New “Smartphone Free” PSA

Students can analyze a new PSA against smartphones for kids. With strong emotional appeal, the approach is about vulnerability and fear—all the bad things that can happen to kids when they go online.

Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation and instrumental in the movement to ban phones in schools, promoted the ad on LinkedIn. His focus is on the pressure kids face, and he calls for delaying when kids have access to phones.

Digital literacy group The White Hatters suggest three questions for analyzing the ad:

• Do these claims hold up under scrutiny?

• Are the suggestions realistic in everyday family life?

• And most importantly, would they actually prevent harm?

Students may watch The White Hatters’ video and read their analysis of five claims identified in the PSA. Their bottom line is that a more balanced message that includes limits and guidance may be more practical for most families.

At least one of their claims and analysis is worth a class discussion:

Claim 4: “Mean Kids”

This logic doesn’t hold up.

If the problem is “mean kids,” then banning smartphones won’t solve it. Those same kids exist at school and offline, where their harmful speech may even be protected under free expression.

Mean kids online → don't have a phone

so

Mean kids at school → don't go to school

Avoiding the mean kids does not prevent their harmful speech or gossip.

Students will understand the two fallacies: the non sequitur and the false analogy (which mocks the non sequitur). But they may believe, perhaps from experience, that the writers miss important points. Kids are meaner online, or more accurately, they might be less inhibited online. Also, unlike at school, online bullies reach kids wherever they are and the bullying unending—if they’re on their phones. Bullying can feel more intense and could have longer lasting effects (digital permanence). The conclusion, “Avoiding the mean kids does not prevent their harmful speech or gossip,” is not quite right: avoiding mean kids online does prevent new, unrelenting pain after school hours.

Students may have more to say about the ad’s persuasive tactics and the analysis.