Pinterest Tests Notifications to Encourage Students to Stay Focused During School Hours
Pinterest launched a new experimental notification across Canada and the U.S. to help students stay focused during school hours. Teens ages 13 to 17 who open the app between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., Monday through Friday, will now see a prompt encouraging them to close Pinterest and pause notifications with a built-in CTA to make it easy. The alerts are available in English and French.
Why It Matters: Pinterest is the first major platform to test this kind of proactive, behavior-based feature aimed at student focus. It lands just as nearly every Canadian province rolls out phone use restrictions in K–12 classrooms for the 2024–2025 school year. Public sentiment is aligned with some regions, as nearly 8 in 10 Canadians support a classroom smartphone ban.
Over the past year, platforms have ramped up their response to growing regulation and parent concerns —think Instagram’s Teen Accounts, TikTok’s Family Pairing feature, and YouTube’s Youth Digital Wellbeing Initiative. Pinterest’s move adds to that list, but stands out for being preventative by design.
It also builds on the company’s broader track record of protecting young users, from advocating for OS-level age verification to enforcing private profiles for users under 16 (with no public option, even with parental consent) and defaulting all users under 18 to private accounts.
