Schools’ Social Media Ban Backfires, Jeopardizing Student Privacy

What if banning social media from schools actually put kids at even greater risk?

One of the more annoying things in talking about tech policy is how many people refuse to think one step ahead about how the world reacts to their policy proposals. We’ve talked about this in many contexts, but one that keeps coming up as illustrative is eating disorder content, where getting big social media companies to ban such content backfired.

That’s because the issue with eating disorder content online wasn’t a “supply side” problem (kids getting eating disorders because they stumbled upon such content online), but rather a “demand side” problem (kids with eating disorders seeking out such content). When social media sites banned that content, the kids still went looking for it, but often found it in less reputable places, and (even worse!) often in places that didn’t also try to provide resources or other community members to guide people towards recovery.

For every effort to “ban” something, we need to think about what impact it will actually have.

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about “banning social media in schools.” And you can see why this feels like it makes sense intuitively. There are concerns about how much time kids spend on social media, what content they see, and certainly whether or not it’s relevant in schools. I mean, we already have school districts across the country filing ridiculous lawsuits against social media companies claiming that they’re melting kids’ brains.

So shouldn’t banning social media in schools be a no-brainer?

Turns out it’s a lot more complex than that. The always excellent reporter Emily Baker-White has a piece at Forbes that, among other things, is looking at what happens in schools that have banned social media. And it’s not making kids any more safe. If anything, the reverse is happening.

As with the eating disorder issue discussed above, it appears that the kids these days want their social media. And if schools try to ban social media, the kids are finding ways around those bans, often using questionable free VPNs to route around network level blocks. And those free VPNs are… pretty bad about the privacy of people using them:

It’s common practice among most school districts to restrict the internet access of their students to prevent them from browsing porn and “inappropriate” websites — from social media platforms to educational sites about racial identity, mental and reproductive health. And, increasingly, it’s common practice among many kids to use apps that bypass those restrictions so they can view those sites anyway.

Today, 1 in 4 high American school students now use workarounds to avoid schools’ internet restrictions, which, in addition to blocking websites, can also monitor their personal online lives, including their social media posts, emails, and browsing history. The most common of these workarounds is a VPN, or virtual private network, which obscures a user’s IP address from the websites they navigate to and the apps they use. But VPNs — especially the free types that teens are most likely to use — often collect sensitive personal information like location and browsing history.

Many unscrupulous free VPN companies then sell that information to data brokers. Some of them have ties to China, where the Chinese Communist Party has the authority to force any company to hand over such data. And others may contain malware that allows hackers to take control of devices on which they are installed.

Yeah. So, for all the hyped up fear about TikTok supposedly shipping all our kids’ data to China, it appears a more effective way for China to get data on American kids is to… have more American schools ban social media at school, leading them to use sketchy VPNs that suck up data and keep that data in China.

And yes, this can lead to very real risks:

Just last week, the U.S. Justice Department indicted a Chinese national for allegedly using free VPNs to gain access to 19 million IP addresses, more than 600,000 of which were in the United States, and renting them out to criminals who used them to stalk and defraud people and engage in child exploitation.

Of course, rather than recognizing that maybe banning stuff outright might lead to worse results, I’m pretty sure all this is going to lead to is the next mole to whack in this never-ending game of whac-a-mole, and politicians and schools will be looking to figure out ways to… ban free VPNs.

The article has lots of concerned quotes from policymakers… focused on the problem of VPNs. But not so much on how their own moral panics drove up the usage of these VPNs.

Still, this is yet another example where when folks like Jonathan Haidt insist there are really no downsides to his policy proposals — which include banning social media for many kids — they may not understand at all what they’re talking about.