Newly filed internal documents show how Google viewed its work with schools as a way of turning children into lifelong customers — while the company simultaneously acknowledged research suggesting that YouTube, one of Google’s main platforms, can be unsafe and distracting.
In a 2018 presentation, one slide noted that the public sees YouTube as problematic for students because there is “No way to block unsafe content, comments, ads,” a challenge without a workable solution. A presentation last updated in 2024 said some survey respondents blamed YouTube for keeping them awake at night, among other negative effects on their well-being.
At the same time, other presentations described how Google’s growing presence in schools — through Chromebooks as well as its learning platforms and YouTube — helped the company build a “Pipeline of future users.”
One internal November 2020 presentation slide said acclimating children to Google’s ecosystem in school would hopefully lead them to use its products as adults: “You get that loyalty early, and potentially for life.” Another undated slide deck suggested imagining a world where “Parents ask their children ‘Why aren’t you watching more YouTube?’” and “School Administrators shift budgets from Textbooks to YouTube subscriptions.”
Education experts and parent advocates who are concerned about schools overusing devices for instruction said the documents shed new light, in candid detail, on the business motivations behind one of the biggest technology companies marketing its products to teachers and school administrators.
“It just proves the kind of fear that we’ve all had,” said Jared Cooney Horvath, a cognitive neuroscientist and education consultant who recently wrote a book criticizing technology in schools. “These companies speak about learning, but to them, learning is just the cover they’re using for these practices of ‘How do we get customers now’ and ‘How do we keep them for life.’”
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The internal Google records, which were heavily redacted, were filed by plaintiffs Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California as part of a major lawsuit in which families, school districts and state attorneys general are suing several technology giants — Meta, ByteDance, Snap and Google — claiming that the corporations purposely marketed addictive and damaging social media to children. Snap settled its portion of the suit this week, on undisclosed terms, as the other companies move closer to trial over questions of whether they were obligated to warn schools of their platforms’ negative effects or to implement more restrictions for young users.
The companies have broadly argued that the plaintiffs are inaccurately describing their products, blaming them for harm they did not cause and incorrectly seeking to hold them accountable for content created by users, which they are protected against under a law commonly referred to as Section 230.
Hundreds of school districts joined the litigation, but a judge chose six last year to proceed to trial first. A Kentucky district will be the first school system to go to trial in June.
Google didn’t answer questions from NBC News about the purpose and audience of the internal documents that were included in court filings, but Jack Malon, a Google spokesperson, said in an email that the “documents mischaracterize our work.” Malon added that while the company does not directly market YouTube to schools, “we have responded to meet the strong demand from educators for high-quality, curriculum-aligned content. Administrators maintain full control over platform usage and schools must obtain parental consent before granting access to students under 18.”
Sarah Gardner, CEO of Heat Initiative, a parent activist group critical of social media platforms, found the newly released Google files alarming. She wants to see schools and political leaders put more guardrails on technology in classrooms to ensure that the products benefit students.
“These documents confirm that suspicion that there are ulterior motives to companies pushing technology into classrooms,” Gardner said. “And so we need to be asking why we’re letting them do that.”
When schools began installing bulky desktop personal computers in the 1990s, they mostly bought Apple products, taking advantage of discounts the company offered.
While Microsoft Windows gained ground in the 2000s, schools shifted toward Google after it debuted the Chromebook in 2011, and the company has dominated the education computer hardware market for the past decade. Schools now account for 80% of all purchases of Chromebooks, according to market research firms. Google said in 2017 that more than half of all American public school children use Google applications and products for classwork and stated in 2021 that over 170 million students and teachers worldwide use them.
Schools also use YouTube, with varying restrictions. Some give students and teachers free rein, while others block it entirely. Teachers can embed YouTube videos in course content through Google’s specialized education platform. Google requires students to have parental permission to access YouTube on school devices.
“Insofar as we are looking at how teachers are engaging with YouTube content, we are trying to make it easier for them to do it,” Kathryn Kurtz, global head of youth and learning at YouTube, said in a March 2025 deposition that was partially unredacted this week. “And one of the things that we heard is that teachers wanted to be able to show YouTube video even if their school had made the determination that they wanted to block access to YouTube.”
Google has argued in recent court filings that YouTube can’t be that much of a problem for the school districts suing because they still use it to communicate with families and they allow students and teachers to use it on campus.
The internal Google documents were made public several days after a U.S. Senate hearing on concerns about the overuse of technology in public schools.
Horvath, the neuroscientist, and three other witnesses argued that school-issued laptops and tablets can distract children and that schools too frequently use unproven digital tools when research shows analog ways of learning are more effective. Ahead of the hearing, the two largest teachers unions, the American Library Association and 14 education trade groups wrote a letter defending education technology and urging federal lawmakers not to restrict students’ access or screen time.
Stacy Hawthorne, board chair of the Consortium for School Networking, an association for school technology officials that signed the letter, is concerned that some are conflating social media, which can cause problems for children, with technology more broadly, which can help students learn.
“There’s a big chasm between ‘Social media is bad for kids’ and ‘We need to pull computers out of schools,’” she said.
Kurtz, from YouTube, said in her deposition that the company had not measured the effectiveness of YouTube to improve students’ learning and did not have data to show its content boosted students’ grades, graduation rates or test scores.
One internal Google presentation, which is undated, conceded that using YouTube for learning is hard because the platform is distracting and disorganized. It showed an example in which YouTube recommended “Will Ferrell Hilarious Acceptance Speech” from user “cocksandballs123” to someone who had searched for content about “linear equations.”
Justin Reich, an associate professor of digital media at MIT and the director of the university’s Teaching Systems Lab, said YouTube is caught between tailoring its product to schools and appealing to a vast global audience.
“There’s no capitalist way to win by making your product less engaging,” he said.