Instagram just launched a School Partnerships Program

Instagram just launched a School Partnerships Program in the US inviting schools to sign up for “prioritised reporting,” “educational resources,” and a badge that shows they are a “trusted” partner of Meta.

This is another public relations stunt dressed up as student safety.

This program doesn’t protect students. It protects Instagram’s reputation at a time when public trust is collapsing and scrutiny is rising.

The pitch states that schools can escalate harmful content faster. They’ll receive resources to help guide students. And their Instagram profiles will get a visible banner to show they’re working with the platform.

But this entire setup depends on one thing...that schools continue posting student data on one of the most controversial platforms on earth.

And that’s exactly the problem.

Schools are being asked to believe that a company profiting from algorithmic addiction, biometric surveillance, and emotional manipulation now wants to help protect kids.

It’s absurd.

Let’s stop pretending Instagram is a neutral tool. It isn’t. It’s a machine designed to monetise attention and manipulate behaviour. It doesn't just show people content, it decides who gets seen, who gets buried, who gets reported, and who gets ignored. It’s opaque by design, unaccountable by structure.

Schools participating in this “partnership” will offer it legitimacy. Telling students and families that this platform is safe, trustworthy, and endorsed by your educators. 

That is a staggering failure of responsibility.

You say we care about digital wellbeing. You run assemblies about online safety. You tell students not to post personal information or share too much. And then, turn around and post their full names, faces, uniforms, school locations, and achievements to a platform designed to extract value from visibility. Once that photo goes up, it’s already been scraped. Indexed. Trained into a model. Matched against databases. Students don’t even have a say. Their digital identities are being built for them, without consent, without limits, and without the ability to erase any of it.

This is not communication; it is exposure. And if anything goes wrong, if a face ends up in the wrong dataset, or gets pulled into a deepfake, or is matched to a future search result, guess who’s liable? Not the platform. The school.

We need to stop kidding ourselves that this is harmless.

Every school account on Instagram is a quiet endorsement of systems that prey on young people’s attention, hijack their self-worth, and convert every scroll, every like, every click into a data point for profit.

It lures schools deeper into dependence on a platform that has never prioritised student wellbeing, only user engagement. It trades safety for symbolism. It wraps surveillance in school colours and calls it community.

We don’t need more badges. We need boundaries. We need to model digital behaviour that puts students before systems. That means pulling back from platforms designed to manipulate. That means building school communication on our own terms — not Meta’s.

So, no, the “School Partnership Program” is not a step forward, and anyone who says it is is probably on the Meta payroll.