As TikTok stares down an impending federal ban, Donald Trump’s win in the presidential election could be a lifeline. It’s a plot twist for the embattled, Chinese-owned social media company. During Trump’s last presidency, the president-elect had been the one to initiate the calls to ban TikTok, which only petered out because he didn’t win […]
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Star Wars-fans opgelet: er wordt gewerkt aan een nieuwe trilogie! Deadline en Variety melden beiden op basis van bronnen dat Lucasfilm een deal heeft gesloten met Simon Kinberg om drie nieuwe films te schrijven en te produceren. Voor de productie werkt hij samen met Lucasfilm-baas Kathleen Kennedy.
Kinberg is geen onbekende binnen de wereld van Star Wars. Hij maakte eerder met Dave Filoni en Carrie BReck de bekende serie Star Wars Rebels en hij was een consultant voor Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Verder is hij bekend binnen Marvel. Hij was bijvoorbeeld betrokken bij de X-Men-films en Logan, producer van de eerste twee Deadpool-films en executive producer van Deadpool & Wolverine. Ook droeg hij bij aan het script van Sherlock Holmes en Mr & Mrs Smith.
Na een gat van zeven jaar komt er weer een Star Wars-film. Waarom duurde dat zo lang?Bekijk ook
De films bestaan verder naast de andere projecten die al in ontwikkeling zijn. Lucasfilm werkt namelijk ook nog aan de film The Mandalorian & Grogu, gemaakt door Jon Favreau, en twee andere films die in 2026 en 2027 moeten verschijnen. Ook zijn er projecten van James Mangold, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Taika Waititi en Donald Glover in de maak, maar het is onduidelijk wanneer die dan verschijnen.
Lees ‘Lucasfilm werkt aan nieuwe Star Wars-trilogie’ verder op Numrush
Eindelijk, er is meer nieuws over het vijfde seizoen van Stranger Things, ook wel Stranger Things 5 genoemd. Netflix heeft een eerste teaser vrijgegeven van de serie, waarin we de titels van afleveringen te zien krijgen. Ook is nu bevestigd dat het laatste seizoen van de populaire serie in 2025 verschijnt.
De teaser vertelt ons dat er acht afleveringen komen in het nieuwe seizoen. Die zijn: The Crawl (1), The Vanishing of [ONBEKEND] (2), The Turnbow Trap (3), Sorcerer (4), Shock Jock (5), Escape From Camazotz (6), The Bridge (7) en The Rightside Up (8).
Logischerwijs wordt er al druk gespeculeerd over wat de titels precies betekenen. De titel van de tweede aflevering lijkt in ieder geval een knipoog naar de eerste aflevering van de serie: The Vanishing of Will Byers. De vraag is echter wie er nu verdwijnt. De naam is namelijk wazig gemaakt.
Helaas is er verder nog weinig bekend. Zo weten we niet hoelang iedere aflevering gaat duren, al zei actrice Maya Hawke eerder al wel dat het nieuwe seizoen als acht films aanvoelt. Dat suggereert dat het om erg lange afleveringen gaat.
Stranger Things seizoen 5: wanneer komt het laatste seizoen en wat kunnen we verwachten?Bekijk ook
In werkelijkheid is er natuurlijk veel meer tijd verstreken, wat we ongetwijfeld ook aan de jonge acteurs gaan afzien. Het eerste seizoen verscheen in 2016, nu al acht jaar geleden. Tussen Stranger Things 4 en Stranger Things 5 zit ook wel wat meer tijd dan anderhalf jaar: het vorige seizoen verscheen in 2022. Dat het nieuwe seizoen zo lang op zich liet wachten, heeft te maken met de staking onder acteurs en schrijvers vorig jaar. Daardoor kwam de productie enige tijd stil te liggen.
Inmiddels is dus wel duidelijk wanneer het nieuwe seizoen gaat verschijnen. Of beter gezegd: in welk jaar. Stranger Things 5 verschijnt namelijk in 2025, maar er is nog niet gezegd wanneer dan precies. Websites speculeren daar nu volop over, waarbij het meeste wordt uitgegaan van de eerste helft van het jaar. Reden is dat het filmen van het nieuwe seizoen al in januari dit jaar gestart is en volgens Radio Times zijn ze daar bijna mee klaar. De productie zou in december of januari 2025 afgerond zijn. Enkele maanden later kan dan dus het nieuwe seizoen verschijnen.
In de tussentijd zijn dan ook al wat foto’s verschenen van de set. Netflix heeft op Instagram een aantal foto’s van achter de schermen gedeeld, waarin we de verschillende acteurs langs zien komen.
Lees Stranger Things 5: Netflix deelt teaser, titels van afleveringen en eerste foto’s verder op Numrush
Het bericht TikTok krijgt verregaande Spotify-integratie voor muziek delen verscheen eerst op DutchCowboys.
An effort to bring a broader news ecosystem to the open social web, also known as the fediverse, is now in the hands of the social magazine app Flipboard. Press.coop, a service that created mirrored accounts of top news publishers (including Reuters, AP, WSJ, NYT, BBC, CNN, and even yours truly), has transferred its collection […]
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Het bericht Worden sociale media straks net zoals drank? verscheen eerst op DutchCowboys.
How often do you come in contact with a conspiracy theory?
Maybe on occasion, when you flip through TV channels and land on an episode of “Ancient Aliens.” Or perhaps when a friend from high school shares a questionable meme on Facebook.
How confident are you in your ability to tell fact from fiction?
If you’re a teen, you could be exposed to conspiracy theories and a host of other pieces of misinformation as frequently as every day while scrolling through your social media feeds.
