Introduction
This is a broad, sweeping essay on what I took away from being a local government communicator focusing on elections in 2024. I wrote most of this in early January, just after I had come out of a long multi-week break after the election season. I spent about an hour sitting down and typing down everything that I felt about the state of media, our society, and what we should be able to do about it.
It is now the last couple of days of March, and like any productivity-focused jerk, I’m looking back at my emotional response to the new year and thinking that I’m still right. Not so bent out of shape about it, but I’m pretty happy with my progress so far in 2025.
School Cell Phone Bans
The recent discussion on phone bans in schools was explained, in part, by referencing Jonathan Haidt’s book on social media and mental health. However, the primary justification for this ban is not student mental health. It makes more sense to me, the Occam’s Razor of this debate, that this is about classroom management. That’s perfectly valid, but we should be honest about our reasoning. No serious workplace would allow employees to scroll through their phones during meetings. However, workplaces don’t frame this as a mental health issue; it’s about staying on task and being present. Schools should take the same approach: set boundaries without overstating the role of social media in mental health.
Furthermore, Haidt’s book is not the definitive source it’s made out to be. A recent review in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2) highlights significant gaps in Haidt’s claims that social media is “rewiring” children’s brains. Most evidence linking social media to mental health challenges is weak or correlative at best. In fact, research suggests that preexisting mental health challenges often drive increased social media use, not the other way around. Oversimplifying the issue by blaming social media risks distracting us from addressing more significant factors like access to guns, economic hardship, and social isolation.
The ironic part of using Haidt’s work as the backing for school phone bans is that it follows the same pattern
In like-minded groups, we share information more freely without checking facts, which increases misinformation in filter bubbles. Social media platforms, driven by profit, make it easy to spread misinformation because they’re essentially like-minded group machines. Closed Facebook groups are the classic example of this phenomena.
The disinformation outbreak about arson behind the 2020 Pacific Northwest wildlife season was a classic example of this and how it works. Local emergency responders and law enforcement could not get on top or even track how the rumors spread because of the private nature of the groups.
Another example is Republican activists looking at Senate polling data in 2022 in Washington State.
https://www.cascadepbs.org/politics/2022/11/despite-talk-red-wave-wa-our-polls-showed-otherwise
They thought they had a chance with that race. They found a conclusion they liked and decided that the poll’s result was based on a good process. This is the end result of many years of the impact of social media and actual disinformation campaigns on political thinking. Social media allowed us to strengthen our silos so only information we agree with tends to get through
So, we start with the result we want and then find the data. We wanted the same people who were behind violence associated with the 2020 protests to be behind the wildfires plaguing rural Pacific Northwest communities. We wanted Tiffany Smiley to beat Patty Murray. So we looked for that data and stovepiped it to our own community, and that became our reality.
This is also what happened with phone bans in schools. Teachers wanted a tool to help with classroom behavior but found a book where a phone ban could be wrapped in with the idea that phones are causing a historic decline in teen mental health.
The science isn’t there, we started with the decision we wanted to make and went to look for faulty information that would back it up.
In fact, kids with phones report higher well-being, more time with friends, more exercise, better self-esteem, and are less likely to feel life is meaningless or be cyberbullied. They also seek help when needed.
But this isn’t to say we know social media is bad for us. So we take one of the biggest impacts of social media, that it easily creates storms of disinformation. When we know what actually exists, we can go find things that social media can’t actually be blamed for.
If Social Media is bad, we need to use our institutions to abstain or at least start building something different
This brings me to a broader concern. I am a government communicator for work. I spend time earning money posting content to the various platforms that are being blamed for declines in teen mental health. Also, rightly, for the increase in polarization and groupthink in politics. So, what really upsets me is the hypocrisy of how social media is treated in these discussions.
Schools condemn platforms like Facebook for their role in declining mental health, yet these same platforms are a cornerstone of how schools communicate with the community. If social media is truly as harmful as some claim, why do we rely on it so heavily to share important updates and connect with our communities?
