If you were a preschooler watching YouTube in 2017, perhaps you were having holes drilled in your still-developing brain by those Elsagate-era videos where shocking things happen to knockoff versions of Disney characters. Almost a decade has passed now, and YouTube has become an even more unsettling place on the whole. But from the sound of it, those same kids—now today’s tweens and teens—have only upped their dosage of content thanks to devices and policies that enable content consumption at school.
A Wall Street Journal report from Wednesday about Youtube consumption on what are supposed to be educational devices included a jaw-dropping factoid: A seventh grader named Ben Warren in Wichita, Kansas reportedly managed to log 13,000 YouTube views from December of 2024 through February of 2025 on his school Google account, during school.
Sure, if you’re a teen user of a video app, and you’re equipped with your own smartphone and have no limits imposed by your parents, you can probably manage 13,000 video views during a single Thanksgiving dinner. But 13,000 YouTube videos for a middle-schooler on school equipment, during school, shows real dedication.
It’s doubtful Warren holds the record for binging on YouTube, because he’s far from alone. One anonymous tenth-grader in Oregon, according to the Journal, logged 200 video views in one school morning last month. By my math, Warren was averaging 144 shorts per day across his entire heavy-viewing period. Another student in Oregon reportedly watched 240 minutes—that’s four hours—of YouTube in one day, according to the Journal, and had been placed in an addiction treatment program at Boston Children’s Hospital.
For the record, Warren probably hasn’t been attentively sitting through long-form videos from creators like MrBeast, if that’s what you’re imagining. According to the Journal, he had been using a school iPad to endlessly swipe, TikTok-style, on YouTube Shorts—frequently ingesting headshot-glorifying content about Fortnite, a game he wasn’t allowed to play.
Last month, a 20-year-old California woman known only as “Kaley G.M.” won a lawsuit against YouTube parent Google, along with Meta, alleging that their content delivery systems had been harmful and addictive products for her to be exposed to as a kid. A jury awarded her $3 million, most of which was to be paid by Meta.
A Google spokesperson named José Castañeda, said in a statement last month, “We disagree with the verdict and plan to appeal,” and added, “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.”
Ben Warren’s mother, Amy Warren, is now an elected member of the Wichita Board of Education, where she’s struggling to implement controls on YouTube viewing in Wichita schools.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday evening. We will update this article if we hear back.
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