Federal Liberals voted in favour of setting 16 as the age of majority for Canadians to be able to use social media accounts.
Party grassroots passed a non-binding resolution Saturday morning for the restriction and to place the onus on social media companies to enforce it.
Quebec MP Rachel Bendayan, who presented the idea to her caucus and championed it at the convention, said prolonged social media use can be harmful to the mental health of young Canadians.
She said social media companies need to be more accountable and stop allowing young children to use technologies designed to be addictive.
Bendayan also said she was astonished by how many youth she personally spoke with who support the idea.
“I was very surprised to see so many teenagers and people within the age group I was targeting tell me they were in favour of this resolution, in part because they felt they have no choice but to be on social media,” she told reporters after the vote.
“So it’s not a ban for a ban’s sake. It’s something that would change the way society operates at the moment.”
The resolution sets out party policy, but because it’s not binding on the governing party, it won’t directly lead to a ban.
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Carter Scott, a 17-year-old Liberal attending his first convention, said he’s frustrated that young people didn’t get a chance to chime into the debate on the convention floor this weekend.
And he says he doesn’t trust the social media platforms to handle the data used to verify a person’s age, such as government IDs or facial recognition.
“There has been a significant risk and significant concerns where this policy has been introduced is if there’s been a breach — as is likely — of the data, where thousands of Canadians — young people, seniors, whoever — could have their data leaked,” Scott said.
Bendayan said this is just the start of a wider conversation about the policy position, including ensuring it does not produce privacy risks. She said Canadians should hear more from young people, teachers, psychologists and medical experts about the issue.
“We’re in the early stages of having this debate and what today did was kick off what I hope will be a national conversation.”
An Angus Reid poll from March suggested widespread support for the idea.
The polling agency found as much as three-quarters of Canadians support a full ban on social media use for Canadians under the age of 16. Because it was an online survey and not a probability telephone sample, it does not carry a margin of error.
Prime Minister Mark Carney said last month that the idea “merits an open and considered debate in Canada,” although he does not have a settled view on it yet and said there were good points on both sides.
Australia became the first country last December to create a law enforcing age limits on accounts, and introduced fines for social media companies found non-compliant.
The Liberals also adopted a similar resolution on Saturday to set age restrictions for chat bots that run on artificial intelligence over similar concerns about the technology affecting the mental health of youth.
It says the government should limit use of “all AI chatbots and other potentially harmful forms of AI interaction” to Canadians over the age of 16.
That includes popular software such as ChatGPT that people now commonly turn to for advice or even have full conversations with.
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