We need to take a hard look at our collective relationship with algorithm-driven social media. The issue isn’t just about kids; it’s about all of us, parents, educators, local governments, and community leaders. Social media platforms, designed to maximize engagement by amplifying divisive rhetoric, have eroded our ability to have meaningful conversations and find solutions. Worse, and more important, these platforms are built on top of digital ad monopolies that have decimated local journalism, a critical tool for understanding our own communities.
So, let’s not let ourselves off the hook. While it’s easy to focus on students’ use of social media, adults are equally responsible for questioning how these platforms shape our interactions and decisions. By blaming kids or technology for challenges like classroom distractions, we risk ignoring the systemic and cultural shifts that have made these platforms so influential in the first place.
A phone ban framed around classroom management is reasonable, but it must be accompanied by broader accountability for how we, as a community, engage with social media. Schools should lead by example, finding ways to reduce their reliance on algorithmic platforms while fostering open, constructive dialogue about the role these tools play in all of our lives.
Schools, food, what is good for us
Food began to change in the 1970s. We went from eating what we chose, generally, to being marketted to. Not just in advertising campaigns but in the actual food we ate. Food companies began changing their product to change what they were selling us based on our psychological needs. Since the 1970s, the food industry has shifted toward more processed and sugar-laden products, impacting the nutritional quality of school meals. Food became irresistible and we became obese.
Schools spend a lot of time thinking about food and (some) think about healthy foods. In response to the change in the food system, the USDA’s 2024 Final Rule updates school meal nutrition standards to better align with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, introducing the first-ever added sugar limits and further reducing sodium levels. These changes, phased in from 2025-2028, aim to improve children’s health by limiting high-sugar items like cereals and flavored milk while maintaining whole grain requirements.
As the food system changed, we can look even further out and see how the information systems have changed. In less than 100 years, we went from primarily print information systems to commercial radio, then broadcast television, and then cable television in the 1980s.
Now the last print generation is dying out and we’re now much more likely to get information through an algorithmic platform than we are from a print newspaper. This will have devastating impacts on the information we’re receiving and how we’re being manipulated.
Schools and our other local institutions can play a role in reversing this trend. Instead of focusing on punitive student-based, we should take a close look at how our communications plans work and if they end up propping up the systems that we also claim are hurting children.
I am pushing for non-algorithmic and local hosted social media on the Fedverse in my own organization, and I am well aware of the institutional slowness that takes place. Friction does not absolve us from doing the right thing.
https://jameshoward.us/2024/01/31/the-case-for-a-government-exclusive-mastodon-instance
Local governments should think about hosting their own social media to avoid issues with corporate control and algorithms. Self-hosting would also help with verification, security, and better communication with the public. Unlike mainstream platforms, Mastodon doesn’t have a system to verify accounts, making it hard to tell real government accounts from fake ones. A self-hosted platform, like social.olympiawaschools.gov, would ensure that government accounts are verified, stopping the spread of false information and building trust. It would also let governments add extra security to protect against data breaches or manipulation. With a dedicated space for government presence, citizens would know where to go for reliable, accurate information, making communication more transparent and accountable.
What is really at the root of it is the money, of course
One of the things I remember about the early days of the social media platforms was the proliferation of experts who were advising newspapers and other organizations that predated 2007 how to succeed in the new communities growing, especially in Facebook. What they didn’t notice, and what became exceedingly dangerous, was what was going on underneath the table. As content marketers taught editors about the newsfeed and how to goose engagement, Google and Facebook were creating unbeatable money machines by capturing the new generation of ad buyers.
You can make all the arguments you want about what the news industry should have done better. More paywalls, better digital, not staying with print for so long. But the ad tech oligarchs are the real reason your city council is not getting covered.
