Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Rhino Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv Subject: [OT] School boards launch multibillion dollar lawsuits against social media companies Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2024 13:12:30 -0400 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 42 Message-ID: <20240328131230.00003892@example.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2024 17:12:31 +0100 (CET) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="6dac6cb917ffc13ee2e292920c046ba4"; logging-data="3890728"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+efxQP5fdKdY07nbkCGg3R2I2Ne1Nbjzw=" Cancel-Lock: sha1:QAwRlNneN80IwL2/a/xiPzKqLLY= X-Antivirus-Status: Clean X-Antivirus: Avast (VPS 240328-2, 3/28/2024), Outbound message X-Newsreader: Claws Mail 4.2.0 (GTK 3.24.41; x86_64-w64-mingw32) Bytes: 3239 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