Canada’s federal government tabled legislation on June 10, 2026 that would prohibit Canadians under the age of 16 from holding social media accounts and create a powerful new federal regulator – the Digital Safety Commission of Canada – with enforcement powers that include fines of up to 3 percent of a platform’s gross global revenue or $10 million, whichever is greater. Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, was introduced in the House of Commons by Marc Miller, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, and places Canada alongside Australia, Indonesia, and Malaysia as governments that have moved beyond voluntary guidelines to legislate minimum age requirements for social media access. The bill represents the most significant regulatory intervention in the Canadian internet policy landscape since the Online Streaming Act of 2023 and is expected to generate substantial debate in Parliament as technology platforms, civil liberties organizations, and child safety advocates each contest different aspects of the proposal.

The stated rationale for the legislation centers on documented harms to children and adolescents from social media use, including mental health impacts – particularly on girls – from algorithmic content that promotes social comparison, body image anxiety, and in some cases self-harm content. The government’s background materials accompanying Bill C-34 cited Canadian versions of international research on the relationship between teen social media use and mental health outcomes, including the work of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt whose 2024 book “The Anxious Generation” has been influential in shaping the political debate around children and social media in Canada and elsewhere. The legislation also includes specific obligations around removing deepfake content and content that “sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor” – an acknowledgment that the harms social media causes to minors extend beyond mental health to direct exploitation and abuse.

What Bill C-34 Actually Requires of Platforms

Beyond the age prohibition, Bill C-34 imposes a set of design and operational requirements on social media services that go beyond simple age verification. Platforms will be required to design their products to be safer for children by default, rather than relying on age-gating as the sole protective mechanism. This “safety by design” obligation is deliberately open-ended – it does not prescribe specific technical implementations but establishes a standard against which the Digital Safety Commission can evaluate platforms and, if they fall short, impose penalties. The inclusion of AI chatbots within the regulatory framework is noteworthy: Bill C-34 extends the Digital Safety Commission’s jurisdiction to AI conversational platforms, not just conventional social media feeds, reflecting the government’s recognition that the boundary between social media and AI assistants is blurring as platforms integrate AI features throughout their products. The rebuilt Siri AI and Apple’s new parental controls announced at WWDC26 in June illustrate how platform-level safety responses are evolving in parallel with legislative mandates.

How the Digital Safety Commission Would Work

The Digital Safety Commission of Canada established by Bill C-34 would function as an independent regulatory body with powers to investigate complaints, conduct audits of platform compliance with the Safe Social Media Act’s requirements, and impose graduated penalties for violations. The penalty structure – up to 3 percent of gross global revenue or $10 million, whichever is greater – is calibrated to be meaningful for the largest platforms, where 3 percent of global revenue could represent billions of dollars, while ensuring that even smaller platforms face a floor of consequences that makes non-compliance economically irrational. The Commission would also have the authority to order platforms to remove non-compliant content within specified timeframes, with additional daily penalties for failure to comply. This enforcement architecture is modeled partly on the EU Digital Services Act’s enforcement mechanisms, which Canada’s government reviewed as it designed the Canadian legislation.

Industry Response and Civil Liberties Concerns

The response from social media platforms to the tabling of Bill C-34 was predictable: Meta, TikTok, Snap, and X each issued statements expressing concerns about the bill’s approach to age verification, the practical difficulty of implementing a blanket under-16 restriction, and the risk that heavy-handed age verification requirements would require platforms to collect more sensitive personal data from users of all ages, creating privacy risks that offset the child safety benefits. Civil liberties organizations including the Canadian Civil Liberties Association raised concerns about the bill’s impact on teenagers’ access to political and civic information online, noting that 15 and 16-year-old Canadians are engaged participants in political discourse and community organizing on social media platforms and that removing their access could have democratic as well as social consequences. Child safety advocates, by contrast, praised the legislation as long overdue and expressed support for the enforcement penalties as the only mechanism likely to compel the largest platforms to take their obligations to children seriously. Canada’s approach, by directly legislating the prohibition rather than relying on platforms’ self-regulation, follows the model that other governments have adopted in asserting regulatory authority over major technology platforms in 2026 – a year in which the relationship between government authority and platform power is being renegotiated across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.