But thankfully, the federal government is on the case. The United States v. Google is a federal antitrust case in which the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), along with several states, accuses Google of unlawfully maintaining a monopoly in the adtech market. The lawsuit targets Google’s alleged anticompetitive practices, including exclusive agreements and acquisitions like DoubleClick, Invite Media, and AdMeld, which the DOJ argues have harmed competition and inflated costs for advertisers and consumers. The trial commenced on September 9, 2024, and concluded on September 27, with closing arguments on November 25, 2024. Potential remedies under consideration include requiring Google to divest certain adtech assets or restructure its business operations to restore competition in the market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2023)
What will work?
In the short term, taxing digital advertising to create a public fund to pay for local journalism?
In the long term? Regulating algorithms like cigarettes and destroying the adtech monopolies?
What won’t work is link taxes.
And this is sad for me to have to make this point. During the second hearing on a bill that I link to above (SB 5400), which would get us in Washington State very close to what we need in terms of a public media fund, was some implications of a link tax.
Jeff Jarvis does a great job arguing that link taxes are fundamentally flawed, as they violate copyright principles by charging for fair use of links, the backbone of the open web. He highlights their unintended consequences: Platforms like Meta have already retaliated by removing news links entirely (as in Canada), disproportionately benefiting hedge fund-owned conglomerates while excluding small, diverse publishers. Jarvis asserts that links help publishers by driving traffic, and instead of punitive taxes, solutions should focus on direct support and innovation to sustain journalism equitably.
Facebook didn’t need widespread legislation to deemphasize news, they just did it a couple of years ago: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/22/metas-retreat-from-news-accelerated-in-2023-leaving-media-scrambling.html
If at any point, Facebook and Google every “stole” content from newspapers, that relationship is over now. They don’t need the news to exist to be able to capture our eyeballs. Anyone that has spent any time at all on the most time-sucking algorithmic feeds knows content on local city council races isn’t rising to the top. What they stole was the advertising revenue. And no right minded ad buy would go anywhere else than the place where they are guaranteed their ads will perform well.
This brings us back to the top and the moral outrage about what social media and phones are doing to our kids. Obviously, the platforms have control. They have shaped our society, changed our politics and destroyed the news. To paraphrase Cory Doctorow, this (and other battles over tech) is what all our other battles are based on.
https://craphound.com/category/internetcon
The discussion above about link taxes and the open web isn’t an argumentative silo. It is based on my broader thesis, that what we are trying to do is defend the open web. One of the reasons that kids with phones have better mental health is the access those phones give them to agency, their friends and information that builds them as people. If you’re cut off from the things that give you freedom, you’re less happy. This is the promise of the open web.
The newspaper companies fighting for a link tax only want to create a system where both their legacy money-making machines and social media platforms survive. It isn’t about digital first, community-based forums or anything new. Link taxes are about defending the entrenched status quo.
For the last 50 years, newspaper publishers have been creating local monopolies through federal antitrust exemptions and straight-up anti-competitive behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_Preservation_Act_of_1970
https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780826210647
Today’s newspaper owners aren’t even largely the newspaper owners who killed off their local competition decades ago. These guys are even worse. The hedge funds are picking the bones of wannabe local newspaper oligarchs are much more likely to want to use anti-competitive tactics to sustain their business models.
Summary: Reflections on Media, Social Platforms, and Institutional Responsibility
As a local government communicator navigating the 2024 election cycle, I’ve witnessed firsthand how media ecosystems shape public discourse, often for the worse. The debate over school cellphone bans exemplifies this: while framed as a mental health issue, the real driver is classroom management. We cherry-pick data to fit preconceived narratives, whether about phones in schools or social media’s role in society.
The real battle isn’t just about kids’ screen time; it’s about defending the open web and dismantling the monopolies that control attention and information.
To fix this, we must confront systemic failures.
The stakes are existential. Just as schools updated meal standards to combat predatory food marketing, institutions must rethink their reliance on algorithmic platforms. Hosting independent, community-driven social media could restore trust and transparency. But change demands courage: we must stop scapegoating technology and address the root issue (corporate control over our attention economies). The open web’s promise of agency, connection, and access is worth fighting for, not just for students, but for democracy itself.
Blaming phones or platforms is easy; rebuilding equitable systems is hard. It’s time institutions lead by example.
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