That’s according to a new study by the News Literacy Project, which also found that teens struggle with identifying false information online. This comes at a time when media literacy education isn’t available to most students, the report finds, and their ability to distinguish between objective and biased information sources is weak. The findings are based on responses from more than 1,000 teens ages 13 to 18.
“News literacy is fundamental to preparing students to become active, critically thinking members of our civic life — which should be one of the primary goals of a public education,” Kim Bowman, News Literacy Project senior research manager and author of the report, said in an email interview. “If we don’t teach young people the skills they need to evaluate information, they will be left at a civic and personal disadvantage their entire lives. News literacy instruction is as important as core subjects like reading and math.”
About 80 percent of teens who use social media say they see content about conspiracy theories in their online feeds, with 20 percent seeing conspiracy content every day.
“They include narratives such as the Earth being flat, the 2020 election being rigged or stolen, and COVID-19 vaccines being dangerous,” the News Literacy Project’s report found.
While teens don’t believe every conspiracy theory they see, 81 percent who see such content online said they believe one or more.
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Bowman noted, “As dangerous or harmful as they can be, these narratives are designed to be engaging and satisfy deep psychological needs, such as the need for community and understanding. Being a conspiracy theorist or believing in a conspiracy theory can become a part of someone’s identity. It’s not necessarily a label an individual is going to shy away from sharing with others.”
At the same time, the report found that the bar for offering media literacy is low. Just six states have guidelines for how to teach media literacy, and only three make it a requirement in public schools.
Less than 40 percent of teens surveyed reported having any media literacy instruction during the 2023-24 school year, according to the analysis.
As part of gathering data for the report, teens were asked to try their hand at distinguishing between different types of information they might encounter online. They were also challenged to identify real or fake photos and judge whether an information source is credible.
The study asked participants to identify a series of articles as advertisements, opinion or news pieces.
More than half of teens failed to identify branded content — a newsy-looking piece on plant-based meat in the Washington Post news app — as an advertisement. About the same amount didn’t realize that an article with “commentary” in the headline was about the author’s opinion.
They did better at recognizing Google’s “sponsored” results as ads, but about 40 percent of teens said they thought it meant those results were popular or of high quality. Only 8 percent of teens correctly categorized the information in all three examples.
In another exercise, teens were asked to identify which of two pieces of content about Coca-Cola’s plastic waste was more credible: a press release from Coca-Cola or an article from Reuters. The results were too close for comfort for the report, with only 56 percent of teens choosing the Reuters article as more trustworthy.
Brand recognition could have played a role in teens’ decision to choose Coca-Cola over Reuters, Bowman says, a feeling that a more-recognizable company was more credible.
“Whatever the reason, I do think news organizations engaging young people on social media and building up trust and recognition there could have the potential to move the needle on a question like this in the future,” Bowman said.
Where teens did feel confident spotting hoaxes was with visuals.
Two-thirds of study participants said they could do a reverse Google image search to find the original source of an image. About 70 percent of teens could correctly distinguish between an AI-generated image and a real photograph.
To test teens’ ability to spot misinformation, they were asked whether a social media photo of a melting traffic light was “strong evidence that hot temperatures in Texas melted traffic lights in July 2023.”
Most teens answered correctly, but about one-third still believed the photo alone was strong evidence that the claim about melting traffic lights was true.
Bowman said that the fact that there was no difference in students’ performance when results were analyzed by their age leaves her wondering if teens “of all ages have received the message that they can’t always believe their eyes when it comes to the images they see online.”
“Their radars seem to be up when it comes to identifying manipulated, misrepresented, or completely fabricated images,” Bowman continued. “Especially with the recent advancements and availability of generative AI technologies, I wonder if it may be harder to convince them of the authenticity of a photo that is actually real and verified than to convince them that an image is false in some way.”
When it came to sharing on social media, teens expressed a strong desire to make sure their posts contained correct information. So how are they fact-checking themselves, given a minority of teens actively follow news or have taken media literacy classes?
Among teens who said they verify news before sharing, Bowman said they’re engaged in lateral reading, which she described as “a quick internet search to investigate the post’s source” and a method employed by professional fact-checkers.
Given a random group of teens, Bowman posited they would most likely use much less effective ways of judging a source’s credibility, based on factors like a website’s design or URL.
“In other words, previous research shows that young people tend to rely on outdated techniques or surface-level criteria to determine a source’s credibility,” Bowman explained. “If schools across the country implemented high-quality news literacy instruction, I am confident we can debunk old notions of how to determine credibility that are no longer effective in today’s information landscape and, instead, teach young people research-backed verification techniques that we know work.”
While conspiracy theories surface commonly for teens, they’re not necessarily arming themselves with information to stave them off.
Teens are split on whether they trust the news. Just over half of teens said that journalists do more to protect society than to harm it. Nearly 70 percent said news organizations are biased, and 80 percent believe news organizations are either more biased or about the same as other online content creators.
A minority of teens — just 15 percent — actively seek out news to stay informed.
The study also asked teens to list news sources they trusted to provide accurate and fair information.
CNN and Fox News received the most endorsements, with 178 and 133 mentions respectively. TMZ, NPR and the Associated Press were equally matched with 12 mentions each.
Local TV news was the most trusted news medium, followed by TikTok.
Teens agree on at least one thing: A whopping 94 percent said schools should be required to offer some degree of media literacy.
“Young people know better than anyone how much they are expected to learn before graduation so, for so many teens to say they would welcome yet another requirement to their already overfull plate, is a huge deal and a big endorsement for the importance of a media literacy education,” Bowman said.
Throughout the study, students who had any amount of media literacy education did better on the study’s test questions than their peers. They were more likely to be active news seekers, trust news outlets and feel more confident in their ability to fact-check what they see online.
