Schools and social media: it’s always someone else’s fault
TORONTO – It is always someone else’s fault.
The Corriere Canadese has gone out of its way to give the Minister of Education, Paul Calandra, the proverbial “benefit of the doubt” respecting education and the need for reform thereof. School environments in 2023-24, in some inner-city were reaching intolerable levels – Hollywood “blackboard jungle” conditions.
Some Boards of Education (Toronto’s two – TCDSB and TDSB – the Peel District School Board and the Ottawa-Carlton District School Board) seemed to find a scapegoat by acting on growing trend in USA: law fare.
On March 28,2024 These boards announced they had retained Neinstein LLP, a Toronto firm, on contingency to pursue a legal claim against Meta Platform Inc, Snap Inc. and ByteDance (TikTok). CNW, a Canadian news outlet, noted that “the lawsuit claims …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”.
No one asked what the Leadership at each of boards hired on the approval and direction of the Ministry of education were doing when confronted with this knowledge. The initial value of damage claimed was approximately $4.5 Billion. At the time, neither Neinstein LLP nor its clients returned phone calls- save one whose representative was not authorized to speak on the record when they confirmed that everything was done with Ministry and Ministerial approval.
Meta et al. filed a Motion in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice (OSSJ) to strike (dismiss) the boards’ lawsuits. After all, the boards were/are led by Education academics who would have presumably known better than to allow and/or prescribe harmful material for curricula without appropriate guardrails. The “coalition” of willing boards expanded, reportedly under the encouragement of the Director of the TCDSB. The claimed “damage” amount is now about $11 Billion, approximately 30% of the Ministry of Education’s annual budget.
One year later, on March 7, 2025, The OSSJ dismissed META’s motion to strike and cleared the way for the multi-billion dollars “negligence and public nuisance” Board suits to proceed to trial. Coincidentally, the Minister, apparently tired of the recurring, insistent and often acrimonious criticism regarding declining “academic and safety standards” in “publicly funded schools”, launched several third part investigators “to check things out” for him.
These investigators, all of them reputable accounting firms, after a few short weeks, gave him an out. To no one’s surprise, they focused on operational deficits, questionable depletion of non- renewable assets and general inability to follow directives from the Ministry. The evidence was as convenient as it was shallow. And it was all about fiscal efficiency, again, to lay for the bases to place Boards under Supervision and “vest Board authority” in the Minister and his Supervisor.
On August 26, 2026, an $18 billion settlement between META and a coalition of state and territories attorneys- general, regarding teen social media safety, received the approval of U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. The other cases between parents and education authorities are still unresolved, but the precedent is now a reality that must be addressed by the Ontario/Canadian system.
If you are a parent, you must be wondering who stole your money while turning your children into zombies? Who and how will they benefit from future settlements?
Following editions will examine how those minutes of settlement in the USA might affect your thinking and perception of those you trusted with your children’s present and future.