Lawsuit: Canada school boards accuse social media firms of ‘rewiring’ how kids think

Four of Canada’s largest school boards have launched a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the social media companies Meta, Snap Inc and ByteDance, accusing them of acting in a “high-handed, reckless, malicious, and reprehensible manner” with products the boards claim harm student learning and “rewire” how children think.

The four district boards – Ottawa-Carleton, Toronto, Peel and Toronto Catholic – filed four separate statements of claim in Ontario’s superior court of justice on Wednesday.

“The lawsuit claims that social media products, negligently designed for compulsive use, have rewired the way children think, behave, and learn, leaving educators and schools to manage the fallout,” the boards said in a statement, adding the companies used “exploitative business practices” and chose to “maximize profits” instead of focusing on the mental health and wellbeing of students.

Read more from The Guardian.

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