The social media ban for children under 16 that’s part of the federal government’s new online harms bill will likely narrow over time, experts note, with exemptions available for companies that meet yet-to-be-defined safeguards.
Government officials are aiming to use the ban as a “carrot and stick” incentive for platforms to improve their designs and better protect children long-term, if and when those kids return.
In practice, the strategy takes a less hardline approach than Australia, the first country to ban social media for youth under 16 and whose law contains no possibility for exemptions.
“They’ve kind of straddled these two worlds,” Christopher Dietzel, a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at Western University and communications studies affiliate associate professor at Concordia University, said in an interview about the Canadian bill.
“I actually think (this bill is) better than what has been posed in Australia because it does acknowledge that, while these services currently facilitate harm, if the services demonstrate that they have reached the threshold where they are safe by design, then there would be exemptions.”
Those exemptions would be doled out by a future digital safety commission, which Culture Minister Marc Miller said will be up and running 18 months after the legislation is passed into law.
The “adequate safeguards” themselves will need to be set by the Privy Council, which includes cabinet members and other officials. The commission would then use those regulations to determine whether a company qualifies for an exemption.
That timeline, government officials said Wednesday during a technical briefing on the bill, means “there will be a period of time where none of the designated social media services should be available to children under the age of 16.”
“It’s going to take time before the first exemption can be granted,” officials said.
Heidi Tworek, a history and public policy professor at the University of British Columbia who sat on the expert advisory group that was consulted for the bill, told Global News the bill recognizes a ban is not the only solution to protecting kids from online harms.
That perspective has been shared by youth mental health experts and organizations who have advocated for stronger online safety measures.
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“You can think about it as carrot as well as stick in here for the platforms to actually improve their services in a really fundamental way,” Tworek said.
“It’s also recognizing that, depending on the child, there are some potential benefits for them in interacting on social media,” she added, including social and educational exposure.
Experts, however, say the key will be in setting an appropriate safeguard threshold for an exemption.
The legislation itself provides some hints on what the government wants to see, setting a “duty to protect children” for social media and artificial intelligence platforms requiring them to incorporate “age-appropriate designs” into their systems.
Those could include content warning labels, safe search settings for children, and measures to reduce addictive behaviours like endless scrolling, the government said Wednesday.
“This will be a question of really making sure you’ve got smart experts on board who very clearly define what those expectations are” for an exemption, Tworek said.
Social media companies like Meta and TikTok say they have already improved their measures protecting children on their platforms in recent years, rolling out features like child and teen accounts and parental controls.
Instagram’s youth accounts for users under 16, for example, have default settings that block teens from being messaged by people they aren’t connected with, and minimize their exposure to sensitive content such as posts that depict violence or encourage cosmetic procedures.
TikTok limits who can follow users between the ages of 13 and 17 as well as who views their videos and reads their bios. The app’s teen accounts can’t host live content, send or receive virtual gifts, or buy or sell products on TikTok Shop, and have a default screen time limit of 60 minutes while disabling push notifications at night.
A TikTok spokesperson told Global News in an email that the company shares the Canadian government’s goal of safe online experiences for teens and expressed willingness to work on further improvements.
“Investing in the latest technologies to advance platform safety is a continuous priority for us, and we look forward to collaborating constructively with the government on this important issue,” the spokesperson said.
Until that exemption regime is in place, there is also uncertainty over how the age restrictions will be enforced — and by whom.
Tech companies have been arguing for years about whether social media platforms themselves or app store providers like Apple and Google should be the ones responsible for verifying users’ ages.
In a blog post published Wednesday as Miller was tabling the online harms bill, Meta’s head of global safety Antigone Davis argued against age-based social media bans and argued “the most effective place to verify age and get parental approval is in the app store.”
“Apple and Google already collect age information when a parent sets up their teen’s phone, and they already have systems in place to obtain parental approval before teens can make purchases,” Davis wrote. “We’re simply asking that this same mechanism be extended to all app downloads.”
A Meta spokesperson told Global News Friday that the company was still studying the bill, but reiterated its preference for app store-led age restrictions.
“Social media bans are counterproductive, but we are encouraged that the government appears to recognize that online services that provide teens with sufficient safeguards, like we’ve done with Teen Accounts and for teens’ conversations with AIs, provide real value to young people,” the company said in a statement.
Earlier this week, Apple introduced some new features to its child accounts, which can limit access to adult websites and set age-based restrictions for the App Store. Child accounts are required for children under 13 and available for children up to 18.
Apple CEO Tim Cook attributed the move to Australia’s social media ban.
Experts note, however, that kids can also access social media platforms on desktop internet browsers without going through an app store.
Dietzel noted the Canadian bill makes it clear that social media platforms will be the ones responsible for enforcing age restrictions.
Yet Miller acknowledged to reporters Wednesday that there may be “some back and forth” over how the ban is enforced, particularly as the bill goes through the legislative process and hears from the social media companies themselves.
“I would expect that they might try to push back against that responsibility,” Dietzel said. “But I think that putting the responsibility on them is the right approach.”
Tworek added that, while the bill seeks to address the privacy concerns raised by age verification measures, more transparency will be needed to ensure those protections are adequate.
The bill specifies that any age verification or estimation measures employed by companies must only use personal data for those purposes, that data must be destroyed as soon as users’ ages are verified, and are first and foremost “effective.”
“It’s one of those ‘devil’s in the details’ problems, because what do we mean by effective and how are we going to measure that,” Tworek said.
“Are we going to have an enforcement regime that ensures that those (data and privacy protection measures) happen? These are questions for the regulator to consider moving forward. But if it’s going to take 18 months (to set up the commission) … what happens during that time?”
