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Letters: Social media literacy would serve youth better than bans

Readers comment on banning social media for youth, cancelling Hockey Night in Canada, love/hate for Elon Musk, race-based parking, and more

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‘Bill C-34 is not protection. It is a failure of education’

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Re: Carney’s plot to censor the entire internet — Josh Dehaas, June 15

Letters: Social media literacy would serve youth better than bans Back to video

Josh Dehaas rightly skewers Mark Carney’s Safe Social Media Act, Bill C-34. Sold as child protection, it is a classic bait-and-switch: restricting Charter freedoms while pretending to improve society.

It also betrays the spirit of education that Northrop Frye considered a moral obligation one generation owes the next. A society that aspires to be better trusts young people enough to educate their imaginations rather than shield them from reality. Censoring “harmful” content does not create neutrality; it simply grants those in power greater authority to decide which opinions may survive. The court of public opinion remains the most democratic mechanism for exposing and defeating bad ideas.

Social media functions as a real-time census of the public mind. Suppressing radical or offensive opinions does not make them disappear; it merely blinds society to problems that must eventually be confronted openly.

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If protecting youth is the goal, media literacy at every grade level would accomplish far more than restrictions any determined 16-year-old can bypass with a VPN. Teaching young people how social media works — its manipulations, incentives, and traps — develops judgment. Censorship replaces knowledge with ignorance while delivering the worst civic lesson imaginable: that banning things solves problems.

A confident country does not fear young people encountering unpleasant ideas. It fears their ignorance. Bill C-34 is not protection. It is a failure of education.

Tony D’Andrea, Toronto

Hockey Night in Canada united Canadians

Re: We’re about to find out if the CBC can survive without NHL hockey broadcasts — Scott Stinson, June 16; and Hello, Canada. We’ll survive without HNIC on CBC — William Watson, June 18

After 74 years of Hockey Night in Canada, CBC is cancelling the program. Our national broadcaster has a mandate to contribute to a shared national consciousness and identity. Hockey Night in........

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