Right Goal, Wrong Execution: Can Bill C-34 Keep Kids Safe Without Sacrificing Digital Rights?

Keeping young people safe online is a goal most of us can agree on. The harder question is how we get there.

Editor’s Note: This post is contributed by OpenMedia’s summer fellows, Elruma Dixon and Abde Amr. See authors’ profiles at the bottom of this article.

Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, is Canada’s latest attempt to answer that question. Introduced in June 2026, the bill would create a new framework for regulating social media services, AI chatbots and other online services. It includes measures aimed at protecting children, reducing exposure to harmful content and making online services more accountable for the environments they create.

There is a lot here worth building on. But there are also parts of Bill C-34 that could create new problems for privacy and digital rights—and could face serious constitutional challenges—if they are not fixed before the bill becomes law.

Protecting kids should go hand in hand with respecting their rights and ensuring their voices are heard. That is why we spent this summer analyzing the proposed legislation and developing policy recommendations that challenge whether the bill’s current mechanisms are sufficiently defined, appropriately targeted and privacy-protective to achieve its stated goals. 

Our new white paper, Right Goal, Wrong Execution: Privacy, Age Verification, and the caps in Bill C-34, is now available online. We invite you to review our work and share it with your community!

The Under-16 Social Media Restriction

One of Bill C-34’s most significant proposals is an under-16 account restriction for certain social media services. Services covered by the restriction would have to verify or estimate users’ ages to prevent children under 16 from holding accounts, unless they qualify for an exemption based on having adequate safeguards in place.

At first glance, the appeal is obvious, in that if social media can expose young people to harmful content and harmful design features, keeping children off those platforms can look like a straightforward solution.

The problem is that young people do not experience the internet only as a source of harm. Online spaces are also where they learn, find communities, access information and resources, and express themselves. That matters when we think about what online safety should actually look like.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has recognized that protecting children in digital environments must go hand in hand with respecting their rights and evolving capacities. In other words, children should not be treated only as people who need to be protected from the internet. They are also rights-holders who participate in it.

There is also reason to question how much an account restriction will accomplish on its own. Early evidence from Australia, which introduced its own under-16 social media restrictions, suggests that many young people continued using affected platforms after the restrictions took effect. It is still too early to know what the policy's longer-term effects will be, but the findings reinforce a basic point: restricting access does not necessarily address the systems and design choices that make these platforms risky in the first place.

Bill C-34 already takes a step in a different direction by requiring regulated services to incorporate child-protective design features. We think Canada should build on that approach.

Instead of broadly excluding young people from social media, the government should put more responsibility on platforms to change the environments they create. That means stronger safety-by-design requirements aimed at features and systems that can contribute to harm, including infinite scroll, autoplay and engagement-maximizing recommendation systems.

The Privacy Issue

Age assurance creates another problem: that of privacy. How does a platform know whether someone is 15 or 25 without collecting sensitive personal data?

Bill C-34 requires services to use age-verification or age-estimation measures, subject to privacy and other requirements.

Still, any system designed to determine a person's age can raise privacy concerns depending on how it works and what information it requires. That is especially important when age assurance could become a condition for accessing online spaces used by millions of people. 

And the issue does not stop with the under-16 social media restriction.

Bill C-34 also requires age assurance where an operator has reasonable grounds to suspect that a regulated service provides access to pornographic content, in order to reduce the risk of children being exposed to it.

Protecting children from pornographic content is a legitimate and important objective. The difficulty is determining how broadly that requirement should apply. There is an important distinction between a service built primarily to provide pornographic content and a forum, image-sharing platform, or community site that prohibits that content but occasionally faces user violations.

Without clearer rules, age-assurance requirements and their associated privacy implications could reach a much wider range of online spaces than people might expect. Some of the biggest decisions are still to come.

How much is left for future rules?

Another challenge with Bill C-34 is how much of the framework will be determined after Parliament passes the legislation.

Many consequential details are left to future regulations or decisions by the new Digital Safety Commission. These include rules that could help determine which services are regulated, how user thresholds are calculated and what may count as “adequate safeguards” for an exemption from the under-16 account restriction.

If regulation depends on the number of people using a service, for example, the government also needs clear rules for deciding who counts as a user, over what period and how inactive, suspended or deleted accounts are treated. Similar disputes have already emerged under the European Union’s Digital Services Act.

Clear rules matter because the details will ultimately determine who falls within the framework and what they are required to do.

Bill C-34 gets important things right too

Our concerns with Bill C-34 are not an argument against regulating online platforms.

The bill includes important measures that deserve support. It places greater responsibility on companies for children’s online safety and for addressing specific categories of harmful content. It introduces transparency and record-keeping requirements. It also creates new obligations for covered AI chatbot services, including measures addressing harmful content, deceptive human impersonation, certain manipulative engagement techniques and specified crisis situations.

That shift in responsibility matters. For too long, online safety debates have placed an enormous burden on individuals and parents while giving much less attention to the companies designing the systems people are expected to navigate.

The question is not whether Canada should regulate online platforms. It is whether we can do it in a way that actually makes people safer without creating unnecessary costs for privacy, access and other digital rights. 

We think we can

Our white paper lays out a series of recommendations for improving Bill C-34, including removing the under-16 account restriction in favour of stronger safety-by-design protections, establishing a much higher privacy standard for any mandatory age-assurance regime, clarifying when age-assurance requirements apply, and tightening some of the rules that will determine how the legislation works in practice.

Canada has an opportunity to build an online safety framework that gives companies greater responsibility  in addressing risks linked to services they design and operate.

Getting the goal right is only the beginning. Now we need to get the execution right too.

Read the full white paper here

Authors’ profiles

• Elruma Dixon is a bilingual youth advocate and Juris Doctor graduate from the University of Ottawa, with additional degrees in civil law and international development. Her work sits at the intersection of law, technology, and public policy, with a focus on digital governance and AI. 
• Abde Amr is a disinformation researcher specializing in the global circulation of misinformation and digital propaganda. His work focuses on the intersection of technology, human rights, and information integrity. Previously, he was a researcher with Simon Fraser University’s Disinformation Project where he studied the spread of false information in Canada.