And, in a strange twist, students who get media literacy in school report seeing more conspiracy theories on social media — perhaps precisely because they have sharper media literacy skills.
“Teens with at least some media literacy instruction, who keep up with news, and who have high
trust in news media are all more likely to report seeing conspiracy theory posts on social media at least once a week,” according to the report. “These differences could indicate that teens in these subgroups are more adept at spotting these kinds of posts or that their social media algorithms are more likely to serve them these kinds of posts, or both.”
© Liana Nagieva / Shutterstock
“For You” algorithms that promote the most interesting content across a social network, personalized to the individual user, offered a disjointed, outdated, and nearly unusable experience on election night in the U.S. as they highlighted hours-old posts that no longer reflected the current state of the race. Frustrations were particularly high on Threads, Meta’s X […]
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De Harry Potter-game Hogwarts Legacy was één van de grootste games van 2023 en sindsdien wordt er met smart op een vervolg gewacht. Warner Bros. Games deelt daar goed nieuws over in gesprek met Variety. Er wordt gewerkt aan een vervolg, zo is bevestigd.
David Haddad, de president van Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, stelt zelfs dat het nieuwe spel “een erg grote prioriteit” is voor het bedrijf. Ook vertelt hij dat het team een aantal van de grote verhaalelementen van de game heeft gecoördineerd met de verhaallijnen die zich zullen afspelen in de HBO-serie “Harry Potter” van Warner Bros. Television. Veel meer is helaas nog niet bekend over de nieuwe game.
Zien: Eerste trailer van Harry Potter-game Quidditch ChampionsBekijk ook
Dat er een tweede game komt, is geen verrassing. Hogwarts Legacy is inmiddels 30 miljoen keer verkocht. Volgens Haddad maakte dat succes ook dat Warner Bros. dit als een goed moment zag om flink in te zetten op Harry Potter. Zo komt er een nieuw pretpark in Orlando, wordt er gewerkt aan een nieuwe serie in de franchise en zijn er al meer games verschenen. In augustus verscheen bijvoorbeeld Harry Potter; Quidditch Champions en een nieuwe versie van de LEGO Harry Potter-spellen.
Lees Het vervolg op Harry Potter-game Hogwarts Legacy is in de maak verder op Numrush
With all the talk of the downsides of smartphones for teenagers, parents have looked to smartwatches as a way to stay in contact with their young children while avoiding the full internet and social media access of a phone.
At least that was the narrative a couple of years ago. But more recently, more companies have been marketing smartwatches to kids as young as 4 and 5 years old. And at younger ages, it’s not the kids asking for the devices, but parents looking to keep tabs on their children out of concern for their safety.
That’s what EdSurge senior reporter Emily Tate Sullivan found when she spent months researching the recent boom in smartwatches for kids, for a feature story that EdSurge co-published with WIRED magazine last week.
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“The worst case scenario in the minds of the parents I talked to is just always looming,” she says. “These parents think, ‘If there's a school shooting, if there's a lockdown, I want to be able to communicate with my child in that locked down classroom. If they are abducted, I want to be able to know exactly where they are. Maybe there's still a watch on their wrist and I can track them.’ I mean, these are things that are so improbable, but it doesn't really matter. The fear is pervasive. It's a really powerful force.”
But while parents focus on physical safety as they hand kids smartwatches, they may not be considering the downsides of starting a digital life so early, according to digital media experts. And schools are increasingly seeing the devices as a distraction — sometimes from parents texting their kids during the school day. Yet watches are often not included in school bans on smartphones, and they’re not always mentioned in the conversation about the effects of digital devices on children.
For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we go behind the story with an interview with Tate Sullivan, including details that she wasn’t able to fit into the final piece. And in the second half of the episode, the author reads the full article, so you can catch this story in podcast form.
Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or on the player below.
© Z U M R U T / Shutterstock
Meta announced Tuesday that it is extending its restriction on political ads until later in the week, though it did not specify which day the ban would be lifted. When asked for more information, a Meta spokesperson pointed TechCrunch to the announcement about the company working to “protect the integrity of elections on Facebook and […]
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Het bericht Threads heeft 275 miljoen gebruikers: hoe kan dat? verscheen eerst op DutchCowboys.
Disney+ heeft in november zin in films. Deze maand verschijnen namelijk maar liefst twee documentaires – waaronder één over componist John Williams – een kerstfilm en een dramafilm! Maar natuurlijk zijn er ook weer wat nieuwe series in aantocht.
Kerstmis en Disney, die twee gaan natuurlijk hand in hand. Daarmee is het geen verrassing dat Disney+ half november een nieuwe kerstfilm uitbrengt. Het gaat om An Almost Christmas Story, de derde en laatste korte film van producent Alfonso Cuarón. De film is gebaseerd op een waargebeurd verhaal.
In 2020 werd een kleine uil gered uit de kerstboom op Rockefeller Center in New York. De film gaat over deze uil, genaamd Moon. Terwijl hij probeert om de drukke stad te ontsnappen, wordt hij vrienden met een klein, verdwaald meisje genaamd Luna. Samen gaan ze op avontuur, in de hoop hun ouders terug te vinden. Tijdens die reis ontdekken ze de magie van het kerstseizoen.
Ook zie je deze maand de dramafilm Out of My Mind, over Melody Brooks. Zij is heeft scherpe humor en een net zo scherpe geest, maar heeft een hersenaandoening. Daardoor is ze verlamd, kan ze niet praten en zit ze in een rolstoel. Met als gevolg dat ze niet dezelfde kansen krijgt als haar leeftijdsgenoten.
