Canadian school boards sue social media giants over effects on students

Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram are addictive and have ‘rewired’ the way children learn, educators say.

Four major school boards in Canada have filed lawsuits against some of the world’s largest social media companies, alleging that the platforms have disrupted students’ learning and are highly addictive for children.

The school boards, which are seeking about $2.9bn (four billion Canadian dollars) in damages, said the social media platforms have been “negligently designed for compulsive use, [and] have rewired the way children think, behave and learn”.

Students are experiencing “an attention, learning, and mental health crisis because of prolific and compulsive use of social media products”, the boards said in a statement on Thursday.

The legal claims were filed separately but all identify Meta Platforms Inc, as the defendant; Meta is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram; Snap Inc, which runs Snapchat, and TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance Ltd.

“The influence of social media on today’s youth at school cannot be denied,” said Colleen Russell-Rawlins, director of education at the Toronto District School Board, the largest school board in Canada and one of the four involved in the legal claims.