New Delhi, March 22 According to the UNSECO's Global Education Monitoring (GEM) team, more than half of the countries have banned phones in schools amid growing concerns about declining attention in classrooms and cyberbullying.
The team found that girls are twice as likely as boys to suffer from eating disorders exacerbated by social media usage.
Facebook's own research revealed that 32 per cent of teenage girls felt worse about their bodies after using Instagram.
The report noted alarming trends related to TikTok's algorithm, which targets teenagers with body image content every 39 seconds and promotes content related to eating disorders every eight minutes.
"Recent global monitoring shows that 114 education systems now have a national ban on mobile phones in schools, representing 58 per cent of countries worldwide. The expansion has been rapid. Less than 1 in 4 countries (24 per cent) had bans in June 2023, when it was first monitored in the 2023 GEM Report. By early 2025, this had risen to 40 per cent, and by March 2026, that share is almost 20 percentage points higher," a senior member of GEM told