School Boards Sue TikTok, Meta & Snap Inc For $4.5 Billion For Distracting Students

On a major lawsuit against Big Tech companies for hijacking kids, and why we need to think deeper about what builds resilient humans.

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On a windy afternoon near my home in Ontario, I met with two friends for lunch. It was an All-You-Can-Eat Sushi restaurant, which apparently costs a billion dollars these days (I still can’t believe the bill), but this story isn’t about inflation — it’s about distracted kids.

During our lunch conversation, the subject of teaching came up because one friend is back supply teaching, and the other has a cousin who teaches full-time and hears of his experiences regularly.

All of us being the same age, we remember what it was like to grow up in school where there were no phones and maybe just a couple of peers in each grade who had a very tough time paying attention and learning.

It’s not like that these days.

It wasn’t long into our conversation that the reality of how addicted students are to their phones became the subject of conversation. The inability to focus, constantly wanting to check phones, and the amount of kids who are ‘checking out’ is massive compared to the past.

I was shocked to hear the stories of completely burnt-out and frustrated teachers, and principals taking leaves of absence or quitting because things have gotten so out of control.

What’s The Cause?

Well, four major school boards in Ontario are suing social media giants Meta, Snap Inc. and ByteDance for the damage they are “knowingly causing” to kids, they say.

The Peel District, Toronto Public, Toronto Catholic, and Ottawa-Carleton District School Boards joined together and are seeking $4.5 billion in damages.

According to the school boards, there are mounting administrative costs associated with the strain these platforms have put on teachers as a result of trying to get kids to pay attention. The staff is burnt out.

The boards say the science clearly shows social media is affecting the neural circuitry of the student’s brains, which is negatively affecting their learning and behavior. They also argue the platforms themselves are designed to be addictive.

I recall in conversation with my friends that not only are teachers “burnt out” but principals are “at their witts end” trying to figure out how to manage the state of students these days. Sure, some schools might not have the issue as bad as others, but regardless, this seems like a fairly widespread challenge.

Ontario Premiere Doug Ford criticized the school boards for suing, stating that the focus needs to be on helping kids, not spending money to sue huge corporate giants with endless pockets to fight back.

Interestingly, there are more than 500 school districts in the US involved in similar lawsuits. It’s also worth noting that Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen showed that Facebook knew the damage it was causing young kids yet targeted them anyway.

Is It Just Social Media?

In the independent and alternative thinking/media realm, it’s common to hear of a singular cause of the plight of young people these days: vaccines. As I’ve stated for many years: this analysis is a mistake.

Almost no major issue in the world or humans has a singular cause. Focusing on and blaming a singular cause in an activist driven way opens doors for easy debunking and for few to take the issue seriously.

What’s happening with youth today goes well beyond vaccines, but I do think the evidence we’ve reported on for the last 15 years does put vaccines in the picture.

While social media is certainly hijacking kids’ attention and destroying their focus, many things are going on that are generationally breaking down the world’s people.

• A continual society built on less and less natural ways of living and being.

• Unresolved generational trauma and the cost it has on the emotional, physical, and mental health of future generations. This is still a largely unnoticed phenomenon.

• Increasing socioeconomic disparity creates more stress on parents making it harder for kids to grow up in safe, connected, and attached households. One only has to look at the ACE study to understand how much these things affect youth (later adults) but are going largely unnoticed.

• Increasing amounts of chemicals, low-quality foods and cheap products to the mix, and we can see our kids have a toxic overload from in utero onwards, creating less resilient beings.

There are likely other factors worth considering as well.

With chronic illness amongst youth continually on the rise in developed countries, one has to think holistically to begin getting a grasp on what’s going on. Our way of life, economy, and worldviews are self-terminating, and the kids are a signpost we have to stop judging and instead get curious about.

Beyond that, I recall the recent time I spoke at a high school in Toronto about my work, consciousness, and well-being. After my talk, several kids came up to me asking about the world ending in 10 years due to climate change. I was shocked to see how many of them felt no hope for the future. This of course is not largely from social media but from politicians claiming climate change will kill us all in a short time.

What effect is our current zeitgeist, and how it’s being told and propagandized to our youth, having on them?

The Need To Build Resilience

Are our kids being stewarded by a connected local community these days? Do parents have the time, energy and resilience to raise thriving kids when social pressures are immense? If our communities are becoming increasingly less resilient, can we expect to create resilient youth?

In the book The Continuum Concept, author Jean Liedloff argues that our Western ways have become so divorced from what is natural to humans that we should not be surprised to see what we’re seeing in terms of generational decline. Her book’s description reads:

"Jean Liedloff spent two and a half years in the South American jungle living with Stone Age Indians. The experience demolished her Western preconceptions of how we should live and led her to a radically different view of what human nature really is. She offers a new understanding of how we have lost much of our natural well-being and shows us practical ways to regain it for our children and for ourselves.”

Perhaps we need to think more deeply about what the real drivers of our current moment are.

I get that we tend to want to fight what we think is the biggest cause of an issue, but even the ‘educators’ of our world seem hopelessly lost in identifying and discussing the complex problems of our current moment and taking to existing game dynamics as a solution. (Or so it appears.)

But with that approach, are we ever truly solving anything? Is it time we wake up and start looking more deeply and holistically at what we’re doing?

The Plight of Modern Capitalistic Ways

In a world built on a worldview of competition and survival of the fittest, we create systems that engage in behavior that create self-terminating outcomes.

Profit is the primary focus. With all the corporate greenwashing and corporate mindfulness bullshit we see out there, we’re seeing efforts by major companies to play like they are doing better but really, they are avoiding the truth that we are engaged in ruthless systems of domination and profiteering at the cost of human lives, wellness and the natural world.

The incentives of our existing systems suggest making people addicted to things is the best way toward profit and appeasing shareholders. Since our overall collective worldview is money, money, money, this becomes OK.

Then when the inevitable happens, a massive group of people is negatively affected and they figure it out, sometimes after years of being called conspiracy theorists, they now have to use their hard-earned money to fight back against juggernauts who generated profits harming the world. All while we pretend we are nationalistic communities that love and look out for each other.

What we say we do does not match our actions collectively.

Let’s Not Get Lost

I’ve spoken about some heavy realities in our world today, and I don’t want this to feel negative… but it is the collective shadow we play with at the moment.

Like an individual who spiritually bypasses by pretending everything is positive all the time, we can do the same about not getting curious about the state of the world. Similarly, we can think the world is totally gone, hopeless and lost by holding a feeling that there is nothing that can be done.

This is why it’s important to foster resilience within ourselves as people as we navigate these changing times in society. The video below, and the full episode here, discuss this more in-depth.

Simply put, we need to take care of the state of mind, consciousness and being we are holding day-to-day. This doesn’t have to mean turning our attention away from what needs our stewardship and participation.

We can use the challenges we see today as opportunities to shift our ways of being and the actions that emerge from them as opposed to staying stuck in a survival driven perspective of how bad everything is.