We're on Social media (reluctantly)

We're not great fans of social media and hopefully explain that below. However, it is a way to bring our resource, material, learning ethos to a wider audience so, slightly hypocritically but out of the passion we have for what we are trying to do, here we are. Check them out.

All our videos on our children's School of the Air site are uploaded to YouTube. They are uploaded as "made for kids" and we believe are as safe for young people to watch as we can make them. YouTube are owned by the parent company of Google (Alphabet). There is a danger that some content can expose the viewer to inappropriate content, to cyber bullying and untrue and fake information. In our view YouTube could do more to remove such content although it is an almost impossible tasks. Like all social media it can become dangerously addictive.

To date, April 2026, we have have not found or heard of any major negative faults with Bluesky. This is the first time we have used it so all is very new. One of the major advantages, as we see it, is that it is decentralised which means that no single company or entity controls the network. However this can mean more inconsistent moderation. It most definitely has a smaller user base but that is growing.



Both Facebook and Instagram are owned by a company called Meta. They own serval other social media companies. In our view the whole idea upon which they function is to make money for the owners. To do this they need you the user to become addicted to the content, keep clicking on the content and so they employ algorithms which spy on your usage, interests etc and keep throwing up links at you that will entice you to stay longer. The more you click, the more advertisers pay to Meta. You may have noticed that many users put up the supermarket equivalent of an impulse buy by making the headline they put on requiring you to click on the link to find the whole story. Obviously this click is shown as being a "view" for that contributor. You, the user, are being duped and manipulated all the time. Meta also makes a great play of AI being heavily invested in developing it. Sadly a vast number of stories you will find on Meta's platforms are blatantly AI generated and complete nonsense.

X, formerly twitter, started out as a way, in a small number of words, a user could share their thoughts with others. It has grown to be a cross between a way of allowing free-speech and a means where fake news, automated spam accounts and trolling and harassment can broadcast. In our view its present owner, Elon Musk, seeks to confuse freedom of speech with permission to cause harm and distress. In our view too much of the content is harmful and there seems to be little moderation or, if you want to be more generous, ineffective moderation