Can you trust Mark Zuckerberg to design a socially responsible Facebook? How about Elon Musk with X or his artificial intelligence chatbot Grok?

The question of trust is at the heart of the Carney government’s recently tabled Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, which would include a new independent regulatory body.

To date, most of the debate on the bill has focused on its proposal to ban teens under the age of 16 from social media. Critics have raised questions about whether such a ban is constitutional and whether it would risk privacy and freedom of expression by requiring that all social media users submit proof of age.

Critics also question how effective a ban would be. In Australia, a “substantial proportion” of teens are circumventing a similar ban, sometimes with the assistance of the social media companies targeted by the country’s new rules.

The complicity of social media companies in helping users beat the ban reflects a deeper, fatal flaw in the Canadian legislation. It trusts that tech companies in the United States will act in the public interest, despite having spent decades demonstrating that they are completely unworthy of such trust.

For the most part, Bill C-34 is a near carbon copy of key parts of a 2024 proposal for online harms legislation that died when Parliament was prorogued for last year’s federal election. The new bill tacks on the social media ban and extends its coverage to include chatbots and online services. What hasn’t changed is its motivating concept — the “duty to act responsibly.”

This duty is a form of corporate social responsibility which is a largely voluntary form of regulation that looks first to companies to police themselves and to take appropriate steps in the wider public interest.

Why trust is the wrong regulatory model

The United Nations sets out that all companies, regardless of nature or location, have a responsibility to respect human rights and more specifically to avoid causing harm to human rights through direct links to their operations, products or services.

In the case of Bill C-34, the Canadian Commission on........

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