‘Welcome to 2014, Dad’
Canadian Identity Minister Marc Miller, centre, pictured with Secretary of State for children and youth Anna Gainey and Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister Rachel Bendayan (front) and Health Minister Marjorie Michel, Public Safety Minister Gary and AI Minister Evan Solomon (back), introduced legislation to restrict children under 16 from using social media services. / TWITTER PHOTO
Around the end of the pandemic, I started using apps on my smartphone for banking and purchases. I was very proud of myself. But when I bragged to my son — whose smartphone seems to be glued to his hand — he replied dismissively: “Welcome to 2014, Dad.”
This rather deflating memory came to mind when the government introduced the Safe Social Media Act, Bill C-34, to restrict children under 16 from using social media services.
The reflex to regulate in Canada is deeply ingrained. Indeed, so compulsively do we regulate to solve real or perceived problems that “Canada Gazette I & II” could be featured on the Canadian coat of arms. It has also larded the economy with such a thicket of regulations that the Prime Minister has made stripping the Canadian regulatory state his number 1 priority.
Canada has duly flexed its regulatory muscles, with at best mixed results, to address a range of health risks posed to teenagers by increasingly popular products
Energy drink and vape precedent
Caffeine and sugar-laced energy drinks, for example, first started appearing in convenience store coolers in the early 2000s. They had already become the go-to drink of young online gamer culture before Health Canada began looking at ways to regulate them. And the final regulations were not in place until 2012.
The regulations ultimately put in place have had little impact on youth consumption. High consumption of caffeine can affect cognitive development in adolescents. And restrictions on marketing to youth have been difficult to enforce on social media platforms. Energy drinks remain the fastest-growing segment of the broader soft drink industry, as young people have shifted away from traditional soft drinks like cola. Recent estimates show the Canadian energy drink market was worth US$960 million in 2024, with the U.S. market generating more than $40 billion.
Nicotine-infused vaping products entered the Canadian market around 2004. Consumption rapidly grew as vapes were seen as safer than smoking tobacco, since nicotine vapers do not inhale the dangerous tars and other chemicals contained in cigarettes. But the impact on adolescent brains of nicotine addiction is a significant public health issue.
While Health Canada pondered its regular options, vaping became commonplace among teenagers. The regulations were not put in place until 2018, by which time vaping had become a $2 billion-a-year market. Though a ban against sales to minors was enacted, vapes are still easily accessible to youth through online retailers.
Bill C-34: The golden oldie of social media regulation
So one more time to the regulatory ramparts with the Safe Social Media Act?
There is a wide consensus that compulsive use of social media by teenagers, who are the most intense users of platforms like TikTok, for example, can result in a whole complex of psychological harms: from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and sleep disruption caused by smartphone algorithmically accelerated doomscrolling through toxic “comparison culture” and relentless 24/7 cyber bullying and harassment.
But the precedents of energy drinks and vapes, each of which has enjoyed great online success, should temper the government's hopes, not to mention those rightly troubled parents, about what regulation can accomplish.
The flip side of the real health risks of these products and services is that they are merely emblematic of the shift in global economic, cultural and social life from in-person to online. With the rapid proliferation of digital platforms of various kinds has come a parallel increase in the tools that bad actors have at their disposal to elude, outwit and outflank the best-intentioned regulators. Even well-intentioned actors despair at trying to police a space that seems to defy policing.
Trickier still is the evident fact that the demographic this bill seeks to protect is the most digitally literate generation in Canadian history, whose understanding of how to short-circuit parental or governmental controls is limited only by their imaginations.
Add to this the fact that the speed and malleability of our already hyper-driven social media platforms are now taking a quantum leap with the AI revolution, an accelerating phenomenon that the government only announced a strategy for little more than a week ago.
So the measures scoped out in the legislation are kind of like a “golden oldies” of online regulation:
Under-16 social media restriction
Corporate exemptions: for companies that demonstrate adequate safeguards to protect children
Rapid content takedowns
A Digital Safety Commission; and
AI chatbot regulations.
As well-intentioned as these measures are, they seem a trifle quaint when you consider that governments the world over have had a devil of a time exerting any effective control whatsoever over social media content.
Actually, there is one country that has successfully implemented significant social media control: China. But it seems doubtful that Canada, or any democratic country for that matter, would accept the collateral loss of individual freedom that would be required to emulate the Chinese model.
The other unspoken problem with the legislation is that it seeks to regulate a sector that is at the very nexus of global economic growth, investment and productivity improvement. Canada needs to catch this wave of rapid, frequently mutating, disruptive technological innovation, or we will be left behind. Canada’s proposed media regulators may find themselves trapped in a never-ending Sisyphean spiral, rolling the digital boulder up the hill only to have it slip back down to the bottom every time.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail
It has been said that “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” The Safe Social Media Act strikes one as another instance of Canada wielding the regulatory hammer in the hope that social media will become a nail.
The social media-induced pain inflicted on young Canadians is all too real. But unless we can find a more supple regulatory tool better fitted to the shape-shifting social media landscape, we will be letting them down.
