Thursday, March 28, 2024

Today's tonic: "TikTok, Snapchat respond as Ontario school boards sue social media giants"

I read this story today and felt relieved that responsible professionals who are charged with the care of children and youth are taking action to hold gluttonous, unethical social media companies accountable for how they've targeted all children and youth for addiction to their platforms. 

"Four major Ontario school boards are taking some of the largest social media companies to court over their products, alleging the way they're designed has negatively rewired the way children think, behave and learn and disrupted the way schools operate."

This has of course happened in the spare time of children and youth, not in the classroom, where cell phones have been banned in Ontario since 2019.  The result of these companies targeting youth to get them addicted to their platforms has been catastrophic in terms of social impacts that we are only just beginning to experience and understand.

The story then quotes Ontario Premier Doug Ford's reaction.  Without the benefit of his highly paid advisers and partisan professionals or a teleprompter telling him what to say, Ontario Premier Doug Ford gave us all another peek into who he truly is. 

His instinct always is to give unconditional, thoughtless support to private businesses NO MATTER WHAT.  And to criticize everyone else.  And his mind is as lazy as they come: 

"At an unrelated news conference on Thursday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he "disagrees" with the schools boards' lawsuits, referencing a provincial ban on cellphones from classrooms back in 2019.

"We banned cellphones in the classroom, so I don't know what the kids are using," Ford said.

"What are they spending on lawyer fees to go after these massive companies that have endless cash to fight this? Let's focus on the kids, not about this other nonsense that they're looking to fight in court."

This answer might make sense if kids only access social media sites during school hours from cell phones in school.  But of course as anyone who is not an idiot knows, kids access these sites at all other hours of the day.  

When Doug Ford has got no one to tell him what to say, he's still the thoughtless turd he's always been.  Ontario can do way better than this.  

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