Als een jonge leerkracht haar potentieel ontdekt, krijgt Melody de kans om mee te doen aan het gewone onderwijs. Daar laat ze zien dat was zij te zeggen heeft, veel belangrijker is dan hoe ze het precies zegt.
Deze films komen in november naar Disney+:
Ook verschijnen er weer diverse series op Disney+ in november. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan Gangnam B-Side, een Zuid-Koreaanse serie die zich in Seoul afspeelt. We volgen Jae-Hee, die in een bekende bar werkt. Zij heeft kennis van een geheim dat in verbinding staat met een reeks verdwijningen, maar verdwijnt vervolgens zelf ook. Detective Kang, de vogelvrije Yoon en advocaat Min proberen daarop ieder achter de waarheid te komen.
Ook verschijnt deze maand de thrillerserie Say Nothing. Deze serie gaat over de alleenstaande moeder Jean McConville, die in 1972 in Belfast werd ontvoerd en nooit meer levend werd teruggezien. De serie laat de gevolgen daarvan zien door de ogen van twee zussen, een militair strateeg en de naar vrede strevende Gerry Adams.
Deze series komen in november naar Disney+
Lees Nieuw op Disney+ in november: An Almost Christmas Story en Say Nothing verder op Numrush
Het bericht Happy Halloween: de leukste posts en inhakers verscheen eerst op DutchCowboys.
In May 2023, Reddit announced that its API would no longer be free, signaling the demise of most third-party Reddit apps and the start of a new Reddit era. Reddit was always interested in making money, but the social media platform’s drive to reach profitability intensified with its API rule changes, which was followed by it going public and other big moves. With Reddit reporting this week that it has finally turned its first profit, we can expect further evolution from Reddit, whether old-time Redditors like it or not.
In its fiscal Q4 2024 results announced on Tuesday [PDF], Reddit said that in the quarter ending on September 30, it made a profit of $29.9 million. This is significant growth from fiscal Q3 2024, when Reddit lost $7.4 million. Revenue, meanwhile, was up 68 percent year over year, going from $207.5 million to $384.4 million. Reddit is expecting $385 to $400 million in revenue for fiscal Q4.
During the Reddit app-ocalypse, many Reddit users and moderators said they would quit the platform because they were disgusted with how Reddit treated third-party developers and moderators, particularly during user protests against the API rule changes.
Een nieuwe maand begint, dus Netflix komt weer met nieuwe content. Deze maand kun je genieten van kerstfilms, een nieuw seizoen van Arcane en zelfs van een live-event: de wedstrijd tussen Jake Paul en Mike Tyson. Hoe dan ook heb je dus genoeg te zien.
Beginnend met dat live-event, want daar wordt al enige tijd naartoe geleefd. Op 16 november (Nederlandse tijd) nemen bokslegende Mike Tyson en Jake Paul het tegen elkaar op in het AT&T Stadium in het Amerikaanse Texas.
Al in maart dit jaar werd duidelijk dat de twee boxers het tegen elkaar op zouden nemen. Origineel moest dat op 20 juli zijn, maar dat werd uitgesteld naar deze maand. Toch gaat de wedstrijd dus wel door. En dat is een bijzondere, ook omdat het leeftijdsverschil tussen Paul en Tyson de grootste is in professioneel boxen. Jake Paul is namelijk 27 jaar oud, Mike Tyson is 58 jaar oud. De vraag is hoeveel dat uit gaat maken. Maar dat zien we dus op 16 november, als we de wedstrijd live kunnen zien.
Deze maand zien we twee langverwachte delen van series: het tweede seizoen van Arcane en de afsluiting van Cobra Kai. Het tweede deel van seizoen zes van Cobra Kai verschijnt op 15 november. Daarin is komt het wereldtoernooi snel dichterbij. Daniel en Johnny werken daarom hard om hun team te herbouwen. Maar oude vijanden en nieuwe bedreigingen staan hun succes nog in de weg.
Ook aan Arcane komt na het tweede seizoen een einde, werd eerder al bekendgemaakt. Maar eerst krijgen we dat tweede seizoen dus nog, wat deze maand in drie delen op Netflix verschijnt. Daarin worden nieuwe samenwerkingen opgezet, andere samenwerkingen stopgezet en ontstaat nieuwe gevaren, terwijl de strijd tussen Piltover en Zaun plaatsvindt.
Het eerste deel van van dit seizoen verschijnt op 9 november. Op 16 en 23 november volgen het tweede en derde deel.
Deze series verschijnen in november op Netflix:
Netflix heeft deze film een hele grote hoeveelheid films voor ons klaarstaan, zoals Sleepless In Seattle, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves en Evil Dead. Maar één van die films krijgt juist nu extra aandacht: 17 Again, met Matthew Perry in de hoofdrol. Het is namelijk een jaar geleden dat de acteur overleed. Maar in zijn films blijft hij natuurlijk voor eeuwig bij ons.
Voor wie de film niet kent: Matthew Perry speelt hierin Mike O’Donnell, een man die op de middelbare school zijn vriendin per ongeluk zwanger maakte en besloot zijn basketbalcarrière achter zich te laten om voor zijn gezin te zorgen. Nu is hij volwassen en alles behalve blij met hoe zijn leven is gelopen. Maar dan krijgt hij de kans om het opnieuw te doen: hij wordt weer zeventien jaar oud (gespeeld door Zac Efron) en kan opnieuw zijn basketbalcarrière opstarten. De vraag is: wil hij dat wel?
