The Rainy River District School Board has joined 13 other boards in a class action lawsuit against social media corporations.
The Schools for Social Media Change lawsuit was first launched in March, with the Toronto District School Board, Peel District school Board, Toronto Catholic District School Board and Ottawa-Carleton District School Board. It is being led by Neinstein LLP, a Toronto-based firm.
The RRDSB joined the suit with a Statement of Claim filed on June 13, and is seeking $60-million in damages from the owners of social media platforms including Snapchat (Snap Inc) TikTok (ByteDance), and Facebook, Instagram an Facebook Messenger (Meta Platforms), citing harm to students and and the learning environment. The group suit is also calling on the companies to amend their products to mitigate harm in the future.
The claims within the lawsuits have not been proven in court.
“The impact that social media has on youth mental health has become a crisis, and these platforms have done substantial harm. Social media has compromised our students’ ability to learn, disrupts classrooms, and we are seeing an increase in students suffering from mental health harm not just at RRDSB but across the province,” said RRDSB chair Kathryn Pierroz. “As a result, these companies have forced school boards like ours to divert significant resources, including personnel, hours, attention, and funds, to combat the growing crisis caused by their platforms. Our Administrators are spending increased time managing issues caused by social media, and in the classroom, our educators are forced to rework curriculum to meet the needs of students with significant attention, focus, and mental health concerns.”
According to the claim, RRDSB is seeking general, special, aggravated and punitive damages equaling $60 Million, to mitigate the harm and additional costs incurred by social media use by students. These include additional educator and administrator time and resources to promote special education and learning as a result of focus issues, increased mental health supports, costs to address digital literacy and online safety programming, additional information technology support, investigations into cyberbullying and threats made over social media, and programming to address an increased risk of “experiencing sexual harassment, sexual abuse, CSAM, and similar serious harms.”
The lawsuit calls on social media giants to redesign their products to keep students safe, noted Pierroz.
“Although, this lawsuit also seeks compensation for the losses related to tackling the crisis social media has created in our schools, make no mistake, this is about the overall harm that has been and continues to be done to our students by using these social media applications,” she said.
According to the claim, the suit is critical of the design of social media platforms, alleging that the services provide infinite content, a lack of effective parental controls, a lack of adequate identity and age verification and lack of mandatory screen time limitations, among other design elements which can negatively impact students.
Disruptive behaviour is also believed to stem from social media, alleged the claim.
“Students may engage in harmful behaviour in the hopes of having a viral moment on social media and misbehave in a manner that impacts the learning environment,” it stated. “Students may slap the teacher’s butt or trash the school bathroom and then post this misconduct to social media. Students may engage in reckless behaviour for views, likes, and comments, such as deliberately parking a vehicle on school in an unsafe manner, driving erratically, or taking entire school bathroom sinks off the wall.”
RRDSB has spent millions to mitigate pervasive behaviour it believes stems from social media, noted the claim. Bathrooms at the Fort Frances High School underwent a $1.1 to $1.2 million conversion from open concept multi-use spaces to single use structures.
“RRDSB deliberately constructed the single use bathrooms with durable materials such as metal doors that would be hard to destroy in direct response to the significant vandalism being filmed and posted to social media. RRDSB also identified concerns around students’ loss of privacy as posting to social media from the bathroom was so pervasive,” it said.
The RRDSB has also spent $1.3 million to modernize and update its security camera system to mitigate “a marked and unanticipated spike in student misconduct fueled by social media.”
Unauthorized filming also necessitated the creation of a “privacy in place” process, which holds all students in place in the event of a medical emergency, such as a seizure or overdose.
“This strategy was created in direct response to students who had their vulnerable moments, such as a medical emergency, captured on camera and posted to social media, where the content goes viral amongst the RRDSB community,” stated the claim.
The Board has also “expended significant and unexpected levels of time and resources to address the endemic and commonplace sharing of sexually explicit images of students over the Defendants’ products including by children under the age of 13,” alleged the claim, adding that students use “disappearing technology” to send explicit photos and videos, unaware that it can be screenshot or overridden by other means. This content can then be shared publicly over social media.
“Every time this type of incident occurs it has a profound impact on RRDSB, its student population and school climate,” stated the claim.
Cyberbullying is also a concern for the Board.
“The perceived anonymity of social media emboldens students to be cruel. There has been a decrease in positive, in person, peer to peer interactions,” alleged the claim. “Cyberbullying can be severe including students bullied in group chats on the Defendants’ products, exposing students to public humiliation and social ostracization.”
The Ford government recently announced new measures to constrict the use of phones in school settings. Starting in the 2024/25 school year, students in grade 6 and under will be required to keep phones silenced and put away during the entire school day. Students from Grades 7-12 will not be permitted to use phones during instructional time. For Pierroz, the restrictions are just a starting point.
“This is a multifaceted problem that requires a multipronged approach,” she said. “Restricting the use of devices in schools is only one piece of the puzzle, but as we all know, compulsive social media use outside the classroom will continue to enter our education system and impact student learning.”
For more information on the case, visit schoolsforsocialmediachange.ca.
