Pinterest has recently launched experimental notifications across Canada and the U.S. as a way to urge students to stay focused during school hours. The notification appears to kids 13 to 17 when they open the app during typical school hours. The messages, in both English and French, encourage the students to close Pinterest and pause notifications and focus on learning.
During this 2024–2025 school year, several areas across Canada, including Ontario, have instituted phone-use restrictions. Over the last few years there have been reports from the medical community about the hazards of too much screen time for kids and the disruption smartphones can cause in classrooms.
According to research conducted a year ago by the Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University, nearly eight in 10 Canadians support a smartphone ban in K to 12 classrooms. Participants were asked, “There have been calls to ban cell phones in K- 12 classrooms due to negative impacts on mental health and learning. What is your view about a ban?”
The online survey was conducted in April 2024 with a random sample of 2,501 online Canadians from Leger’s research panel.
Pinterest says that the new feature reinforces its belief that technology in school should be a tool, not a distraction. It also builds on the platform’s broader youth safety efforts, including advocating for OS-level age verification, enforcing private profiles for users under 16 even with parental consent, and defaulting profiles to private for users under 18.
Concerns about social media and kids are not limited to North America. This past November Australia’s parliament approved a ban on children under 16 using social media. The ban will not take effect until around November of this year. Tech companies that don’t comply could face multi-million dollar fines.
This month, Meta announced it is shoring up its teen account offering by testing artificial intelligence to check whether a user is a teenager and move them to a teen account.
Although currently testing only in the U.S., this feature is expected to move into Canada in the future. Meta launched teen accounts on Instagram last fall and recently rolled them out to Facebook and Messenger. These accounts have stricter privacy settings and parental controls. The controls are automatically set to private and cannot message strangers. The testing is to ensure the AI age-detection tech is accurate. There is a way to circumvent it and switch back to an adult account in case it makes a mistake.
Sarah Thompson, executive managing director of Glassroom says, that as platforms like Meta have allowed for more hate and less controls on the platform for people to protect themselves, it is important to support our young people with further measures.
“A recent PEW study shows that 48% of teens say social media harms people their age and that is way up,” Thompson says. “Some platforms have more influencer content for mental health support – but it leaves it in the hands of young people to filter and find it. We have a sadness and a loneliness epidemic and you can already seeing brands talking about how to bring people together and more experiences that are safe. As a parent I’m concerned, there are fewer safe spaces online for young people. I also get concerned when we push more young people into addictive habits or using Ai to detect age of young people.”
Thompson says the context of media is just as important as the opportunity of media.
“We need to factor societal issues and pitfalls into how we think about the opportunity,” she says. “Stress and memory retention make it hard for a person to understand what you are telling them. And in turn, if I said that this was a Canadian publisher, we would probably have clients pull dollars. Everything needs recalibration to ensure a business outcome and no social harms.”