Netflix maakt daarnaast vast een start met de kerstfilms, in de vorm van Meet Me Next Christmas. De romantisch ingestelde Layla – gespeeld door Christina Milian – racet door New York om een kaartje te scoren voor het kerstconcert van Pentatonix. Een jaar eerder had ze namelijk afgesproken om daar met James af te spreken, een man met wie de vonk direct oversprong. Maar helaas: het concert is uitverkocht. Gelukkig is er een vriendelijke verkoper die haar wel wil helpen.
Deze films zie je vanaf november op Netflix:
Natuurlijk zijn er ook weer allerlei documentaires die je kunt kijken. Bijvoorbeeld Return of the King: The Rise and Fall of Elvis Presley. Presley was natuurlijk de King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, maar aan het einde van de jaren ’60 moest hij wel bewijzen dat hij dat nog steeds in zich had. In ’68 deed hij een comeback special. In deze documentaire zie je het verhaal achter die special.
Ook zie je een documentaire over de ontvoering van Anabel Segura. Zij werd maar liefst 900 dagen gevangen gehouden in Spanje, waardoor het hele land zijn adem inhield. De nieuwe documentaireserie verkent de zaak via nooit eerder gehoorde opnames van de kidnappers.
Deze documentaires komen in november naar Netflix:
Netflix zet deze maand ook een heleboel films en series klaar die je met het hele gezin kunt kijken. Denk aan bekende films als Madagascar en Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, maar ook aan een klassieker als Stuart Little. Die film, uit 1999, gaat over een gezin genaamd de Littles. Zij adopteren de muis Stuart, die kan praten. Zoontje George is in eerste instantie niet zo’n fan van Stuart, net zoals de kat Snowbell. Maar Stuart laat zich niet uit het veld slaan en doet zijn best hun harten voor zich te winnen.
Kijk je liever naar een kat en een iets nieuwere film, dan kun je ook The Garfield Movie kijken, over de bekende oranje kater. In de film leert Garfield zijn vader kennen, de straatkat Vic. Maar daardoor moeten hij en hond Odie hun luxe leven verlaten om Vic te helpen met een riskante overval.
Deze films en series voor het hele gezin komen in november naar Netflix:
Lees Nieuw op Netflix in november: Meet Me Next Christmas, Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson en Arcane verder op Numrush
As Jennifer Hill’s eldest child was heading into fifth grade, she began to wonder how she would communicate with him in the hour between his school bus drop-off and her arrival home from work in downtown Cleveland.
This story also appeared in WIRED.“There’s no phone in this house if something goes wrong,” she remembers thinking. “It’s not safe.”
When Hill was a kid, there were no cellphones, sure, but there were landlines. And friendly neighbors keeping an eye out. And close-knit communities where everyone knew each other.
“It’s not the way it is anymore,” she says. “I can’t imagine my kid walking up to somebody’s house, knocking on a door, and saying, ‘My friend fell off his bike. Can I use your phone?’ We teach kids not to do that anymore.”
She wasn’t ready to get her 10-year-old a smartphone, not by a long shot. Nor did she intend to install a home phone. She wanted her son to be able to ride his bike around the neighborhood in the afternoons, too—not just be cooped up in their house.
She quickly whittled her options down to just one: a smartwatch.
Hill knew of another family that had just purchased their child one of these high-tech wearables. Back then, in 2018, the kid-focused options were fairly limited, as were their capabilities. Hill got her son a Verizon Gizmo watch, which, at the time, had only rudimentary features, storing up to 10 parent-approved phone numbers and allowing the user to send only a handful of preset text messages (think: “Where are you?” and “Call me”). The smartwatch also had some simple location-tracking capabilities.
Fast-forward six years, and Hill’s two oldest children, now high schoolers, both have graduated to smartphones. Her youngest, a 10-year-old daughter, wears a Gizmo watch, only hers comes with all the technological advancements and upgrades accumulated over the prior years: photo and video capture, video calling, access to a full keyboard for texting, voice messaging, group chats, geofencing, and up to 20 parent-approved phone numbers.
Today, says George Koroneos, a spokesperson for Verizon, the smartwatch is “truly a phone replacement on their wrist.”
And the product category is booming. A decade ago, only a few tech companies made smartwatches for kids. Today, the market is bloated with players, new and veteran, vying for kids’ and parents’ loyalty—and advertising smartwatches to children as young as 5.
[Smartwatches] are becoming a child's first device.
“They are becoming increasingly popular,” says Kris Perry, executive director of Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development. “They are becoming a child’s first device.”
Families are noticing, too—after all, they’re the ones driving this “explosion,” as Shelley Pasnik, former director of the Center for Children and Technology, describes it.
Hill has seen the evolution since her first watch purchase. When her sons were younger, she says, only a handful of their friends and classmates had smartwatches. Now, the devices are “huge” in her affluent suburban community of Westlake, Ohio.
“With my daughter, everyone’s got them. They’re as popular as Stanleys and Owalas,” she says, referring to the colorful, reusable water bottles that children have helped popularize. “All the little girls have watches.”
Kids clamoring for their first digital device are easily winning over adults who, let’s face it, aren’t putting up much of a fight in the first place, when always-on communication and precise location-tracking are part of the package that comes with modern parenting.
In fact, parent fears may be the real force propelling smartwatch proliferation.
The T-Mobile SyncUp is a kid-focused smartwatch that first launched in 2020. The company targets children ages 5 through 12 for the device. Photo courtesy of T-Mobile.T-Mobile, which makes the SyncUp watch, conducted a consumer insights study and found that 92 percent of parents of children ages 4 through 12 felt it was important to “always know where their child was,” says Clint Patterson, senior vice president of product marketing at T-Mobile.
Today’s tools make such tracking possible.
