The Great Digital Regret
Guest post by Theresa McSweeney
We’re in the middle of massive regret based on the promise of social media to bring us together. The headlines are all about banning phones and blaming social media moguls. We handed out digital megaphones twenty years ago, watched the train wreck happen in real-time, and now we’re trying to solve it by just making the hardware disappear.
But banning the phone and blaming the platforms doesn’t delete the behavior.
The real crisis isn’t the device; it’s the pedagogical void. We gave kids (and their caregiver adults) the most powerful communication tools ever built and didn’t spend a single hour teaching them how to be democratic within them. We just expected the civics of a 1950s town square to naturally carry over to a Discord server.
It didn’t.
We need to move the living laboratory of democracy into the tools we actually use in school: Google Chat, Microsoft Teams, Minecraft. These are the places where short spurts of conversation land boldly. One sentence can change everything.
The Civil Myth
We keep trying to teach digital citizenship like it’s a tea party. We use words like respectful discourse and active listening. But on your favorite social media platform at 11:00 PM, that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is power dynamics, speed-posting, and ratioing each other.
As Amy Gutmann points out, democracy requires us to navigate disagreement, not just avoid it. And as Ethan Mollick notes, when you add AI to that mix, the human element gets weirdly distorted. If we don’t teach them how to handle a heated chat now, they’ll just become another adult shouting into the void on social media later.
The Friction Prompt: A Discord Simulator
This prompt is designed to be a little uncomfortable. It forces the AI to be difficult so the students have to actually work to keep the democratic process alive.
Copy and paste this into your AI of choice:
“I want to simulate a high-friction digital debate to help my students practice democratic deliberation.
The Setup: We are in a shared Google Chat. The school is considering a Phone-Free Campus policy.
Your Role: Act as three students with sharp personalities:
The Logic Bro: Uses cold, AI-sounding language to dismiss others’ feelings as irrational. He uses ChatGPT to generate long, overwhelming walls of text to win by exhaustion.
The Skeptic: Thinks the school is just power tripping and uses short, snarky one-liners to shut down conversation.
The Compromiser: Is trying desperately to be democratic but is getting steamrolled by the other two.
The Goal: My students will enter the chat to try and reach a consensus.
The Instructions for AI: Do NOT be nice or helpful immediately. Be stubborn. Make the students work to find a middle ground. If a student makes a good point, acknowledge it, but stay in character. If they ask the Logic Bro to stop using AI, have him defend why AI-generated logic is superior to human emotion.
Start the chat by having the Logic Bro post a 3-paragraph AI-generated argument for why phones should be banned for maximum cognitive efficiency.”
Why This Works
When you run this, you aren’t just talking about democracy. You are performing an autopsy on it in real-time.
Gutmann’s Theory: Students quickly realize that if they don’t find a way to make the Logic Bro listen, the community fails.
Mollick’s Jagged Frontier: Students have to figure out how to talk back to a wall of text. Do they use AI to fight AI? Or do they use their human voice to call out the BS?
This is the “Where does this class exist?” moment.
Digging Deeper
Once the simulation runs, you can ask the kids: “Who was the most frustrating to talk to? Why? And did you actually feel like your voice mattered in that thread?”
This is a low-risk environment, but it still carries weight. Be sure to warn them that this simulation is meant to feel REAL—interacting with it left me with some raw “ick” from the chat. As I messed with the prompt, I saw the direct connection between my own social media frustrations and this simulation. The lack of effective, democratic banter was exhausting.
Where will our students learn this skill? What if they had the opportunity to do so in the spaces they already occupy, like Google Workspace? We could use comments in shared documents to give them the chance to be heard, to listen, and to repeat.
What if they used Microsoft Teams to communicate findings in short spurts? We could set the expectation: “Restate what someone else said before you say your peace, and use no more than two sentences.” Is this doable?
What about in a fun, playful space like MinecraftEDU? Can students collaborate on builds and code in a place where they have a common language and a low-risk environment?
To my knowledge, we aren’t addressing these issues in a formative way. We are banning and limiting interactions at school to preserve the peace—which makes sense—but isn’t it our job to help students function outside those walls? When do we start recognizing that democratic communication must be explicitly taught to alleviate the regrettable situation we’re in?
I say the answer is today.
AI Prompting Disclaimer: The writing before you was built using Gemini as my sidekick. I built this one section at a time, channeling my thoughts and asking Gemini to make them sound professional.
Theresa McSweeney, a veteran public school teacher turned tech guru, currently works for the Boise School District as a Digital Support Specialist. She is active in the Treasure Valley hockey community, scorekeeping and serving as a digital specialist for the Idaho Steelheads Booster Club. Pedagogy and Innovation for 2026 and beyond are her specialties.
