Ontario education minister meets with YouTube on classroom distractions

Ontario’s education minister says she has met with executives from online video giant YouTube as part of a push by the government to engage social media companies in tackling classroom distractions.

In the spring, the government announced that, instead of participating in a lawsuit against social media companies led by some of Ontario’s largest school boards, it would meet with executives at the companies.

Then-education minister Stephen Lecce said he felt it was more productive to discuss how they could work with the companies instead of fighting them in court.

Months after that announcement, however, new Education Minister Jill Dunlop said she was still working out the details of meetings and trying to arrange them with various social media companies.

In October, Dunlop was able to book her first meeting.

“I have met with YouTube recently and talked to the organization about what they do to protect children and young people online,” she said Monday, referencing a meeting that took place in late October.

“So I have met with them and I will be meeting with the other companies as well.”

It is not clear when Dunlop plans to meet with the other social media companies, or which apps and services are on the government’s list.

“I want to meet with the companies to look at what they are doing to protect our students but ensuring that we are protecting our students by banning social media is very important,” she said.

The Ministry of Education previously told Global News it reached out to social media executives in June, inviting them to meet with the government.

At the same time, several of the province’s school boards are taking a different approach, suing social media giants for the alleged effects their apps have had on children’s attention spans and learning.

A number of boards — including in Toronto, Peel and Ottawa — directed a legal challenge in the spring at Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Facebook and Instagram; Snap Inc., which owns Snapchat; and ByteDance Ltd., which owns Tiktok.

The challenge demanded $4 billion from social media companies, alleging that their products have rewired how children think, behave and learn and that educators and schools have been left to “manage the fallout.”