Five additional Ontario school boards and two private schools are taking up the fight against tech giants Snapchat, TikTok and Meta. They have joined an existing lawsuit against the social networks, alleging that the platforms are disrupting student learning and the education system.

The Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board; York Catholic District School Board; Trillium Lakeland District School Board; District School Board of Niagara and Ottawa Catholic School Board have joined the lawsuit. The private schools are the Holy Name of Mary College School and Eitz Chaim.

They are asking for an additional $2.6 billion on top of the $4.5 billion originally requested in March by the Toronto District School Board, Peel District School Board, Toronto Catholic District School Board and Ottawa-Carleton District School Board.

According to them, Canadian students are experiencing an attention, learning and mental health crisis due to the addictive use of social media. With the lawsuit, they aim to make the platforms safer for teens and obtain the resources needed to support programming and student services.

“The addictive properties of the products designed by social media giants have compromised all students’ ability to learn, disrupted classrooms and created a student population that suffers from increasing mental health harms,” said Schools for Social Media Change, an umbrella group of the plaintiffs in the suits. “As a result, social media companies have forced school boards to divert significant resources including personnel, hours, funds, and attention to combat the growing crisis caused by their products.”

Schools for Social Media Change said the combination of public and Catholic school boards with private schools in urban and rural regions of Ontario shows that social media addiction and its consequences on learning is a problem that affects kids and teens from diverse cultural, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds.

A Snapchat spokesperson recently told Media in Canada that the app is working to protect younger users (particularly those aged 13 to 17) through several of its policies. For example, it only allows friends to contact teens, and it doesn’t display teens’ profiles in someone else’s search results unless they have mutual friends. A TikTok spokesperson had also said that the social network continues to develop safeguards such as parental controls, screen time limits and age restrictions on features such direct messaging. Meta, meanwhile, has been updating its Facebook and Instagram apps to hide results related to suicide, self-harm and eating disorders.

The news comes after the B.C. government shelved its proposed online harm bill after reaching an agreement with some social media platforms to improve online safety for young people. The Public Health Accountability and Cost Recovery Act (aka Bill 12), introduced last March, would have allowed the province to sue social networks for the harm they cause to kids and teens.