Bill C-34

Safe Social Media Act

An Act to enact the Digital Safety Act and the Digital Safety Commission of Canada Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts

Part 1 enacts the Digital Safety Act , whose purpose is, among other things, to promote the safety of persons in Canada, particularly children, reduce harms caused to them as a result of harmful content online and ensure that the operators of regulated social media services, regulated chatbot services and other regulated online services are transparent and accountable with respect to their duties under that Act.
That Act, among other things,
(a) imposes on the operators of regulated services
(i) a duty to act responsibly in respect of the regulated social media services that they operate, including by implementing measures that are adequate to mitigate the risk that users will be exposed to harmful content on the services, by providing tools to users to enable them to block other users and flag harmful content and by labelling synthetic content,
(ii) a duty to act responsibly in respect of the regulated chatbot services that they operate, including by implementing measures that are adequate to mitigate the risk that the chatbot will communicate harmful content to a user, measures to ensure intervention in crisis situations and measures that are adequate to mitigate the risk that the chatbot will engage in certain harmful behaviours,
(iii) a duty to protect children in respect of all of the regulated services that they operate by integrating into those services design features that are set out in the regulations, by implementing minimum-age restrictions for accessing pornographic content on regulated services, and, if provided for by regulations, by implementing minimum-age restrictions for being able to have an account with, or being otherwise registered with, regulated social media services,
(iv) a duty, in respect of the regulated social media services that they operate, to make inaccessible to persons in Canada, in certain circumstances, content on that service that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor and intimate content communicated without consent, and
(v) a duty to be transparent in respect of all of the regulated services that they operate, including by submitting a digital safety plan to the Digital Safety Commission of Canada to assist it in determining whether an operator is complying with its duties under that Act;
(b) authorizes the Governor in Council to make regulations to make the operators of other online services subject to the duty to protect children and the duty to be transparent;
(c) provides that persons in Canada may make a complaint to the Digital Safety Commission of Canada that content on a regulated social media service is content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor or intimate content communicated without consent and authorizes the Commission to make an order requiring the operator of the service to make that content inaccessible to persons in Canada if the person making the complaint has used their best efforts to seek recourse from the operator of the service under that Act; and
(d) provides that persons in Canada may make submissions to the Digital Safety Commission of Canada respecting the measures taken by the operator of a regulated service to comply with its duties under that Act.
Part 2 enacts the Digital Safety Commission of Canada Act , which establishes the Digital Safety Commission of Canada, which has powers, duties and functions under the Digital Safety Act . The Part also makes consequential amendments to other Acts.

Safe Social Media Act

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture and Minister responsible for Official Languages]

moved that Bill C-34, An Act to enact the Digital Safety Act and the Digital Safety Commission of Canada Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Mr. Speaker, I will start off by seeking unanimous consent to share my time with the member for Outremont.

[The Deputy Speaker, Tom Kmiec]

Is it agreed?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today on Bill C-34, the safe social media act.

Upon taking office, the Prime Minister pledged to protect and strengthen Canada, and that is what we are doing today. We have also remained focused on ensuring that as Canadians, we take control of our own destiny, protect what we believe in and pave the way for future generations. That starts with keeping Canadians safe, not only in their communities but online. Today, I am here to reaffirm our government's unwavering commitment to protecting Canadians and, in particular, young Canadians.

We have all seen how online harms have exploded. These harms have real consequences for our communities. We need only think of the Tumbler Ridge tragedy, which claimed eight lives, including six children, and left many more injured. The perpetrator of the shooting used OpenAI's chatbot to get advice. Another example is the young person who was admitted to Toronto's SickKids hospital in a catatonic state after classmates set up a site just to humiliate them.

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection processes more than 100,000 reports of online child sexual abuse every month. Police-reported online child sexual exploitation incidents rose by 347% between 2014 and 2024 alone. Violent online networks are targeting our children on the platforms they use every day, encouraging them to hurt themselves or even take their own lives. If this activity happened on the playground, the playground would be shut down immediately.

One in four young people say they have been cyberbullied. This represents a 500% increase since 2014. We are also witnessing a rise in mental health challenges, including anxiety, low self-esteem and suicidal thoughts. These figures are alarming. Behind every one of these statistics is a child, parents and a family.

Over the summer, my colleagues on this side of the House and on the other side of the House and I met with Canadians, experts, parents and young people. Everywhere we went, we heard the same message: We need to act, and we need to act urgently.

Parents, teachers and caregivers cannot be expected to face these challenges alone, nor can they be expected to take on some of the world's most sophisticated technology companies by themselves. Urgent action is needed to hold online services accountable and to ensure that our children are safe on the platforms they are growing up with.

