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Canada Joins Global Fight to Ban Teens from Social Media

Bill C-34 borrows from Australia’s controversial experiment while adding unprecedented rules for AI chatbots

Last Wednesday, the Mark Carney government tabled the Safe Social Media Act, Bill C-34, legislation that would make online services responsible for addressing harmful content on their platforms. The headline is a restriction on social media accounts for children under sixteen. Canada did not invent that idea. Australia did, and Australia has now been running the experiment for six months. The early results are worth examining before anyone declares this bill a solution or a failure.

First, what the bill does. It applies to social media services, including livestreaming and user-uploaded adult content services, and to artificial intelligence chatbot services. It organizes obligations under three duties: a Duty to Act Responsibly, a Duty to Protect Children, and a Duty to Make Certain Content Inaccessible. It targets seven categories of harmful content, including content that sexually victimizes a child, content that induces a child to harm themselves, bullying content, incitement to violence, content that foments hatred, terrorist content, and intimate content shared without consent.

The bill also creates a Digital Safety Commission of Canada to enforce the legislation through audits, compliance orders, and administrative monetary penalties. Platforms will have to submit publicly disclosed Digital Safety Plans, label synthetically generated content, and provide accredited researchers access to certain data.

The under-sixteen restriction sits inside the Duty to Protect Children, and it comes with a release valve: the age restriction would be subject to an exemption process should the regulator determine that a service has implemented sufficient safeguards for children. That single clause may end up being the most consequential design choice in the bill.

But before debating whether Ottawa’s solution will work, it is worth remembering why governments across the democratic world converged on roughly the same approach at roughly the same time.

The legislation arriving in Ottawa, Canberra, London, and Brussels follows years of accumulating evidence about what the platforms knew and when they knew it. In March, juries in two American courtrooms returned verdicts against the companies this bill would regulate. In California, Meta and Google were found negligent for failing to warn users about the addictive design of their products.

In New Mexico, Meta was found liable for failing to protect children from exploitation and abuse on its apps. The New Mexico jury found the company engaged in unconscionable trade practices that took advantage of the vulnerabilities and inexperience of children. It deliberated for two days and awarded the statutory maximum, $375 million (US). The case was built in part on an undercover operation: state investigators created accounts posing as underage users and documented those accounts being flooded with sexual grooming and harmful content almost immediately.

What the discovery process surfaced is........

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