The Decibel - School boards take on social media giants

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

Educators across Canada are worried about the use of cellphones – and in particular social media – in classrooms, saying it’s disrupting class and causing mental health issues. Four school boards in Ontario are suing the companies behind Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat for billions of dollars, joining a long list of U.S. school districts doing the same.Philip Mai, senior researcher and co-director of the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University, explains why this might be a tough case to prove in court, and how it could make an impact on how young people engage with social media.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

No, that wasn't your phone. It's pretty distracting, right? Educators in Canada are worried that social media is disrupting their classrooms and impacting the mental health of students. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health found that 91% of students in grades 7 to 12 use social media daily, and about one-third of them use it five hours or more. Now, four school boards in Ontario are suing the companies behind these social media platforms. And this comes after dozens of U.S. states and school districts have done the same thing. Philip Mai is a senior researcher and co-director of the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University. Today, Philip tells us about this lawsuit and the impacts it might have,

and what the research says about social media's effects on young people. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Philip, thank you so much for being here today. No problem. Thank you for having me. So several school boards, four school boards in Ontario, are suing the big tech companies behind these social media platforms. Can you just catch us up? What are the details of this lawsuit. Yeah, so four of the biggest Ontario school boards are suing Snapchat, TikTok, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram for $4.5 billion. The boards involved here are the Toronto District School Board, the Peel District School Board, the Toronto Catholic District School Board, and the Ottawa-Carlton District School Board. And what exactly are the

school boards arguing? Well, they're arguing that the social media platforms have been like negligently designed for compulsive use and have rewired the way children think and behave. And they're leaving educators in school to manage the fallout. They're also saying that students are experiencing, you know, an attention deficit in learning and experiencing mental health crisis because of the prolific and compulsive use of social media. And it leads to all kinds of problems within the school, you know, like mental health, escalation of aggression, cyberbullying, and so on. Okay, so these are all the things that they're talking about here. What specifically, I guess,

is the legal argument? Well, they seem to be making the things that they're talking about here. What specifically, I guess, is the legal argument? Well, they seem to be making the argument that this is causing a public nuisance. They're not arguing necessarily that it's a defective product because that's a harder bar to prove. So they're more or less arguing that these platforms are interfering with the public right to an education. So they're going to have to eventually convince the court that A, that there is a public right to an education, just like there's a public right to have clean air. So the idea is that the right to an education is similar to the right to access clean air and clean water, right? So that's the first argument they will have to make. And then the second argument they'll probably have to make is that, OK, if the court agrees that it is similar to clean air, is the social media company

responsible? Is their algorithm the one responsible for causing that public nuisance? So, Philip, you mentioned some of the impacts in schools here. I guess what does this mean for teachers? Like, what are classrooms like right now? How is social media use affecting the classroom? Well, there's been lots of report of how phones and social media apps in general are very disruptive to the classroom, for example, with cyberbullying and so on. I mean, we've always had kids that were bullied, but when the school bell rings at the end of the day, you go home, slam your bedroom door, at least you get a short reprieve from the bullying. But now with the cell phone, the bullying goes with you into the bedroom because your phone is there.

Right. So your attacker can continue to harass you. So it changes the dynamic a little bit. And that's with school being the front line and the first responder to many of societal problems. Things that we see in society usually get replicated in small amount in the classroom. And they are the first people that will have to deal with some of these things before we at the largest society eventually get around to passing legislation. Yeah, cyberbullying is a huge thing. I would imagine too, like, you know, there's social media challenges. There's just kind of usage in the classroom. These things must be disruptive as well to the learning environment. it. So the province have brought in 2019 some rules regarding a ban, but they left a lot of leeway for each of the school boards and teachers to come up with things that are specific for their

classroom. But that has proven to be difficult to implement simply because one teacher in one classroom might have one policy, another teacher in another classroom might have a different policy. So it creates a bit of confusion. So I guess, for example, the Toronto School Board recently voted to revisit this policy to see whether they can add a little bit of tea to it and also some uniformity. So this way, the teachers who are enforcing these phone restrictions or ban, we'll have something to back up to. And then the other issue I'm concerned about is how will this be enforced simply because a school day is so short as it is and their teachers have so many mandated things that they have to deliver during each class.

Are they going to have to devote time now to basically collect all the phones? Or are you going to basically give people, force people to put it in their locker at the beginning of the day? But that kind of ban can be circumvented so quickly because think about it. Many of us have dummy or dead phones at home. So kids are going to just grab one of the dead phones

and throw in the box. See, I put one in the box, just like you asked me. And ta-da. So this is what you're saying, like it's really hard to enforce a ban like this. It's just like almost impossible. Like I said, it's going to require a lot more effort than they think. And it's going to create basically you're jumping out of a frying pan and going into the fire and you're simply trading one type of heat for another type of heat.