The reality is that our laws have not kept up and kept pace with technology. Current legislation imposes penalties only after the harm has occurred, rather than preventing it in the first place. This bill, the safe social media act, would establish clear responsibilities for regulated social media services and AI chatbot services operating in Canada. It would place the onus where it belongs: on the platforms themselves. It would ensure their services are safe.

This act is structured around three core duties.

The first is a duty to act responsibly. Social media services would need to assess and mitigate the risks of exposure to seven categories of clear, harmful content, apply labels to synthetically generated content, build safety measures into the design of their platforms, make it easy for Canadians to report and submit complaints, and, finally, provide Canadians with better tools to keep themselves safe, such as blocking and flagging functions. AI chatbot services would have to mitigate the risk of chatbots communicating harmful content, intervene in crisis situations when a user intends to harm themselves or another person, and mitigate the risk of chatbots engaging in harmful behaviour with our children.

Secondly, social media platforms would have a duty to make certain content inaccessible. Platforms would be required to remove the most serious forms of harmful content within 24 hours of it being flagged or reported. This includes content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor and intimate content communicated without consent.

Third, the law would establish the duty to protect children. It would require social media and AI chatbot services to implement age-appropriate safeguards. This means building safety into the design of their services and ensuring that children are not exposed to high-risk interactions or harmful content.

This includes an obligation for regulated services to prevent children from accessing pornographic content on their services.

For regulated social media platforms, this would also mean having a responsibility to prevent children under the age of 16 from having social media accounts. This approach was requested by parents and educators almost unanimously. It is in line with the emerging international approaches to online safety, but this design is made for Canadians.

We expect platforms to adopt age verification and age estimation measures that meet the highest standards of security and privacy protection.

However, the age restriction is just one of the measures in this bill, because we know that the best way to protect young people is to design online spaces to be safe. That is why social media platforms that put sufficient safeguards in place will be able to seek an exemption from the age restriction.

Finally, regulated services will need to be transparent with Canadians and publish digital safety plans detailing how they are meeting their obligations.

We also recognize that Canadians deserve to know how their personal information is being used, shared and protected. That is why my colleague, the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, introduced Bill C-36. It represents the most significant change to Canada's private sector privacy law in over 25 years. This bill establishes clear guardrails to protect Canadians' personal information, with a special focus on children's personal information.

Making Canadians safer online, enhancing platforms' accountability and preventing online harms before they occur must be priorities for us and the House.

The safe social media act would establish conditions necessary for the online services that shape our lives to operate responsibly and, importantly, transparently. It is designed to address current concerns while allowing us to keep pace with technological changes, which often outpace legislation. Finally, it would ensure that our children and Canadians can benefit from new technologies without compromising their safety and privacy.

Canada has been falling behind, and we must ensure that Canadian youth are no less protected than young people elsewhere as our world becomes increasingly digital. We need to act now. Canadians expect action from the House, and we must deliver.

I invite all members to give this bill serious consideration and engage in an open and constructive debate. Our children's safety must be a shared priority that rises above partisan lines. I am committed to working with all members of the House to protect our children online.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, one of the provisions in Bill C-34 is that those under the age of 16 would not be able to set up or maintain social media accounts. However, that provision is only in place temporarily until social media companies meet a set of guidelines that are yet to be determined. Those guidelines are not defined in the legislation.

For the sake of parents who are seeking clarity on this, I am wondering if the minister would care to expose what those guidelines might be in order to make sure that kids are in fact kept safe once those accounts once again become available to them.

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I think an important feature to keep kids safe before the harm occurs, as opposed to prosecuting once the damage has occurred, is to make sure we have a regulator in place that can put together precisely these guidelines. I will admit that this bar would be quite high and that there is probably a legitimate debate to be had here and in committee as to what those regulations would be and whether they would be determined by the regulator or perhaps even by committee. Obviously, in the conception of a regulatory platform, regulation should not necessarily be debated in the House on every item. I think that is a careful balance we are willing to consider.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by commending the minister for his bill and his speech.

The Standing Committee on Industry and Technology heard from representatives from Meta as part of our study on fraud. Basically, we learned that there are long delays when fraudulent ads or content are reported. Another witness who represented Wealthsimple said that scammers had impersonated Wealthsimple and that it took more than five days for the fraudulent ad to be taken down. The representative from Meta told us that the company is doing everything it can and that it cannot do any more.

How will the minister ensure that the web giants, the platforms that often seem to think that they are above the law, do comply with the law and co-operate?