“The way that parents monitor their kids has changed dramatically in just a generation or two,” says Mitch Prinstein, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association. “Parents are monitoring their kids far more closely, really wanting to be aware of their location [and] concerned about their safety.”
This heightened surveillance has trade-offs. The trend has seeped into schools, where teachers and leaders have grown frustrated by the introduction of yet another digital distraction to students’ learning, even as more districts enact cellphone bans.
It’s possible there are ways in which smartwatches are creating an electronic umbilical cord. That has possible risks as well.
Yet no one really knows where these gadgets fit into the larger conversation around children and screens. Research on kids and smartwatches is thin. Even data about adoption and use is lacking. This has left digital media and child development experts to extrapolate and hypothesize about the possible pitfalls and benefits.
“If this is a way of parents or kids achieving their goals and delaying their kids on social media, this might not be such a bad thing,” says Prinstein, who codirects the Winston National Center on Technology Use, Brain, and Psychological Development and whose research focuses on adolescents and younger children.
“On the other hand,” Prinstein adds, “we don’t have a lot of research yet. It’s possible there are ways in which smartwatches are creating an electronic umbilical cord. That has possible risks as well.”
When the Apple Watch was released in 2015, it was seen—and priced—as a luxury good, notes Girard Kelly, the head of privacy at Common Sense Media.
It was also, back then, marketed to adults. But as new generations of the Apple Watch came out, some parents handed down older models to their children, says Pasnik of the Center for Children and Technology.
“Naturally, kids like to do things adults are doing,” says Jon Watkins, senior product manager for Bounce, a kid-focused smartwatch made by Garmin. “There’s a natural tendency for kids to want a watch like they see Mom and Dad wearing.”
Garmin makes a smartwatch for kids called Bounce. "Let kids be kids," an online promotion for the device says. "Save the smartphone, and let them explore the world with the Bounce kids smartwatch." Photo courtesy of Garmin.Noting the trend—and in some cases, helping to grow it—other companies began to release kid-specific smartwatches with more limitations than an adult device. Apple, too, released a version, the Apple Watch SE, in 2020, with restricted features and a lower price.
Around that time, demand for kids’ smartwatches spiked, says Perry of Children and Screens. Educators, too, note a bump in adoption around the pandemic—one that has been sustained in the years since. The smartwatch market for kids is estimated to be worth more than $1 billion in 2024—and it’s growing rapidly, Perry adds.
A typical kids’ smartwatch today costs around $150 up front, plus an ongoing monthly subscription fee of $10 to $15. That’s certainly no pack of bubble gum, but it does put the device within reach for many families, particularly those who view the product as one that enhances their child’s safety, says Kelly of Common Sense.
Parents are, like, halfway in between giving their child or teen a phone, and the watch makes sense. It’s cheaper.
“Parents are, like, halfway in between giving their child or teen a phone, and the watch makes sense,” he says. “It’s cheaper.”
To adults feeling pressure to introduce their kids to technology, a smartwatch may feel like a safer starting point than a cellphone that grants exposure to the entire internet, argues Kelly’s colleague Laura Ordoñez, executive editor and head of digital media family advice at Common Sense.
“What is the low-hanging fruit that doesn’t feel like it’s doing the most damage?” Ordoñez asks. “I believe that’s what’s motivating these parents.”
Numerous people cited social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation,” in interviews, noting the harm that smartphones and social media may be causing young people. Most smartwatches don’t have web browsers or social media applications. That in itself gives many parents an enormous sense of relief.
“Parents are increasingly aware of the problematic designs of smartphones and the troubling data on social media apps,” says Perry. “They want the connection, but they don’t want their child scrolling and online constantly.”
As the price of kids’ smartwatches has come down, though, it may have muddled how the wearable fits into a family’s overall technology goals. What started as a consolation prize offered to an older preteen or young teenager who craves technology, communication, and social inclusion has evolved into a sort of gateway device. Like bowling with bumpers.
“It’s a great way to ease into tech,” says Hill, the Ohio parent. “You can learn to take care of the technology in a small way before you are given it in a bigger way.”
That seems to be how the smartwatch makers view it, too. In interviews with executives at Verizon, Garmin, and T-Mobile, they describe their target users as ages 5 to 12, with the core customer base as parents of 8- to 10-year-olds.
“This is a very safe way to have a means of communication with a child,” claims Watkins of Garmin.
Patterson, at T-Mobile, describes kids’ smartwatches as “training wheels in the adoption of technology.”
“Just like you wouldn’t throw your kid on a bicycle, you don’t throw them at a smartphone or tablet with unfettered access,” Patterson adds.
What exactly are these training wheels preparing kids for? The bicycle metaphor suggests that someday, children will be allowed to zoom off on their own, liberated from their parents’ purview.
Yet untethering is not the trajectory families seem to have in mind when they buy their young kids entry-level digital tools. It’s not why Tim Huber, principal at Harris Creek Elementary School, part of North Carolina’s Wake County Public School System, is seeing more and more children in the early grades show up to school wearing smartwatches.
“It has been just a steady increase of kids, at younger grade levels, all the way down to kindergarten,” Huber notes.
To be sure, the reason that 5- and 6-year-olds—children who may not even be literate—have smartwatches is not to delay the purchase of their first smartphone or to ward off social media. For them, the watches are serving another purpose entirely.
When Kristi Calderon’s daughter was in fifth grade, one of her classmates made a bomb threat.
“I rushed to them,” says Calderon, referring to her three school-age kids. “It was very scary.”
She saw only one of her children walk out of the building as the school was evacuated. In those next moments, she did not know where two of her children were or if they were OK.
“That’s what, like, killed me,” says Calderon, who lives in Long Beach, California.