Philip, let's let's talk about the money here, because the school boards are asking for a lot in damages. Altogether, it's $4.5 billion. What do they say about what those financial damages are? Like, what is actually costing them money, I guess? They have to bring in, you know, counselors and teacher aides and other things because they have to deal with disciplinary issues that they are arguing is brought about or exacerbated by social media. Extra IT support and help, you know, sociologists, psychologists, and other people that they have to bring on. For example, every time there's an incident of bullying or something

like that that gets out of hand, they will have to bring in extra help to provide the emotional support for the students and so on. Those are extra costs that right now is not priced into the product that they are putting out. It's basically being outsourced to society. So each individual school board have to figure out how to pay for all these things. And I guess a lot of it might come down to if kids aren't focusing in classrooms, like the loss of learning. I don't know if that's rolled into it as well. Right. So, I mean, that's something harder to put a dollar value on. But like I said, this lawsuit is not a slam dunk for either the school or

the social media companies. There's no doubt that, you know, like I said before, schools are the front row seat here. They're the de facto first responder to many of the crises that we see in society. But there are a couple the crises that we see in society. But there are a couple of things that we know for sure. Smartphones and social media are very popular with a lot of people, not just youth. Right. And that there is a mental health crisis among youth, at least since the early 2010. And the third thing that we know is that there's a growing narrative that these two things

are somehow related. And I guess I should just say, like, these claims have yet to be proven in court, of course, but the lawsuit accuses the tech companies of exploitative business practices, right? Creating addictive products for young people. Can you explain that? Yeah. So, like I said, there's still a debate among the research community about whether this is correlational or causal, meaning there's an association, but is it the only cause, right? There are many studies connecting social media used to mental health, but many of them are correlational studies. Very few are longitudinal

studies or true experiment or even quasi or natural experiment that link mental health problems to social media because mental health problems is complicated. There are many factors that contributes to that, right? So none of the researchers are saying that there is no association, but the debate is, is this the only association and is this, you know, the primary causal link? So you're saying that there's kind of studies have proven there's a correlation here, but not necessarily causation is what you're saying? Yeah. So the debate is really at this time still over the standard of proof necessary for society to act. We really don't have enough evidence that might stand up, let's say, in a criminal proceeding.

But we are accumulating enough evidence now where it might stand up, for example, in a civil trial, which is where we're at right now. Right. Yeah. Let's just talk about this for a sec, because we see so many articles and studies about social media and young people's mental health, connecting it to things like poor body image. Right. Cyberbullying, as I mentioned, discrimination, depression, anxiety. A whistleblower from Facebook even came forward a few years ago, right, saying that the company knew it was harming young people with its practices. So I guess we seem to have this correlation, like you said, but they're not necessarily connected, I guess. Can you help me understand that? Yeah. So a lot of study relies on survey data where the respondents are asked, you know, to report their perception of what they're experiencing. And those are indicative of things that people are experienced personally, but they're not always the gold standards because there are not enough experimental studies and not enough longitudinal study yet.

But like I said, we're starting to have enough of those where people are coming to a consensus, but we're not there yet. And also because, again, mental health is one of those problems that are complicated, that have many root causes that are working in tandem to pull one out, let's say, social media and say, this is the main cause and the main driver is causing some people to pause. But we need more longitudinal study on the effect and the impact of social media and phones on our kids. Yeah. So we do know, of course, though, that social media has a pull on people, right?

People know it's engaging. People know they're drawn into it. Can you walk me through, I guess, why it is so addictive in a way to some people? Well, the systems are designed to reward you. For example, when you do something, there are built-in mechanism to alert you and let you know that, hey, your community liked this. For example, the like button, the share button.

These things are signal. And every time you get one of those, it's a bit of a dopamine hit that you get. And then you kind of learn like, oh, okay, so that's the kind of content, that's the kind of behavior that gets rewarded on this. And so as a result, people do more of that. Right. And I guess are young people particularly vulnerable then to that to that kind of pull of social media? That's one of the arguments that's out there right now. For example, if you were to give social media and cell phones to, let's say, somebody who's a 30-year-old versus somebody who is still early in their development stages, the way they interact and use that tool might be different. Because if you're an adult, you have other responsibility. This tool will be compartmentalized accordingly. But if, let's say, you are a young child and you're given to

this thing and this becomes your world, you're going to treat it differently. And over time, that becomes your habit. So I think that there will be more studies coming out in the near future that will show that this might be related to stages of development. We'll be back in a moment. So, Philip, this lawsuit in Ontario is following dozens of school districts in the U.S. that are also suing the big social media companies. But beyond the money, what other changes would these school boards be looking for? Well, for one thing, they will probably be asking that the companies should redesign their system to bring in and take into account the vulnerabilities of people under 18.