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

Mr. Speaker, that is a very good question. We need to be very clear about what the bill can and cannot necessarily cover. I think the issue of online fraud is of great concern to the House, particularly when it comes to the online experiences of our children and young people. Platforms have a duty of care.

This is a first in Canada. I believe it could help address certain aspects of online fraud, but it is clear that we need a highly targeted approach in this area and we must ensure that platforms act responsibly. This is an important first step, but it does not represent the entirety of the debate. I am certain the House will want to continue examining the issue of online fraud, and it may do so through another, more comprehensive bill.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I really want to express my gratitude that the minister has moved forward on such an important issue that many Canadians are genuinely concerned about. Protecting the interests of our children is so critically important with respect to social media, the advancement of AI and so much more. I wonder if there are individuals whom the minister would like to recognize who have contributed to the development of the legislation.

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his advocacy in this matter, and I thank the member for Outremont, as well as members from across the way who have been engaging with citizens. I think there is cross-partisan support for this very targeted bill, which would be doing a very basic thing we need to do as elected officials: to protect our kids. I think that is key. If we cannot get it right, there is probably no reason for us to be here.

Educators, SickKids in Toronto and Alberta Children's Hospital have all been approaching us with the same concerns. If we talk to frontline workers, such as doctors who see kids in the emergency room, and this is gallows humour and everything, we hear that they want to see more broken bones as opposed to broken souls. It is really alarming to talk to doctors and hear them say that 10 years or 15 years ago, this was something they were seeing maybe on a monthly basis. They are now seeing it on a daily basis with their patients.

I want to thank all the doctors and educators and all the people out there who have been advocating for this for some time and holding us to account. I also want to give a particular shout-out to the online protection group in Winnipeg that has been doing amazing work to flag all this garbage online and to make sure people are held to account and put in jail where that is merited.

[Rachel Bendayan, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister]

Mr. Speaker, I am truly honoured to share my time with the minister himself as we begin debate on his safe social media bill. I sincerely thank him and his team for their leadership.

This debate is about young people's safety, but it is also about their rights and their freedom to learn, connect and express themselves. Our responsibility as parliamentarians is to preserve these rights and freedoms while protecting young people from harm.

This debate is about the kind of childhood we want our children to have: a childhood with room to explore, to make friends and to make mistakes without those mistakes necessarily following them for the rest of their life, and a childhood in which their safety comes first.

The numbers tell us how much is at stake. Twenty-three per cent of teenagers aged 12 to 17 spend five hours or more a day on social media, one in seven girls in grades 9 and 10 shows signs of addiction, and 52% of teens report receiving unwanted sexual images, mostly through social media platforms. Statistics Canada reports that the rate of police-reported online child luring rose by 65% in 2024, and that number continues to climb. That same year, cybertip.ca received more than 2,300 reports of sextortion.

I approach this debate of course as a parliamentarian but also as a mother. My daughter is nine years old. She is not on social media yet, but she is curious about technology and always comes home with stories about TikTok that are being shared in the playground, and I know the decisions so many Canadian parents have made already or are wrestling with today are waiting for me just on the other side: when to say yes, how to say no and how to keep her safe.

Parents are being asked to navigate technologies that evolve faster than most of us can follow, built by some of the largest and most sophisticated companies in the world. We tell parents to set better boundaries. We tell children to show more self-control. Well, it is time we told companies designing these platforms to do better. For too long, we have asked families to take on technology giants by themselves. We have asked children to resist products deliberately designed to hold their attention. It is just not a fair fight, and it is time we changed the rules.

The call for change has come from across Canada: grandparents worried about their grandchildren, parents struggling to set boundaries, teachers seeing the pressures in their classrooms first-hand, and pediatricians and emergency room physicians confronting the consequences on a daily basis.

This call to action has come from people in my own community. In Outremont, our riding association submitted a resolution to make 16 the minimum age for having social media accounts and to require the major platforms to enforce that age restriction. I want to thank all members of our association, especially our chair, Jonathan Nuss, for spearheading this resolution with such conviction.

I was very proud to champion the resolution at our Liberal convention in Montreal in April, where party members from across the country overwhelmingly voted in its favour.

Going from the concerns of parents and teachers in our community to a debate here in Parliament is what grassroots politics can achieve. That is what democracy is capable of: people coming together, speaking up and pushing for change, and then change coming right here before the people's House in Ottawa. An Angus Reid Institute poll found that three-quarters of Canadians support a ban on social media use for children under 16. This is not a partisan issue. There is room in the House to disagree about the details. There should also be room to work together to get them right.

