By Megan Wood and Andre Policzer
Some facts that should concern every Canadian: since 2014, reported incidents of online child sexual exploitation have increased by 347%. About one-in-four Canadian youth report having experienced cyberbullying during their lifetime. And more broadly, research consistently finds that youth cyber-victimization is associated with high risks of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts.
For years, Canadian parents, educators, healthcare practitioners, researchers, and advocates have sounded the alarm. On 10 June 2026, the Government of Canada clearly responded by introducing Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act. Set to be debated in September, many important issues will need to be dealt with before the legislation is able to deliver real reductions to the harms that Canadian youth are facing in digital environments.
Bill C-34 represents a historic shift in Canada’s approach to digital safety, but its success is far from guaranteed at this stage. By leaving many consequential decisions to future regulators and the soon to be established Digital Safety Commission, the government has postponed some of the most difficult policy choices. Therefore, to ensure Bill C-34 is effective at reducing the harm facing Canadian youth and becomes a global role-model in digital legislation, the government must address several priority issues.
One of the first tasks for digital regulators will be defining what qualifies as a sufficiently safe platform. The centrepiece of the bill is a default minimum age of 16 for social media accounts, although platforms can bypass this restriction if they are able to demonstrate that they can adequately protect children. Under this exemption, platforms would be able to continue engaging young users, which creates market incentives for companies to compete on user safety rather than simply on user engagement.
The challenge here is that what constitutes sufficient safeguards and safer design features remains deeply unclear. Many platform features produce both benefits and risks that are difficult to separate. For example, recommendation algorithms that target vulnerable teens with extreme or exploitative content can also help young users discover educational resources, communities, and legitimate interests. Direct messaging can facilitate grooming, harassment, or sextortion, but it is also an important way for young people to maintain friendships and access support networks. Finally, livestreaming can expose children to exploitation or real-time abuse but also enables educational programming, creative expression, and community engagement. Because many design features serve multiple purposes, regulators will need clear, transparent, and publicly available criteria for determining which risks are acceptable and which warrant intervention.
Digital regulators must also address how platforms that do not or cannot qualify for an exemption will verify users’ ages. This presents a significant privacy challenge. To exclude children effectively, platforms must functionally verify the age of every user, including tens of millions of adults. Around the world, age verification and estimation has quickly become one of the most controversial aspects of online safety legislation and resulted in public pushback despite potential benefits of safety and security.
Every available approach involves trade-offs. For example, government-issued identification systems provide a high degree of accuracy, but also raise public concerns about intrusive surveillance and data breaches. Otherwise, facial age estimation offers convenience for platforms and users, but introduces questions about accuracy, bias, and the handling of sensitive biometric information. Additionally, third-party digital credential systems may offer the strongest privacy protections capable of confirming age thresholds through zero trust solutions, but integration faces limitations as these systems are technically immature and are not yet widely deployed.
Canadian regulators have begun grappling with the privacy implications of age assurance, but the implementation of a workable national standard remains unresolved.
Finally, the digital regulators must also define what success looks like before regulation begins. Currently, Bill C-34 would require platforms to submit transparency reports known as “Digital Safety Plans,” but it says comparatively little about the outcomes those plans are intended to achieve. Tangible reductions in youth exposure to harmful content, online child sexual exploitation, and cyberbullying are all valuable targets, but each will require different regulatory tools and methods of evaluation.
Limiting violent extremist content may require measuring whether platforms are reducing the content’s amplification and reach. Preventing online child sexual exploitation will likely require stronger detection, reporting, and law enforcement coordination. Reducing cyberbullying, meanwhile, may depend on a variety of changes that encourage healthier online interactions and more effective user reporting mechanisms. In each case, regulatory actions must be connected to measurable improvements in the online experiences and safety of children.
If regulators do not clearly define the outcomes they seek and how they will measure this, Bill C-34 risks becoming a process-oriented regulatory regime; simply measuring success by the number of reports filed, investigations launched, and penalties issued, rather than whether Canadian youth are genuinely safer online.
Canada’s approach is notable because it attempts to address a difficulty shared by many existing international frameworks: preventing harm before it occurs. In the United States, regulators often rely on reactive, multi-million dollar jury verdicts to determine who is responsible after harm has occurred. The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act takes a different approach by imposing systemic duties on platforms and empowering Ofcom to oversee compliance. Australia, meanwhile, has pursued a much more direct intervention by moving toward a statutory minimum age requirement for social media access. Bill C-34 takes a different approach by seeking to influence how digital platforms are designed and operated before harm occurs. This preventative focus gives Canada an opportunity to test whether digital regulation can move beyond responding to individual incidents and toward creating safer online environments by design.
Canadian policymakers have correctly recognized that online safety is a matter of both content moderation and platform design. With the announcement of Bill C-34, Canada has answered the question of whether it wants to change the digital marketplace in the interests of the safety of young people; now, the more difficult work falls to regulators. If the Digital Safety Commission can transform principles and establish meaningful and transparent safeguard criteria, develop privacy-preserving age verification standards, and effectively measure and commit to achievable outcomes, Bill C-34 could indeed become a consequential piece of digital legislation both domestically and internationally.
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