Four Ontario school boards are suing social media giants. What does it mean for B.C.?

The Ontario school boards are alleging the social media platforms are disrupting student learning, contributing to a mental health crisis and leaving educators to manage the fallout.

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The head of B.C.’s School Trustees Association says the province’s school boards are unlikely to follow the lead of their Ontario counterparts, which have launched legal action against social media giants for the harm caused to students.

That’s because the B.C. NDP is proposing its own legislation that would allow the province to sue large corporations, including social media companies, to hold them accountable for the impact of their alleged addictive algorithms.

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Last week, four of Ontario’s largest school boards filed separate but similar lawsuits against the parent companies of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, alleging the social media platforms are disrupting student learning, contributing to a mental health crisis, and leaving educators to manage the fallout.

The lawsuits claim the social media platforms are negligently designed for compulsive use and have rewired the way children think, behave and learn. School boards across the country have the opportunity to join the litigation.

Carolyn Broady, president of the B.C. School Trustees Association, said she is aware of the lawsuits in Ontario, but said B.C.’s province-wide approach seemed like a “better way forward” rather than legal challenges from individual school boards.

“My sense is that we will wait to see what the legislation looks like once it’s passed in British Columbia,” Broady said. “And then we will revisit that to see if there’s any further steps we need to take.”

Last month, the B.C. NDP introduced legislation that would allow the government to sue corporations for the harm they cause, with an aim to hold social-media giants accountable for addictive content served to kids. The bill has not yet passed into law.

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When introducing the legislation, Attorney General Niki Sharma said the Public Health Accountability and Cost Recovery Act follows the B.C. government’s success in recovering costs from tobacco companies and opioid manufacturers for the devastating health consequences for their products.

Sharma said Tuesday the lawsuits by the Ontario school boards show that B.C. is not alone in its concerns about the impact of social media, particularly on young people. She said she hasn’t talked to any school boards to determine if they are considering taking similar action to those in Ontario.

Hassan Ahmad, an assistant professor at UBC’s Peter A. Allard School of Law, is closely watching the lawsuits being filed in Ontario as well as in the U.S. — where a multi-state coalition of 41 attorneys general sued Meta, alleging it damages young people’s mental health and illegally harvests their data.

Ahmad said the challenge will be to prove legal causation, or that the social media companies contributed or caused the negative health impacts and associated health-care costs. The government would also have to prove that the social media companies should have reasonably foreseen that their conduct could cause harm.

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“So that’s a difficult legal hurdle to be able to prove — to say that your time on Facebook or TikTok or Snapchat has had to do with a serious effect on your health, such that the province has now had to pay for those costs,” he said.

Asked about whether B.C. will face legal hurdles proving that social media caused the harms, Sharma said the province will rely on the expanding research that shows the direct impact of social media on individuals, especially youth.

“Unfortunately, it’s one of those things that you think about when young people are facing this right now in real time about what the future harms might be,” she told Postmedia on Tuesday. “I’m really thinking about individuals who have lost their life because of social media.”

with files from the Canadian Press 

kderosa@postmedia.com

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