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Here's the contradiction nobody in the education system seems eager to explain: some of the very school boards now suing the world's biggest social media companies over the harm done to students are simultaneously requiring those same students to plug into a different set of tech platforms every single day.

In Ontario, the Toronto District, Peel District, Toronto Catholic and Ottawa-Carleton school boards have filed suit against Meta, Snap, and TikTok parent company ByteDance, seeking roughly $4.5 billion in damages. The boards allege the platforms were deliberately designed for compulsive use, driving an attention, learning and mental-health crisis so severe it has forced schools to pour more money into mental-health supports, additional staff, IT infrastructure and cybersecurity just to manage the fallout.

Yet, inside those same buildings, students are being issued a device, a login, and an entire curriculum built around digital platforms — no permission slip required.

Parent advocate Nicki Petrossi, founder of Scrolling to Death and a former social media executive, is pointing out the contradiction: if this technology is dangerous enough to justify a multibillion-dollar lawsuit, why is more of it being pushed into classrooms every year?

Petrossi points to the explosion of EdTech — the technology platforms and tools schools now rely on to teach and manage classrooms, from Google Classroom to school-issued Chromebooks — as its own red flag, separate from the social media fight entirely (which we covered in part one of this two part series). These systems collect enormous amounts of data on children; not just grades, but behaviour, performance, interactions, interests and patterns tracked over time. Where that data goes, who profits from it, and how it's used remain largely concealed from the families whose kids generate it.

Unlike social media, where a parent can at least choose whether their child gets an account, there's frequently no real opt-out when the technology is baked directly into the school day. If the platform is mandatory for homework, grades, and communicating with teachers, "choice" becomes theoretical.

Petrossi's advice to parents, though rooted in the American regulatory system, is almost identical for Canadian households. The policies may differ by border, but the tech giants building these products are the same. She urges parents to find out exactly what their kids are being exposed to, what data is being harvested, and to start demanding real transparency and accountability from both the platforms and the schools that mandate them.

The bigger, harder question that parents are grappling with is why are some kids more vulnerable to this technology than others? What makes one child more susceptible than the next to addictive design, social pressure, and the psychological toll of constant digital engagement? Until parents and schools understand those differences, Petossi says they cannot fully grasp why the stakes are so much higher for some students, even when they are sitting in the same classroom and using the same device.