The experience rattled her. Ever since, she says, she has ignored school policies around devices. She would rather know where her kids are and be able to communicate with them, to know that they are safe, than to be left to wonder and worry.
The youngest of her four children, now an 8-year-old in third grade, wears a smartwatch. He’s had one since he was in first grade.
Kristi Calderon with her family. The youngest of her four children, an 8-year-old, has worn a smartwatch since first grade. Photo courtesy of Calderon.Experiences like Calderon’s—and the seemingly ever-present possibility of children encountering violence in schools—have driven parents to seek out location-tracking devices for their kids. Some settle for a simple AirTag fastened to a child’s backpack, but many also want the ability to communicate with their child, as Calderon does with her son during and outside of school hours.
Tina Laudando, a parent of two in Park Ridge, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, says she got her older son a smartwatch when he was 11 “so we could stay in touch with him and give him a little bit more freedom.”
Tina Laudando with her 12-year-old son. He was 11 when he got a smartwatch. Photo courtesy of Laudando.His friends were getting together at the park, and she wanted him to be able to join them. And at his age, she didn’t want him to have to come with her every time she needed to make a trip to the grocery store. The watch, she figured, would allow him to stay home alone or meet his friends and communicate with his parents in case of an emergency.
Did she ever consider letting him join his friends at the park without a communication device? No, she says. That was never an option in her mind.
“The idea of him going to the park alone, going for a bike ride with his friends, without adult supervision, I think for me as an adult is scary,” Laudando says. “Being able to just, for myself, have that comfort level, knowing he’s OK, it gives me peace of mind.”
It’s a win-win, Laudando believes. Her son gets the feeling of more freedom and independence, and his parents feel confident giving that to him.
Laudando, like most of the parents interviewed for this story, grew up during a time when many kids would leave home on their bikes and be gone, unreachable, for hours, returning only for dinner. That was normal.
“It’s kind of sad, right? Because we lived without technology for so many years, and as I’m explaining this, I’m like, I don’t know what we would do without it,” Laudando says. “We’ve become reliant on it.”
But Laudando feels the world her children inhabit today is less safe than the one she was raised in.
Tina Laudando's older son, Nico, on his 12th birthday. He wears a smartwatch so his parents are comfortable letting him join his friends at the park and stay home alone. Photo courtesy of Laudando.Tara Riggs, a parent of two in Livonia, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, can relate. She sees videos on social media, hears stories from friends, reads the news. She feels “inundated” with negative information. It wears her down, she says.
“I’m constantly worrying,” Riggs admits.
Indeed, the internet—and social media in particular—can leave many with the sense that the physical world is more dangerous today than ever, when in fact, by a number of measures, it is notably safer. (What has gotten worse, in the past few decades, is child and adolescent psychological and emotional well-being. Some researchers and leaders, including the US surgeon general, attribute this shift to high use of technology and social media among youth. Others cite intensive parenting practices that, ironically, seem to undermine the normal development of resilience in kids.)
“The perception of danger versus the actual danger is a distinction that’s probably important here,” says Prinstein, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association. “The perception of danger is heightened for a lot of parents.”
It’s a consequence of how much more connected our society is than it was a few decades ago, he adds. People can find out, in real time, about violent or disturbing events that happened many communities away. It leaves them with a sense that trouble—no matter how remote the possibility nor how many miles separate their families and the latest crisis making headlines—is looming.
Perhaps no tragedy feels more present and pernicious to a parent than a school shooting. One can take place on the other end of the United States, yet parents everywhere are reminded, viscerally, that their child, too, is at risk. It may have happened elsewhere, in Georgia, or Florida, or Texas, but the next one could be at their kid’s school.
“The psychology of fear—it’s extremely powerful,” says Huber, the elementary school principal. “We face that constantly. We are asking hundreds and hundreds of families every day to trust us with the safety and wellness of their child for seven to eight hours.”
Katie Joseph, assistant superintendent of Regional School Unit 1 in Bath, Maine, understands that school safety is a palpable concern for many families. Yet she urges those in her school community not to be overtaken by it.
I try to remind parents what I always tell myself: There is what is possible, and there is what is probable. Probably, all the things you’re worried about are not actually the things you should be worried about. You should be worried about the [device] in your child’s hand.
“I try to remind parents what I always tell myself: There is what is possible, and there is what is probable. Probably, all the things you’re worried about are not actually the things you should be worried about. You should be worried about the [device] in your child’s hand.”
Joseph believes the kind of “independence” a child attains by donning a smartwatch only runs skin deep.
If a child’s parent is constantly monitoring them, in touch with their every move, then really they are not developing a strong sense of responsibility, she says. Everyday situations that might allow for a child to experience and overcome challenges, to take risks and build resilience, become virtually frictionless when their parents are just one tap away.
“If my child is riding his bike and something happens, he needs to be able to figure out, ‘What am I supposed to do in this situation?’” says Joseph, who has an 8-year-old. “The first thing we should want our kids to do is not to call us and have us do the thinking for them.”
Because of the relative affordability of the smartwatch, and its limitations, many families may not be asking themselves how likely it is that their child would be caught up in a violent event, Prinstein notes. Rather, they may be thinking, “Will I feel regret if I spend that 200 bucks on Starbucks versus just getting the device, just in case?” he says.
“I think the calculus there is a little bit like, ‘Better be safe than sorry,’ even though logic might follow that it’s not truly necessary,” he adds.
Yet Hill, the parent in Ohio, believes that her decision, years ago, to buy her kid a smartwatch as a safety precaution has been vindicated.
One afternoon, riding his bicycle home from swim practice, her oldest son was hit by a car. He wasn’t run over, Hill says, but the driver sideswiped him and he landed hard, with his bike toppling over him. With a few taps of his watch, he was able to make a quick call to his parents. Hill’s husband drove the mile to reach him and took him to the hospital.
