Commentary
Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, is being sold as a way to protect children from online harms. Everyone agrees with this goal. However, Bill C-34 would impact all Canadians of all ages: everyone would be subjected to identity screening in order to access social media. The bill would create the Digital Safety Commission, a new, powerful federal regulator with largely undefined authority to censor speech on social media. Further, Bill C-34 would facilitate extensive monitoring of private AI conversations, undermining both our privacy and our freedom of expression.
The Digital Safety Commission will have vast and largely undefined power to force social media platforms and AI chatbot services to comply with policies that the commission itself will create.
If Bill C-34 passes, the commission—without input from Parliament—would create rules to govern social media, interpret those rules, and enforce those rules by imposing penalties up to $10 million on social media companies, or 3 percent of their annual global revenues. The commission will combine regulatory, investigative, adjudicative, enforcement and advocacy roles into one large, very powerful body.
Almost all of what the Safe Social Media Act prohibits as “harmful content” is already illegal under the Criminal Code: child pornography, child luring, sexual exploitation, distributing intimate images without consent (“revenge porn”), uttering threats, criminal harassment, advocating genocide, terrorist conspiracy, and advocating violence. Canada needs better enforcement of existing laws, not a new additional layer of laws that target the same behaviours.
The Digital Safety Commission can censor the opinions of Canadians on social media that it believes are “likely” to foment hatred, with hatred defined as “detestation or vilification” directed at certain groups. The commission can immediately remove (or order the removal of) content that it considers “likely” to foment hatred.
The commission’s censorship powers differ significantly from the Criminal Code ban on wilfully promoting hatred, under which prosecutors must prove that the accused person intended to promote hatred. Prosecutors are required to consider whether there is a reasonable likelihood of conviction: does the Crown actually have a strong case? Prosecutors cannot move ahead unless the proposed criminal charges have been reviewed and approved by the attorney general (justice minister). Further, the person accused of publicly promoting hatred has defences available, such as truth. For all of these reasons, hate speech prosecutions in Canada are infrequent.
In contrast, the Digital Safety Commission will exercise its broad censorship powers instantaneously on a daily basis, without notifying speakers or listeners of which opinions or messages have been removed from social media.
Bill C-34 is in large part a blank cheque: more than 50 important public policy decisions are left to be decided by the commission or by the federal cabinet, after the bill passes. Examples of “to be decided later, without input from Parliament” include which social media are covered, what age-verification methods are acceptable, and how new censorship rules are interpreted. Parliament is being asked to approve a new legal architecture without knowing what it will look like in practice. Annual reporting by the commission to Parliament will provide only minimal accountability. Judicial review exists in theory, but few can actually afford to challenge the commission’s rules, decisions, or penalties in court.
Bill C-34 would ban Canadians under 16 from having accounts on certain social media platforms, enforced through “adequate” age-verification and age-estimation measures on all Canadians. Australia’s under-16 social media ban shows that preventing minors from accessing regulated social media platforms requires screening all users. Platforms in Australia have used facial age estimation, behavioural inference, and “optional” stronger checks including government ID. Even so, according to the Australian government’s own progress report, more than two-thirds of under-16s continued using social media in spite of the new law. Further, parental awareness of children’s use of social media actually declined in respect of children aged 10-12, and in respect of girls.
If Bill C-34 is to succeed in preventing under-16 teens from using social media, the only certain way to achieve this goal is to require all Canadians to prove their identity when accessing social media for daily work, leisure, education, and exploration. This regime violates Charter-protected privacy rights for millions of adults. Compelling the surrender of highly personal identifying information as a condition of everyday online life constitutes illegal “search or seizure.” It is a blunt, population-wide measure aimed at children but imposed on everyone.
The Bill C-34 regime displaces parental authority. The Supreme Court has recognized that the Charter’s Section 7 liberty interest includes a parent’s interest in making fundamental decisions concerning the care and upbringing of their children. Bill C-34 imposes instead a uniform prohibition and verification system on all families, with no individualized assessment and no room for parents to decide that less restrictive methods are sufficient. A law that leaves most teens online while making many parents less informed undercuts both child protection and parental authority.
Bill C-34’s distinctive problem is that a new, unelected commission—able to impose severe financial consequences—would have the power to interpret and enforce vague standards across social media. Facing severe penalties, platforms will have incentives to over-remove legitimate expression of opinion by Canadians. Where the worst harms are already criminal, a parallel administrative regime with lower thresholds for protecting Charter rights and freedoms is hard to justify.
Bill C-34 will require AI platforms to monitor the AI conversations of Canadians for suicidal ideation, self-harm, or intent to cause serious harm. AI operators must interrupt those chats, and may report them to crisis services or police. The end result is large-scale monitoring of private conversations. When Canadians know that their chats may be scanned, interrupted, or handed to authorities, citizens will avoid sensitive and controversial topics.
The bill also regulates chatbot outputs and “harmful behaviour,” with further categories left to future regulations. Unclear standards plus severe penalties will push companies toward sanitized models, and reduced access to information. Some companies will leave Canada.
Bill C-34 therefore creates a framework that sacrifices Charter-protected privacy, expression, and parental authority for uncertain gains. Child protection is a legitimate objective, but it does not require mandatory identity screening of the adult population, open-ended duties to mitigate “hatred,” monitoring the AI conversations of all Canadians, or the transfer of core policy choices from Parliament to an unelected body with weak safeguards.
Existing Criminal Code prohibitions already address the most serious online harms involving children and non-consensual intimate images. Those laws should be enforced more effectively. Clearer civil accountability for platform design choices that foreseeably harm children, and targeted age-verification for pornography, are more tailored tools than population-wide verification and a new commission with open-ended powers.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
English (US) · 
Turkish (TR) · 