This morning, I listened to a really interesting, and important podcast.
You probably heard that the federal government introduced new legislation yesterday that would ban children under the age of 16 from social media platforms. It’s hard not to feel relieved that Ottawa is finally doing something. As a parent, as a community member, as someone who has watched this play out for years, it feels like we’ve been screaming into a void. So yes, no doubt, the Digital Safety Act matters. But we need to talk about whether it actually solves the problem, or if we’re just putting a bandaid on a broken bone.
The bill, introduced Wednesday by Identity and Culture Minister Marc Miller under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government, would ban children under 16 from having social media accounts, unless platforms can prove they’ve put strong enough safeguards in place to protect young users. Companies that don’t comply could face fines of 3% of their global revenue or up to C$10 million, whichever is more. The legislation also takes aim at AI chatbots, setting up a digital regulator to establish safety standards.
Miller didn’t mince words. “We are failing our children. Enough is enough,” he said at the announcement. It’s great that they’re concerned. They should be. But it’s more complicated than just implementing safeguards.
Alex MacIsaac, a researcher at the Samara Centre for Democracy, son of South Stormont Councillor Jennifer MacIsaac, and someone who grew up right here in our community, has been doing deep work on exactly these questions, and his concerns are worth paying attention to. He points out that the harms we’re talking about aren’t just affecting kids. “They’re affecting adults, they’re affecting our communities, our collective society,” he expressed in the podcast episode on Age-gating, where he was a guest alongside Beatrice Wayne (Director of Research and Policy).
Alex is right. And that’s part of why an under-16 ban, while well-intentioned, might just not be enough.
One of the biggest issues is Enforcement. The main tools being proposed for age verification (biometric face scans, behavioral profiling, or uploading government ID) all carry serious problems. MacIsaac is blunt about it: “This is creating new harms for children and youth surrounding their most sensitive data.”
We’re talking about passports, driver’s licenses, home addresses, handed over to private, largely foreign corporations and their web of third-party processors. And when there’s a breach, because there is always a breach, nobody’s accountable. As MacIsaac noted, Discord had over 70,000 government IDs leaked through a third-party provider and basically shrugged it off.
How is that protecting kids? In my book, it just creates an additional risk, not protection.
There’s also the question of whether the ban would even work. Australia passed a similar law in December 2025, the first of its kind in the world, and early results aren’t encouraging. According to the first eSafety Commission report on the ban, 70% of kids under 16 who had social media accounts before the ban still have at least one account. There’s also been no measurable reduction in cyberbullying or image-based abuse. It’s early, yes. But it’s not the slam dunk it’s being sold as.
And then there’s the question of what we’re even banning. MacIsaac raises something that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: we can’t even agree on what “social media” means. The Australian legislation covers Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X, and YouTube, which are but the tip of the iceberg! What about WhatsApp, Discord, or Roblox, reddit? Research shows that the places where children are most vulnerable to predators and abuse are often private messaging apps. Aren’t we drawing the line in the wrong place?
What researchers like MacIsaac and his colleague Beatrice Wayne are actually calling for is something more ambitious: duty of care legislation that holds platforms accountable for the harm baked into their design — the algorithmically-boosted outrage, the infinite scroll, the features engineered to keep your kid glued to a screen at 2am. “We can create safer spaces for kids,” Wayne said. “Banning young people from being online is not one of those ways.”
Young people themselves have been saying this. At a recent Students’ Commission of Canada conference, youth from 12 to 18 weren’t asking to be kept off platforms. They were asking for better ones.
Canada has been trying to pass some form of online harms legislation for years. Across multiple governments, nothing has stuck. The Digital Safety Act is a real step forward, and that matters. But let’s not pretend a ban alone will fix what’s broken. The pond is polluted. The answer isn’t to put a fence around it — it’s to clean it up so, as Wayne puts it, “everyone can swim in it.”
Our kids deserve that.
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