The federal government has introduced a new law that would prohibit the use of certain social media apps and websites by Canadians under the age of 16. Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act (a revised version of the Liberals’ previously-introduced Online Harms Act) would create legal responsibilities for large social media companies to control content on their platforms that could cause users to harm themselves or others, incite violence or hatred, or other public harms. The government’s backgrounder groups these new responsibilities in three categories: a duty to protect children, a duty to act responsibly, and a duty to make certain content inaccessible. The bill, if passed, would also create a digital safety commission to keep tabs on these huge platforms and enforce orders under the law.
The age limit on social media is likely to get the most attention in the debates over C-34, and not entirely without reason. Any meaningful age limit will require eroding some of the most basic expectations we’ve had about using the internet since its inception — most notably that we can use it (more or less) privately and anonymously. That’s admittedly a norm that’s already been eroded in other areas (most obviously the private sector war against copyright infringement) but C-34 would be a clear legislative departure from that principle. Depending on implementation, an age limit on children using social media doesn’t just bind people under 16 — adults would need to prove they’re adults, via some method yet to be determined.
Australia has tried this and so far the results are pretty dismal: because the identification measures are so lax, it’s trivially easy for teens to get around the attempted bans, not least because the platforms themselves have an obvious incentive to make it easy (for example, the Australian regulator reports that at least one platform allows teens to make multiple attempts to “confirm” their age status). Reported numbers vary but credible estimates suggest half of Australian teens are still happily using these platforms.
It would be one thing to argue for age limits on social media if the policy would actually work on its own terms; it’s substantially harder to argue for dismantling the internet’s anonymity for a policy that can’t even keep kids off these sites.
The more fundamental objection I have to laws like C-34 is that the problem with social media isn’t exclusively or even mostly about the harms to kids, that’s just the one demographic where there’s public permission for the government to intervene. Age verification schemes would have done nothing to stop the world’s richest man from seemingly inciting violence in Belfast using his extremely expensive megaphone. Limiting the social media use of minors does absolutely nothing to deal with the legitimate problem of boomers cooking their brains on reactionary Facebook memes. As for the quality of health advice you’ll receive online, perhaps the best diagnosis is simply: yikes.
The problem of social media, in short, is not about young people any more than the problem with cigarettes is about young people: sure, it’s particularly bad for children to get addicted, but it’s not like it’s a tonic for the rest of us. These platforms are polluting the information environment all around us, they’re making ungodly sums of money doing it, and they’re not going to stop unless we make them.
The internet, broadly construed, was blessed with a light regulatory touch from the beginning, for a few different reasons. Policymakers often didn’t understand what the internet was, and those who did were willing to give a relatively small, obscure industry room to grow and experiment. That alone was sufficient, and it has been proved to be a wise decision: there really have been improvements in people’s lives because governments mostly didn’t try to get in the way of the growth of online services.
There was always another reason for not regulating the internet, though, and it was an important one: for a very long time, using online services was largely directed by the user themselves, and the government was hardly going to get between a free Canadian citizen and whatever website they happened to be clicking on (with some obvious exceptions for truly heinous content). If we regulated TV and radio precisely because audiences can’t control what makes it on the airwaves, the individualized control that the early internet offered was a strong presumption against government action.
That presumption no longer holds in 2026. You don’t really control what social media is feeding you, and there’s no cheat code around this. There’s no way to use X, Facebook, or (yes) Bluesky “well,” the only option is to use them less. These companies have all built their business case around algorithmically-served content peppered with surveillance advertising; the algorithms they use to boost engagement are themselves the source of so much dysfunction, not least an obvious and visible increase in political polarization.
The good news, such as it is, is that if users are no longer in control, then the argument for directly regulating these services is so much clearer. Meta, Alphabet, X, TikTok, and other platforms that may come in the future are not passive actors who just happen to be getting rich while our brains break: they’re rapacious, polluting industries extracting enormous wealth from the most finite resource we have — our time on this Earth — all while flooding the public consciousness with garbage.
In that light, C-34 is a timid less-than-half measure, but it’s at least directionally correct. So is Ontario’s initiative to take phones out of schools. What nobody wants to admit quite yet is that what both of these things obviously imply — that phone-enabled internet use is bad for human growth and flourishing, no matter what age you are.