In 2026, choose joy, stop using ai, social media and please, just use books.

I have been thinking about what to write to respond to the latest school projects around addressing disinformation and misogyny. My main concern is that the adults in education don’t understand how to combat misogyny or harm, often enabling it. And the use of Twitter especially shows this. Recent online abuse around a safeguarding report demonstrated this very well. When men in education feel challenged they resort to the kind of online behaviour that would get a Year 9 boy a two day exclusion. ( use of exclusions and isolations being another issue)

I then saw a substack blog about not using twitter, written by a man, and I thought about how in the UK, we are so ignorant of tech harms. Because Substack is also very problematic.

I will start with an anecdote, if you will permit me. This year, I worked in a school on IT training. My manager, who worked in HR, used my appraisal meeting to go on a rant about “the news is awful today, all those immigrants arriving, we don’t have space”. I stopped her and asked her to show me this news and she pulled up a Facebook page where some disinformation had been posted. She and the other staff spent all day on Facebook, posting for new starters, and also messing around getting information in their various, unofficial, parent groups for their childrens’ schools. I had to interrupt my APPRAISAL to show her Full Fact, and counter the disinformation. That is what it is like in schools today. Even if you don’t see it, even if not everyone is like that. Because all the work we say we are doing on disinformation, misinformation, harm, is going to the children and we are not working on the adults.

Perhaps we need to admit it is the ADULTS and these damn phones who are the issue? Addicted to socials, to likes and to vacuous online follower credibility. We have school Head Teachers on TikTok doing dances. It all needs to stop.

I have written before on the issues and dangers around edtech and now ai. I have given talks and written blogs and published articles. But I am here, at the start of a new year, to BEG more of you to consider the harms of technology that you or your school uses daily. Because small steps add up to a big difference.

First step: remove yourself from Twitter and Facebook. Both promote harm and have no real moderation policies anymore. The very children that you claim to want to protect in your school policies are absolutely harmed by Facebook/Meta and Twitter every day.

Not only this but posting on those apps provides ad revenue metrics for tech billionaires who are happily aligning themselves with dubious politics. They don’t care about you, or the people you care about. Your use of these apps is tacit support. Bill Gates and Sam Altman etc have ALL said openly that teachers and knowledge workers will be replaced by AI. They HATE educators because we are the last line of defence against harm to knowledge. And they also despise people who are loved and respected in communities, which is something they crave but cannot buy.

Schools also complain of lack of community integration, but have spent the last ten or so years pushing all comms out to apps and Facebook/Meta groups. Which is rather like asking people to swim through slurry to reach information about uniform sales, PTA events or trips. Couple that with the myriad of data selling edtech apps ( covered in our next point)- you are creating disparate communities, not one nice one. You drive people like my manager mentioned in the anecdote, to splinter groups and disinformation.

The second thing to do is to reject edtech more often. Challenge it and really THINK about where the data goes, if the promises can really be true. Edtech is a sprawling mass of data brokerage. Selling child data to hundreds of third parties. Even the new well-being bill proposes a student number that will identify a child and their records more easily- all done so that children can be profiled in harmful ways. My edtech governance guide is here.

Every time a new app, or now “ai tech” is proposed, please read around it and consider issues. Why is this free? What could go wrong? Where does the data go? It is not hard to use brave, duck duck go etc and check which tracking pixels are embedded into an edtech website. Most share data with the social media companies that we are telling children and families to avoid. Above all, ask questions, be curious and don’t accept the lies of a twitter influencer who gets rolled out to tell you they are “there for teachers”.

The third way that you can choose joy, is to simply choose a non tech, non ai resource. Use a book. Recommend books. Refuse to use or recommend copilot or other LLM. Not just because LLM are a clear safeguarding risk. LLM have no product safety at all, just like Edtech is wildly unregulated and the vendors just pay fines when they get caught.

Choose books and trusted sources because young people want this. They are tired of ai marked and set work on apps like Seneca. They see it and hate it. They need to go into a world where they know what to trust and we are there are the people who should be showing them that. Not giving them lessons on disinformation and online harm, to tick an RSHE compliance box. Then sending them into a lesson where the teacher ardently recommends using Gemini to write a draft or copilot to make test questions.

In future years we will see the risks of LLM and edtech and social media use as we now see lead paint or smoking. It is our job to choose and advocate for joy. Tech can be wonderful. It can make learning more accessible and it can bring things to life. But it is also often unregulated and dangerous. And sadly too many adults in education are addicted to social media and unwilling to challenge themselves or others on their use of it. Or challenge use of edtech that might be damaging the future for young people by selling their data onwards. How much of the current youth unemployment issue might be due to data given to Applicant Tracking Systems in HR from edtech? Has that even occurred to you?

A joyful approach rejects this and is not ashamed of being angry or upset. It advocates for young people and their digital rights. It holds us accountable - and we should welcome self reflection. We should also refuse to engage with people who won’t move from Twitter, facebook or sub stack etc. You can and should move and so should your school. Use your WEBSITE. Not some app controlled by an algorithm that wants you to literally dance for attention.

If you would like more reading, please go to the sources in my edtech guide or below:

The research of Dr Ben Williamson https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/persons/ben-williamson/publications/

Research of Dr Dan McQuillan https://www.danmcquillan.org/pages/about.html

Research of Dr Chris Gilliard https://just-tech.ssrc.org/our-network/chris-gilliard/

https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/blog/when-education-serves-machine Join Civics of tech and collective work to support each other for an ethical edtech and tech ecosystem

Work of Audrey Watters https://audreywatters.com/

This is not an exhaustive list, but these are people who are not twitter or TikTok influencers, they work hard and for free very often, to support community work for tech that respects children and digital rights.