If you were a preschooler watching YouTube in 2017, you were probably getting your still-developing brain drilled by those Elsagate-era videos where shocking things happen to knockoff versions of Disney characters. Nearly a decade has passed now, and YouTube has become an even more turbulent place overall. But from the sound of it, those same kids – now today’s tweens and teens – have only had increased doses of content thanks to the devices and policies that enable content consumption in school.
The Wall Street Journal’s report Wednesday about YouTube consumption on educational devices includes a startling fact: A seventh-grade student named Ben Warren in Wichita, Kansas, reportedly managed to log 13,000 YouTube views on his school’s Google account from December 2024 to February 2025 during school hours.
Sure, if you’re a teenage user of a video app, and you have your own smartphone and no limits imposed by your parents, you can probably manage 13,000 video views over the course of one Thanksgiving dinner. But 13,000 YouTube videos show real dedication for a middle-school student on school equipment during school hours.
It’s doubtful that Warren holds the record for binging on YouTube, as he’s far from being alone. According to the Journal, an unnamed tenth grade student in Oregon logged 200 video views on a school morning Last month. According to my math, Warren made an average of 144 shorts per day during his entire heavy-watching period. According to the Journal, another student in Oregon reportedly watched YouTube 240 minutes a day, or four hours, and was placed in an addiction treatment program at Boston Children’s Hospital.
For the record, Warren probably hasn’t been paying attention to long-form videos from creators like MisterBeast, if that’s what you’re imagining. According to the Journal, he was using a school iPad to constantly swipe TikTok-style on YouTube shorts — often 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 “Cali GM,” won a lawsuit against Meta as well as YouTube parent company Google, alleging that their content delivery systems were harmful and addictive to her, similar to the products she encountered as a child. A jury awarded him $3 million, most of which was to be paid by Meta.
A Google spokesman named Jose Castaneda said in a statement last month, “We disagree with the decision and plan to appeal,” adding, “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 is fighting to enforce 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 get any response.
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