[OT] School boards launch multibillion dollar lawsuits against social media companies

School boards in Toronto, Peel Region (the Toronto suburbs just west of
Toronto) and Ottawa have launched lawsuits claiming over $4 billion in
damages from operators of Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok and others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNNlplE19lY [12 minutes]

The school boards are making use of lawyers that are operating on a
contingency basis so the lawyers only get part of the settlement if
they are successful and no tax money is being spent on the lawyers.
This implies that the lawyers are highly confident that they are going
to win. I find that surprising given the vagueness of the claims made
by the board and the difficulty of  proving the damage done by social
media in court.

After all, I think there is a general sense that kids are spending too
much time on social media but how do you prove that actual harm is
being done, that the harm is exclusively caused by the social media,
and then how do you quantify the harm in dollar terms? Furthermore, why
would you give buckets of money to school boards to rectify the harm
allegedly done by social media? Surely we've seen plenty of reasons to
doubt that school boards are NOT doing a very good job of educating
children and teens so why give THEM the money if indeed harm can be
shown to have been done by social media?

If I was a lawyer for the social media companies, I think I'd have a
field day defending them in the legal process. One of the first
questions I'd have would be about the school boards' own rules around
the use of social media in schools. Are kids allowed to use social
media while at school? If so, why? Given the harm it is alleged to be
causing, why would the schools allow kids to access social media while
they are on school property? I would also ask school boards what
benefits they see from social media? For instance, I can imagine many
kids insisting that they get a sense of belonging from the various
cliques they join online, reducing their sense of loneliness. And
that's just for starters.

It's going to be interesting to see what comes of this, assuming the
courts don't just refuse to hear these cases in the first place.

--
Rhino