The Carney government introduced legislation Wednesday that would ban children under 16 from social media and impose the country’s first legally binding safety requirements on AI chatbots — placing Canada among a growing wave of nations moving to regulate children’s online lives.
Culture Minister Marc Miller tabled Bill C-34, formally titled the Safe Social Media Act, in the House of Commons. The bill restricts under-16s from creating social media accounts, though companies can avoid the restriction by demonstrating they have implemented adequate protections. Adult content platforms cannot obtain that exemption regardless of their safeguards.
The legislation covers traditional social media services, including Meta‘s (Nasdaq: META) Facebook and Instagram, and X, as well as “public-facing conversational chatbots that can mimic human-like relationships.”
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Platforms must identify and address risks of harm, deploy age-appropriate design features, provide blocking and reporting tools, label AI-generated content, and remove non-consensual intimate images within 24 hours of being flagged. Companies that fail to comply face penalties of 3% of global revenue or C$10 million — whichever is larger. A new Digital Safety Regulator would set and enforce ongoing standards.
Miller told reporters that the government introduced it because “kids are dying.” The AI chatbot provisions respond partly to concerns about OpenAI‘s handling of the Tumbler Ridge shooting. Google (Nasdaq: GOOGL), which owns YouTube, said it was committed to working with the government. Meta said it was assessing the details. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre declined to say whether he supports the ban.
Officials acknowledged the process would take time — the legislation faces roughly a year in Parliament, followed by another 18 months to establish the regulator — prompting University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist to write that teenagers worried about losing social media access “don’t have too much to worry about — this will take years to implement.”
The bill also drew immediate pushback from the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which argued the age-verification requirement embedded in Section 27 creates a privacy problem for all Canadians — not just those under 16. To comply with the ban, platforms would need to verify the age of every user, meaning adults would have to submit personal information to social media companies to maintain their accounts.
The bill’s own provisions require that age-verification data be used only for that purpose and destroyed once the verification is complete — but critics argue the collection itself represents a significant expansion of data exposure for the entire population.
If this pushes through, Canada joins Australia — which enacted the world’s first such ban in December 2025, triggering the deactivation of nearly five million teenage accounts — as well as Indonesia and Malaysia, in restricting minors’ social media access.
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