Canada's Online Safety Test: Protect Children Without Surveillance

Canada is finally having the conversation about children, social media, and AI in the right frame: accountability.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has introduced the Safe Social Media Act, legislation intended to make social media platforms and AI chatbot services safer for children and to restrict social media access for children under 16. Predictably, some will call this censorship, some will call it overdue, and some will reduce it to a fight over parental choice. The more important question is simpler: who carries responsibility when powerful digital systems are designed in ways that predictably harm children?

Trustworthy technology requires safety to be designed into the system from the start. Good governance asks practical questions before harm occurs: what can go wrong, who is affected, what controls are in place, and who is accountable when those controls fail?

Young people are developing in an environment shaped by systems optimized for attention, influence, intimacy, and scale. Social media can connect them to community, culture, and support. It can also expose them to bullying, exploitation, hate, manipulation, and dangerous algorithmic rabbit holes. AI chatbots add another layer because they can feel private, responsive, and emotionally present, even when they are corporate products operating at massive scale.

That is why platform responsibility matters. A child safety law should not simply push the burden onto parents, teachers, or young people themselves. It should require companies to design safer systems, assess risks, respond to harmful content, limit dangerous features, and prove that their safeguards work.

Seen alongside the Combatting Hate Act, which would update Canada’s Criminal Code response to hate propaganda and hate-motivated crime, the Safe Social Media Act signals a broader shift: government is beginning to treat digitally amplified harm as a matter of public accountability, while still needing to protect Charter freedoms and peaceful expression.

The hard part will be implementation. Age verification can become intrusive. Overbroad rules can chill expression. Young people can move to less visible platforms. Enforcement can lag behind technology. Those risks are real, and they need to be addressed openly.

Still, Canada is right to reject the fiction that online harms are just the price of participation in modern life. Children deserve digital spaces built with care, limits, and accountability. The test for this legislation will be whether it protects young people without creating surveillance, censorship, or a false sense of safety.