I have had the privilege of learning from advocates at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, SickKids, the Canadian Medical Association, Apathy is Boring, Unplugged Canada, Phone-Free Schools Movement, Raising Awareness About Digital Dangers and many others. Their persistence has helped us come to this moment. We have also listened to teenagers. Many told me that they supported an age limit because being online did not feel like much of a choice anymore. When every friend is on the platform, opting out means being left out. We should listen carefully when young people tell us they want help.

Canada is not acting alone. Australia has already implemented a minimum age of 16 for accounts on social media platforms, and other governments are pursuing stronger protections as well. We should learn from those experiences and build an approach grounded in Canadian rights, Canadian values and our responsibility to children. At the heart of that approach is safety by design. That means looking at how a platform works. What does its algorithm recommend? What keeps a child scrolling for six or seven hours? What happens when a child is in distress, and what protections are in place before something goes terribly wrong?

Infinite scroll is a design choice. Autoplay is a design choice. Recommendation systems are design choices. Safety must be a design choice too.

In practical terms, under the bill before us, platforms subject to the age restriction would be required to take measures to prevent young people under the age of 16 from having an account. The bill also allows companies to seek an exemption if they can demonstrate that they have provided adequate safeguards for the protection of children. The decision would be made by the new digital safety commission of Canada, an independent body that sets the conditions for granting an exemption. Companies would have to provide evidence to convince the commission. We want companies to compete to better protect children, not just to keep their attention for as long as possible. They should use their capacity for innovation to keep young people safe.

AI chatbot services would also have certain obligations, particularly to reduce dangerous behaviours and to intervene in crisis situations. An independent regulator would enforce these obligations and would have the power to investigate, issue compliance orders and impose penalties. This framework is based on clear responsibilities, independent oversight and consequences for non-compliance.

Parliament has important work ahead. We must continue to hear from parents, young people, doctors, teachers, privacy experts and child safety advocates, as well as from the companies that would have to implement these rules. We must protect privacy and freedom of expression and make sure that the rules work in practice. That scrutiny is part of our responsibility, and so is acting. Innovation and accountability can and should go hand in hand. If we can build technology powerful enough to transform society, we can build that technology with children's safety at its core.

My daughter is nine years old. The decisions we make here will help shape the digital world she grows up in. I want her to benefit from technology, but I also want the tech companies building that digital world of the future to take her safety as seriously as I do. That is what every parent wants. That is what we should all want for every child. We are talking here about the next generation of our country.

[Lianne Rood, Conservative, Middlesex—London, ON]

Mr. Speaker, over one of the break weeks in September, I had an opportunity to host two town halls in Middlesex—London, where I heard from parents from all around the communities I am honoured and privileged to represent. I think we can all agree that parents want to protect their children. We all want to protect children from online predators, but what I heard from parents is that they feel they should have the opportunity, first and foremost, to protect their children, and that they also should have the opportunity to be heard on this matter.

I am asking the government if it will consult with an array of Canadians from across this country to hear from parents what they would like the government to do, just as I did with my own constituents, and take that feedback going forward with this bill to make sure we get it right so we can all protect children from online predators.

[Rachel Bendayan, Liberal, Outremont, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to assure the hon. member that the conversations will continue. I would like to point out that the minister did extensive consultations over the summer, as did I. Of course, the bill will move to committee if it is passed at second reading in the House, and there will be an opportunity for further study of the bill, where we will again hear from parents.

I would like to point out that what the bill aims to do is to provide additional tools to parents. Nobody would be dictating to parents in any way how to teach or set boundaries for their own children. As my colleague would know from the bill itself, it aims to ensure that young people cannot create accounts, but if a parent would like their child to see something online, that would still remain possible.

I hope we will have the opportunity to work together so I can help address some of the concerns the member may have.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Mitis—Matapédia—Les Basques, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I commend my colleague on her speech.

I agree with her that it is necessary, and indeed urgent, to regulate access to platforms, particularly to protect young people. What worries me is the issue of transparency or, more specifically, democratic oversight. My colleague mentioned that the government wants to create a new digital safety commission, but the bill does not specify which platforms it would regulate, nor is it clear what powers this new commission will have.

Can my colleague explain to us what specific new powers she wants this commission to have? We are willing to support a good idea from the government, but we do not know how this new commission will work. I get the impression that something is being created without any clear explanation as to how this will solve the problem.

[Rachel Bendayan, Liberal, Outremont, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the question from my colleague from the Bloc Québécois.

Yes, the bill before the House provides for the creation of a commission. The process will be conducted in a very transparent manner, but we are not there yet. If my colleague has any suggestions regarding the commission's powers beyond those already listed in the bill, we are ready to discuss them and work with him so that we can collaborate with the Bloc Québécois to move the bill forward.