf guns, “head shots” where children realistically portray being killed, a video with sexually explicit jokes about neighbors sleeping together.
YouTube had served up “shorts”—video after video that it algorithmically determined that he might like.
“It made me cry,” Warren said. “All of a sudden it’s this kind of gun slop, by no fault of his own. ” She later ran for school board and won in November, eager to galvanize change.
Kudos to the mother for taking action and striving for change, but I think it would require a huge infrastructure change to go back to the older and more proven style of learning when teachers themselves rely on YouTube and videos for teaching. I do think YouTube is a great tool as a supplement for learning in a controlled environment, but the creation of Shorts on all platforms was a sign of mental destruction, and now we have some numbers - 13,000 videos watched in 3 months during school hours.
There’s more numbers stated in the article:
A second-grader in New York watched more than 700 videos in two months during school hours, including one featuring pole dancing. A tenth-grader in Oregon scrolled through more than 200 between 9 and 11:40 a.m. on March 6.
Who do you blame in this instance? It’s hard to pinpoint the problem because you can make a case for all parties involved, be it parents, Google, Apple, school districts, etc.
However you frame it, this is one of those “first world problems” that truly is a problem:
The concern about YouTube arrives during a crisis in education. American math and reading scores have slid to their lowest point in decades. Many educators, families and learning scientists say they can no longer blame pandemic learning loss; the decline has coincided with a dramatic increase in school screen time, turbocharged by the embrace of 1:1 devices by more than 88% of public schools, according to government survey data. YouTube and Meta recently lost a landmark social-media addiction trial, with a jury finding the companies negligent for operating products that harmed children. YouTube said it’s appealing the ruling.
Chromebooks—primed for Google software and YouTube—have about 60% of the K-12 mobile device market, according to Futuresource Consulting. Apple iPads are also a popular school device. YouTube is a top-viewed website on school devices, sometimes accounting for half of student traffic, according to administrators and web-filtering companies. […]
In some school districts, including Wichita, efforts to block all or part of the platform proved futile. Students found workarounds: logging out of their district accounts, sharing YouTube links in Google Slides and Docs and other backdoors in, parents, teachers and students say. Google says it’s fixed the Slides and Docs bug.