Are social media companies liable to public school boards for alleged harms caused to student users of their platforms? A recent decision from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice suggests that the answer may be ‘yes.’ In Toronto District School Board v Meta Platforms Inc., the Court declined to strike the plaintiff school board’s claim against the owners of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, examining the potential expansion of product liability duties within the digital landscape and addressing the unique challenges posed by social media technologies.1
Background to the Case
In March 2024, the Toronto District School Board (the Board) launched a lawsuit against Meta, Snap, and ByteDance, the owners of the popular social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, claiming $1.6 billion in damages.
The Board’s claim is largely framed in negligence as a product liability action. The Board alleges that the defendant social media companies negligently interfered with its mandate to promote student achievement and well-being by designing addictive platforms that cause harm to students, leading to what the Board described as a mental health crisis which required it to incur significant increased costs in its administration of Toronto public schools. The Board also advances a public nuisance claim arguing that the social media companies’ conduct constituted an unreasonable interference with the public’s right to education.
The defendants brought a motion to strike out the Board’s claim on the basis that it disclosed no reasonable cause of action and was “plain and obvious” to fail. However, the Court dismissed this motion, allowing the claims to proceed to trial.
Duty of Care: Proximity and Foreseeability
The core of the defendants’ arguments in favour of striking the Board’s negligence claim was that the Board lacked a sufficiently close and direct relationship with the defendants to justify a legal duty of care. The defendants argued that, while they may have a special relationship with students who were users of their platforms and to whom they owed a duty of care, they had no similar proximate relationship with the Board.
The Court disagreed, finding that the defendants had inserted themselves into the Board’s fiduciary relationship with its students through their digital platforms, thereby creating a legal proximate relationship sufficient to give rise to a duty of care. The Court emphasized that legal proximity is based on the foreseeable consequences of a defendant’s conduct, not just contractual ties. Based on a review of prior caselaw, the Court found that a manufacturer’s duty of care may extend beyond a product’s direct users to include those within the product’s sphere of influence.
The Court further found that it was not plain and obvious the defendants lacked a reasonably foreseeable duty of care towards the Board. The Board’s claim argued that the educational disruptions were foreseeable outcomes of the defendants’ allegedly deliberate design of addictive features in their platforms. The Court also considered the Board’s allegations regarding attempts to have harmful content removed from the defendants’ social media platforms, and the brain development and student susceptibility to the alleged harmful digital enticements, as indicative of foreseeable consequences.
The defendants raised various policy factors weighing against a finding of the proposed duty of care between the defendants and the Board. Among other things, the potential for the creation of a “ripple effect” of unlimited or indeterminate liability was raised as a basis for negating the existence of a duty of care. The Court addressed this by suggesting that the scope of liability should be analyzed within the duty of care framework concerning proximity. The Court further suggested that the defendants were conflating significant liability with indeterminate liability, reasoning that the affected school boards were a “finite and knowable” group, supporting a manageable scope of liability.
Public Nuisance
With respect to the Board’s public nuisance claim, the Court found it was conceivable to include the right to a safe education and the alleged interference with that right through online activity as a subject of public nuisance. It considered the “neighbourhood” affected by the nuisance to include the broader impact of addictive digital products on student mental health and educational achievement, suggesting a modern interpretation of public nuisance requiring redress. The potential expansion of the public nuisance tort proposed by the Board’s claim was found to be a triable issue which the Court declined to strike.
Key Takeaways
While it is important to note that the Meta decision does not represent a finding that the Board’s claim will succeed on the merits, the decision represents a potential expansion of previously held notions regarding the limits of a manufacturer’s duty of care. It suggests that manufacturers may be exposed not only to liability for harm caused to the users of their products, but also to public institutions who are impacted by those harms indirectly.
The Board’s action is one of multiple similar claims being advanced by Ontario school boards and the decision, which is likely to be appealed, will have a broad impact on those cases and product liability litigation in Canada generally if upheld. As this case, and the parallel cases by other school boards, progress, they will serve as a critical test of corporate responsibility in cyberspace, potentially expanding the bounds of a manufacturer’s duty of care. The potential scope of negligence and public nuisance envisioned by the Court’s decision, if upheld, may impose potentially significant liability on manufacturers and online service providers for the broader impacts of their products on society.
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1 2025 ONSC 1499, <https://canlii.ca/t/kb4jm> [Meta].