Students won’t be using Pinterest during class — or, at least, they will be heavily discouraged from doing so.
The social media app is experimenting with a prompt that will encourage American and Canadian users between the ages of 13 (the minimum age for account holders) and 17 to close the app and pause notifications during typical school hours (Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.). Pinterest confirmed in an email to Mashable that the prompt will reach “millions” of school-age users, and the wide-scale experiment is intended to better inform the app’s teams. This comes after Pinterest CEO Bill Ready announced his support for the Kids Online Safety Act and phone-free school policies in the Washington Post.
“Focus is a beautiful thing,” the prompt says, according to the Verge. “Stay in the moment by putting Pinterest down and pausing notifs [sic] until the school bell rings.”
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Pinterest also announced on Tuesday a partnership with the International Society for Technology in Education to develop digital citizenship and well-being action plans through newly established Digital Innovation Wellbeing Task Forces.
“At Pinterest, we believe that schools can take advantage of all that technology has to offer students, while minimizing the harms and distractions,” Wanji Walcott, Pinterest’s chief legal and business affairs officer, told the Verge. “Tech companies need to work together with teachers, parents, and policymakers to build solutions that ensure in the hands of our students, smartphones are tools, not distractions.”