“If that hadn’t been there,” Hill says of the watch, “I don’t know that he would have had the wherewithal to give my number to somebody with him. He was scared. He was 13. He was by himself. As much as we drill it into him, that’s a lot to ask of a kid.”
The smartwatch, in that moment, was a “resounding success,” she adds.
Late last summer, Riggs, the parent who lives near Detroit, began to research smartwatches. She was considering buying one for her then 10-year-old daughter.
Riggs and her husband had recently caught their daughter disobeying them. One afternoon, their daughter was supposed to be at a friend’s house around the corner from their own, a block away. But when Riggs’ husband passed that friend’s house on his way home from work, he noticed their daughter’s bike wasn’t in the yard. Riggs sprang into action. She got in her car and drove around the neighborhood, going up and down each street until she found her daughter at another house.
“I didn’t like that feeling—that panicked feeling,” she says. “Where did they go? Did they cross the main road like they’re not supposed to? What are they getting up to?”
Her impulse was to prevent a similar situation by putting a tracker on her daughter. She spent months researching different smartwatch models, consulting other parents, scouring tech-focused parenting groups for insights. “I rabbit-holed that,” she says.
Then it occurred to her that maybe she was trying to solve the wrong problem. Riggs didn’t need a better strategy for monitoring her daughter. Rather, she needed to teach her child not to break the rules in the first place.
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“It seemed like I was opening Pandora’s box, when it wasn’t absolutely necessary,” she says of purchasing a smartwatch. (Still, she didn’t forswear technology entirely. Her daughter now bikes with a Wi-Fi–only tablet, connects it to the internet when she arrives at a friend’s house, and sends her mom a message on Facebook Messenger Kids letting her know she arrived safely.)
The possible drawbacks of smartwatch use extend beyond stunting character growth. Even though smartwatches are virtually unexplored in academic research and will require further study before anyone can say, conclusively, how they may affect kids and childhood, it’s clear that screens, in general, can cause children harm, Perry of Children and Screens argues.
“They interfere with so many aspects of child development,” she says, rattling off some examples: cognitive development, language development, social emotional and behavioral development, mental health.
True, the screen of a smartwatch is much smaller than that of a phone. Its functionalities are more limited. Some of the “irresistible” qualities of other devices are missing from smartwatches, Perry concedes. And even though most kids’ smartwatches come with games, they can be difficult to use and may deter kids from playing for long, or at all.
Still, that doesn’t make smartwatches safe from some of the addictive, distracting tendencies of phones, experts say. Watches vibrate, chime, and ping with notifications. They, like other devices, are built with persuasive design.
“The evidence is really clear that the notifications—the visual cues to look at your watch—those things are really disruptive and provide a real distraction from something else the child should be doing,” Perry says.
Teachers and school leaders would vouch for that.
They’re disruptive, distracting. It all just gets in the way of what teachers are trying to do.
“They’re disruptive, distracting,” says Joseph, the district leader in Maine. “It all just gets in the way of what teachers are trying to do.”
She doesn’t see watches and phones as being wholly different from one another, especially in middle and high school settings where, increasingly, students have both devices with them during the school day. A phone may be put away, out of sight, but the watch on a student’s wrist will still be buzzing with news alerts, incoming text messages and photos, social media notifications, and the like.
Joseph’s school district, RSU 1, encompassing a small coastal region of Maine, updated its device policy over the summer, at a time when many schools and districts opted to do the same. Except, unlike RSU 1, most districts are narrowly focused on the potential harms of smartphones, multiple people shared in interviews. Their revised policies may not even mention smartwatches, creating a loophole for those devices.
For leaders at RSU 1, whose school board voted to “eliminate” both smartphones and smartwatches in grades six to 12, it was an attempt to increase student connection—real-life, in-person connection—and by extension improve their mental health. They’ll enforce this by collecting all watches and phones at the start of the school day, placing them in lockable Yondr pouches, and distributing them at dismissal.
Huber, the elementary school principal in North Carolina, also recently wrote smartwatches into his school’s device policy, requiring that they be in airplane mode—functioning only as a watch, not as a connected device—during the school day. “The watch is considered a cellphone UNLESS airplane mode is activated,” the policy reads.
He would take the policy a step further if he felt he could. Airplane mode can be disabled with one touch, and truthfully he’d rather not see the devices in his elementary school at all.
“There has not been one time I have ever heard from anybody, ‘I’m so glad this kid had a smartwatch,’” he says. “I can’t think of any scenario where there is a need or benefit to having it.”
Still, he’s not sure how much additional harm they could be causing for a generation of children who “have already been raised on tablets,” glued to parents’ smartphones at the dinner table. What’s one more screen?
Perry invites parents and families to think about it another way. Once a child is given their own personal device, their digital life begins. The child’s data is collected. Algorithms are built around their preferences and practices. An online profile is developed.
That can seem relatively innocuous—it’s just a watch, right?—but what people may not realize is that smartwatches collect thousands of data points, “easily,” per day, per user, according to Kelly of Common Sense.
“The younger you’re connecting your child to that world, the more risk there is to them than if you didn’t,” Perry says. “That’s a tough calculation as a parent.”
Is it better to stay out of touch with a child, trusting that they’ll be safe enough as they move about the physical world? Or to invest in a tool that enables constant monitoring and communication, albeit through the shadows of the emerging digital world?
The big question today’s parents must wrestle with, Perry says, is, “Which risks can I tolerate?”
© Illustration: Jacqui VanLiew, Reference Images: Getty Images
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