Four of the largest school boards in Canada have launched lawsuits totalling $4.5 billion against Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok, accusing the social media titans of harming students’ mental health and disrupting the education system.
The Toronto District School Board, Peel District School Board, Toronto Catholic District School Board, and Ottawa-Carleton District School Board have filed four separate but similar cases in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice.
The March 27 filings accuse Snapchat, Tik Tok, and Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram of deliberately or “negligently” designing platforms that cause “compulsive use” among young people, effectively rewiring the way students “think, behave, and learn.”
The statements of claim say the school boards have suffered “substantial damages” as a result and call on the social media firms to make improvements rather than “leaving educators and schools to manage the fallout.”
The allegations have yet to be proven in court.
Toronto District School Board director of education Colleen Russell-Rawlins says the influence of social media on students cannot be denied.
Schools for Social Media Change
The four school boards involved in the lawsuits have formed Schools for Social Media Change, a group aiming to strengthen the education system by demanding accountability from social media giants.Forty-five percent of these students use social media for five hours or more a day, the website says.
Peel District School Board director of education Rashmi Swarup says excessive social media use, and its impact on students, has been an issue for some time.
“There has been growing concern for years about the effect of social media on students’ development, mental health, safety, and emotional well-being. Urgent action is needed to protect students from further harm,” Ms. Swarup said in the statement. “That is why we have come together in bringing action against social media giants to make their products safer while addressing the disruptions they are causing to our educational mandate.”
The website lists nine separate but linked “harms” the school boards are suffering due to students’ social media addictions.
“Administrators are adjusting curriculum to respond to an unfocused and inattentive student population,” the site says.
Other alleged harms include additional costs for increased mental health support, IT infrastructure and cyber security, and digital literacy and online safety programming. Resources are also needed to investigate and respond to threats made against schools, staff, and students over social media as well as to protect children from adult predators, the site says.
The school boards, in their lawsuits, are asking Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok to “remediate these enormous costs to the education system.”
US Lawsuits
This is not the first time school boards have sued social media companies for causing a “mental health crisis” among students. U.S. school districts in Alabama, California, Florida, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Washington state have all filed lawsuits similar to those launched by the Ontario school boards.U.S. lawmakers and intelligence officials also have TikTok in their crosshairs, identifying it as a possible security concern. Legislation was recently approved in the House of Representatives that could ban the China-made social media app in the United States over concerns it could be used by the Chinese regime to influence users or access their data. The bill is currently before the Senate.
Chinese Internet company ByteDance, the owners of TikTok, has said it would deny requests by the Chinese regime for data on Americans.
