Four of Ontario’s largest school boards filed separate but similar lawsuits against the companies behind Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok on Wednesday, alleging the social media platforms have “disrupted and fundamentally changed the school, learning and teaching climate by creating and sustaining prolific and/or compulsive use of their products by students.” 

These cases are the first of their kind in Canada, and add to hundreds of similar lawsuits against social media firms in the United States.

The claims: Two boards in Toronto and one each in suburban Peel region and Ottawa claim they have had to spend many hundreds of millions of dollars cleaning up messes related to students’ excessive social media use—from teachers’ time to discipline, to extra help for kids with attention problems and vandalism caused by social media challenges. 

They’re seeking compensation for those, plus punitive damages for what they allege are the companies’ bogus claims that they take these problems seriously.

Collectively, the school boards are seeking $4.55 billion.

The response: None of the claims has been proved in court. The companies have weeks to file formal defences.

Snap spokesperson Tonya Johnson wrote in an email that Snap focuses on friends’ communications and has no public “likes” or comments.

(The lawsuits say Snap rewards compulsive use in other ways.)

TikTok 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,” spokesperson Danielle Morgan wrote. 

The legal take: The boards’ cases are serious but proving the claims will be tough, said Trevor Farrow, dean of York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School. They will have to prove that the social media companies have responsibilities to the boards, and the extent of damages, on relatively new legal terrain.

But there’s a long history of this kind of litigation, for causes from civil rights to the environment to tobacco to opioids, he said.

“Some of the big social engineering—in terms of improvements in society around basic human rights—happened through legislation, but some of it happened through court cases,” Farrow said. The process can be cumbersome and expensive, but it’s appropriate when there’s an important question of justice that legislators aren’t taking up, he said.

The context: Forty-one states and Washington, D.C., have sued Meta on similar grounds, alleging Facebook and Instagram have harmed young people’s mental health. So have hundreds of U.S. school districts.

Under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has banned students from using cellphones at school and restricted social media accounts for youths—following a similar move by California under Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2022.