America’s elementary and secondary schools are saying no to smartphones and social media. Starting next year, elementary and middle school students in the Los Angeles, California area will no longer be able to use smartphones in school. And it looks like more and more U.S. cities are planning to follow suit, or even pass legislation to make smartphones and social media disappear entirely from K-12 campuses.


Text | Sina Technology Zheng Jun

At the end of June this year, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Board of Education voted 5:2 to ban students from using mobile phones in elementary and middle schools. The new regulations will take effect early next year. This means that more than 400,000 students in the school district can no longer use smartphones in school, make calls and send text messages, let alone use TikTok to post Instagram.

It should be explained that students can bring their mobile phones to school, but they must set them to silent mode, put them in their personal lockers, and wait until after school to take them out. During teaching hours, students are not allowed to bring mobile phones into the classroom, let alone take them out for use.

The school district education committee in the United States is equivalent to the Chinese Education Bureau, which independently manages all affairs of primary and secondary schools in the school district. The committee operates like a government parliament, with members elected by local people through a vote, with salaries and terms of office. People can also vote to remove them if they are dissatisfied.

Why not let students use mobile phones? Los Angeles School District Board Chairman Alberto Carvalho said in a statement announcing the decision that the main reason is social media, which is a harmful tool that has a negative impact on young people (Harmfulvehicle).


The Los Angeles Unified School District is the second largest school district in the United States based on student population. Their decision will undoubtedly attract the attention of many school district school boards around California and even across the country, prompting them to make their own regulations on smartphone use in schools.

Florida takes the lead in enacting legislation banning smartphones

California Governor Newsom followed suit and issued a statement supporting a ban on smartphones on campuses across California. Newsom said in a statement, "I look forward to legislation that will follow up on restricting smartphone use in teaching practices. When children and teenagers come to school, they should focus on learning, not their phone screens."


The Los Angeles school district is not the first in California to enact a ban on cell phones on campus. On this issue, Democrats and Republicans finally reached an agreement. Orange County, south of Los Angeles, is a red zone in California. The Orange County School District Board of Education issued a similar ban as early as last year, which took effect in September last year.

The Orange County School District Board of Education in California said that the direct reason that prompted them to issue a ban on mobile phones on campus was that after the COVID-19 epidemic, students became more dependent on smartphones, and some students even secretly look at their phones during class.

Florida, a deep red state dominated by the Republican Party, is already one step ahead of California in this regard. They directly enacted a law last year to ban mobile phones in all public and private school classrooms, and even blocked social media websites and applications through Wi-Fi.

Florida Congressman Brad Yeager, who proposed the campus cell phone ban law, said that banning cell phones on campus is to protect our children from social media control, and to create a more focused church without distractions and a better learning environment.

Florida became the first state in the United States to enact such a statewide law. In addition to California, states such as Utah, Connecticut, Indiana, and Maine are also promulgating and drafting similar laws and regulations, and from a legal perspective, mobile phones are completely banned in primary and secondary schools across the state.

If caught, they will be confiscated and the parents will have to be contacted.

Of course, many students were very dissatisfied with this killing order. Some middle school students said in interviews with the media that smartphones are not the main factor hindering students' learning, and that the school district did not consult students at all when making this decision.

Some students complained that they were unable to look up information on their phones, take photos in their hobby classes, or connect with friends and family during lunch. One 13-year-old said, "Imagine that the tools you use to communicate with others on a daily basis suddenly completely disappeared. It made me feel completely isolated."

However, with the tough stance of the law and the school, the students are helpless. On the first day of the implementation of the mobile phone ban on campuses in Orange County, California, the local Timber Creek High School confiscated more than 100 mobile phones and called parents to deal with the offending children. Campuses in Florida even put up warnings: If you see a cell phone, you will confiscate it.

According to the school, another benefit of the campus mobile phone ban is that without mobile phones, campus bullying incidents have also decreased a lot. On American campuses, there are always students who take videos of classmates and teachers and then upload them to TikTok or Instagram to cancel and humiliate the victims, adding to the psychological shadow of the victims.


A survey by Norwegian scholars earlier this year showed that after middle school students banned smartphones, girls’ academic performance and mental health improved significantly, and bullying incidents also decreased. Their survey also found that among children from low-income families, the positive effect of banning mobile phones on campus is more obvious.

Local education committees jointly sue social networking sites

Social media giants have become the target of public criticism among educators across the United States, especially the three major platforms that teenagers are most obsessed with: TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. In addition to banning cell phone use in schools, school boards across the country are directly suing social media platforms.

At present, more than 200 school district boards across the United States have jointly sued social media companies, accusing these Internet giants of designing highly addictive social products that cause serious harm to students' mental health, and schools are also victims.

Such lawsuits have proven helpful in promoting government legislation. Four years ago, more than 100 school district boards jointly sued e-cigarette manufacturers, accusing them of irresponsible marketing to attract young users. Ultimately, the U.S. government banned the sale of novel and fancy-flavored e-cigarette products. The e-cigarette manufacturer JUUL was also forced to withdraw from many channels and paid billions of dollars to reach settlements with various places.

