Social media lawsuit: Why school boards are raising red flags over use
Global News
As Ontario school boards are raising red flags over social media use among students, experts say the evidence is mounting that more screen time is linked to changes in behaviour.
As Ontario school boards raise red flags over social media use among students, experts say the evidence is mounting that more screen time is linked to changes in behaviour.
On Wednesday, five more Ontario school boards and two private schools joined a lawsuit against Meta, Snapchat and TikTok initially launched in March that alleges they disrupt student learning and the education system. Four of Ontario’s largest school boards originally filed the lawsuit and are seeking $4.5 billion in damages.
“The lawsuits filed by these boards and schools claim social media products, intentionally designed for compulsive use, have rewired the way children think, behave, and learn and educators within these boards/schools have been left to manage the fallout,” said the group representing the school boards, Schools for Social Media Change.
“The addictive properties of the products designed by social media giants have compromised all students’ ability to learn, disrupted classrooms and created a student population that suffers from increasing mental health harms.”
The school boards’ lawsuit claims that social media giants owe a responsibility because they “knowingly and/or negligently engineered products and design features to manipulate brain neurochemistry and to induce excessive and/or compulsive and/or addictive and/or problematic use amongst students.”
In response to the lawsuit, a spokesperson for TikTok told Global News on Thursday that the platform has “industry-leading safeguards such as parental controls, an automatic 60-minute screen time limit for users under 18, age-restrictions on features like push notifications, and more.”
“Our team of Safety professionals continually evaluate emerging practices and insights to support teens’ well-being and will continue working to keep our community safe,” the spokesperson said.
A Meta spokesperson told Global News Thursday that it has developed over 30 tools to support teens and their families, including “tools that allow parents to decide when, and for how long, their teens use Instagram, age verification technology, automatically setting accounts belonging to those under 16 to private when they join Instagram, and sending notifications encouraging teens to take regular breaks.”
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