So to make it less addictive. So, for example, they could force the company to remove or reduce the use of algorithm to surface things that are interesting and basically go back to the old type of social media where it's chronological. So if it's just chronologically, it's not kind of designed in a way for you to keep coming back or not be as drawn in then. Right. So that would then probably hurt their bottom line. So more than likely, they're not going to agree to that at all. They could put a limit on the total number of times the app can be working on a child's phone, for example. They might require, let's say, a parent to put in a passcode every time the child access the thing. So there are many ways that they can limit this. But they've done this in other countries, not necessarily Western countries, but in China and so on.

But people find ways to get around them. to limiting it to the usage of the app for people of a certain age, which means that there's going to be more push for age ID laws and stuff like that, which then, of course, is another can of worms because now you're going to force people to have to upload their government issue ID to these companies so that they can, you can prove that you are of certain age.

So this way they can use that information to decide, oh, okay, you should get this type of content, but not this other type of content because of your age or because of where you live, right? Because otherwise, how do they know who's a kid and who's not? Do these companies have a responsibility here, right? These social media companies are making products that are working as far as they're concerned.

So what is their responsibility? Well, to be a good corporate citizen, I mean, they do have a responsibility. If they are operating in this market, making money from all of us, I would argue they do have a responsibility. The debate, as always, is what is the extent of that responsibility, right? But I think that if you are introducing a product into the market and your users are pointing out that it might be causing some problem, at the very least, it's their duty to look into that and address some of those concerns. Okay, that's basically the definition of being a good corporate citizen. It doesn't mean that you have to agree with what the critics are saying,

but acknowledge that this is a problem and how and what are you doing to address it and why have you chosen not to address it? But I think one of the good things about this lawsuit, whether in the end the board are going to win or not, is that it's bringing this discussion to the fore and it's adding more pressure to the company. For the longest time now, they've been basically just muddling along and trying to ignore the problem for as long as possible to make as much profit as possible. But I think we're now getting to the point where there are enough different groups and forces in society that are saying, wait, wait, wait, wait. We need to have a conversation about this. And the court are now finally starting to take on some of these cases and trying to figure out what is that level of responsibility and liability that they have. And they will have two choices. They either change their product or pack up and go home.

You know, just like what Facebook did when the Canadian government says, hey, you got to pay for and have to support journalism. And they decided, you know what, we're going to take the ball and go home. So as you said, Philip, you know, part of this, at least is that there's more awareness around this now, too. It's being talked about. How likely is it, though, that any of these lawsuits will actually create change? I think they have a good chance, actually, of creating change. More than likely, it's going to be negotiated, simply because if they let a judge decide, it might even be more costly to them. So I think that in the next few years, more than likely, they will come to an agreement of some kind. But like I said,

until we get to that point that I think the companies are going to fight tooth and nail, some of the companies will settle, some of the company will leave or close out a certain market where they will say, hi, we will not make our product available to kids. Philip, just lastly here, before I let you go, we've been talking about a lot of the negative effects of social media, but I guess how should people be thinking about the role of social media, especially if maybe their parents or they have young kids in their lives? How should we think about this? Well, like everything else, we're trying to achieve a Goldilocks here where these type of tools can also be very useful.

For the last seven to eight years, at least since around 2016, 2015, we started talking more about the negative side. But remember, these tools do serve a purpose in our lives. That's why they have become so popular. We use it to connect to people, friends. We use it to learn new things. We use it to find emotional support, to find validation, to find community online. So they do serve that purpose, right? But we also know that they have sharp edges. And right now we're at the point in society where we are demanding that some of those sharp edges be removed, the debate is to

which one and who should be responsible for removing them. Right now, some of that cost is down low on society. And some of the people who are currently paying for those costs are saying, wait, wait, wait, it shouldn't be us. You guys are making the profit. You should be giving back some of that profit to alleviate some of the problem that you have helped to introduce into society. And that's where we're at right now. But to me, these tools have a use in our lives. That's why we all have cell phones in our pockets or in our purses. They're not going to go away anywhere. They'll still be with us. But there are ways to design them so that they have an appropriate place in our lives

but without taking over our lives. Philip, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. No problem. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our intern is Manjot Singh. Our producers are Madeline White,

Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.