Just after the Los Angeles Board of Education banned the use of smartphones in schools, US Medical Director Dr. Vicek Murthy published an article in the New York Times, showing a lot of evidence proving the connection between social media and the decline in adolescent mental health. He called on social media to add warning labels online such as "Smoking is harmful to health" and prominently warn teenagers that addiction to social networking sites may cause harm to their physical and mental health.

Murthy wrote, "The mental health crisis among young people has become an emergency, and social media is an important driver. Teenagers who spend more than three hours a day on social media are twice as likely to develop symptoms of anxiety and depression. And surveys in the summer of 2023 show that American teenagers will spend 4.8 hours a day on social media!"

In an emergency like this, Murthy writes, you don't have time to wait for more perfect information. You must make your best judgment based on known facts and take action as quickly as possible. The Surgeon General of the United States is equivalent to the U.S. government’s spokesperson for health affairs. However, he does not have the power to promulgate regulations. If he wants to enact similar regulations, the U.S. Congress must legislate.

It seems that the U.S. government has finally realized the urgency and begun to mitigate the harm and impact of smartphones and social media on their next generation. In June this year, New York State passed legislation requiring social networking sites such as TikTok or Instagram to restrict functions for users under the age of 18 and disable the platform's content push algorithm. In this regard, New York State is also at the forefront of the United States.

A generation transformed by smartphones and social media

However, in the view of some educators, warning labels on social networking sites are not very helpful. Chicago NorthShore School District Board of Education Chairman Michael Lubelfeld said he agreed with Murthy's statement on the matter, but he was not sure how much help the warning labels would help. "There are so many kids using social media that it's hard for them to take action. I'm also not sure parents really understand what their kids are doing on their smartphones."

The impact of smartphones and social media on teenagers is concentrated in the GenZ generation (born between 2000 and 2012). They are a generation that grew up with smartphones and social media. They have been accustomed to using smartphones since they were young, and they check social networks every day. According to a 2023 CommonSenseMedia survey, almost half of children in the United States own their first smartphone when they are 11 years old, and about 90% of teenagers own their own smartphone.

Americans are horrified to discover that the GenZ generation is becoming increasingly sociophobic and nerdy compared to previous generations. These teenagers are unwilling to go out to work, get driver's licenses at a later age, and don't even want to go out to play (an indirect effect is that even the underage pregnancy rate is only one-third that of Millennials). They are starting families and having children at an increasingly later age, and many even do not want children at all. What is even more worrying is that the suicide rate of GenZ is far higher than that of previous generations. The suicide rate for GenZ girls is as high as 5.1 per 100,000 people, compared with 3.1 for Millennials.


"The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Children is Caused by the Epidemic of Mental Disease" published this year by Jonathan Haidt, a professor at New York University in the United States, explores the profound impact of social media on the mental health of the GenZ generation. His book quickly became a bestseller and was recognized by many parents and educators.

Haidt believes the popularity of social media is a major factor in the mental health crisis among young people. He wrote, "A study of teenagers in 29 countries found that teenagers across the country have some problems with over-addiction to the Internet, withdrawal reactions, neglect of other aspects of life, and lying to their parents about their social media use."

However, some scholars believe that social media is not the main cause of all problems among young people. Christopher Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University in Florida, believes that "blaming social media is a kind of panic. The political circles are creating this statement, but there is no obvious data to support it."

He mentioned that this kind of panic about new technologies ruining the next generation of young people is not new. Parents in the past also worried that television and video games would ruin their children's mental health. Many studies assessing the impact of social media on young people have no practical conclusions, and even if they do, their relevance is negligible. They are also keen on using social media, but young people in other European countries have not seen an increase in suicide rates like GenZ in the United States.

Feature phones unexpectedly become fashionable

However, some young Americans are indeed taking the initiative to reduce their use of social media and the time they spend on smartphones. A survey last year by research organization Fullscreen showed that 54% of young Americans admitted that frequently scrolling through their smartphones was bad for them, and 51% said they longed for a life without social media.

This social media boredom has even unexpectedly boosted feature phone sales in the United States. Generally speaking, the main markets for feature phones are regions such as the Middle East, Africa and India, but in the past few years, these traditional markets have continued to shift towards smartphones, while the United States has become a new growth region for feature phones. Last year, 2.8 million feature phones were sold in the United States, equivalent to 2% of total mobile phone sales.


Although HMD, which took over the Nokia brand, is no longer competitive in the smartphone field, it continues to launch retro-looking feature phones in the United States, accounting for more than 90% of the market. In addition, new companies Light and Punkt have joined this market and released black and white ink screen mobile phones with minimal functions.

What is even more surprising is that many young Americans have become new users of feature phones, rather than the older people they are thought to be users of feature phones. After all, a feature phone only costs a few dozen dollars. Feature phones have become a fashion item. On Reddit, YouTube and TikTok, there are bloggers and Internet celebrities sharing their experience of using feature phones and the changes it has brought to their lives.

At the beginning of this year, #BringBackFlipPhones# became a popular hashtag on TikTok. 21-year-old TikTok blogger Caitlin Kunz filmed a short video of herself buying a feature phone, which has received more than 3.2 million views on TikTok. She previously used her smartphone for more than 12 hours a day.

Of course, this is more like a retro gimmick, just like CCD cameras, GameBoys and Polaroids, which are once again popular among young people. It’s very simple. If young people really use flip phones, they won’t be able to use TikTok.