What Canada can learn from Australia’s floundering social media ban

With more than 40 countries following Australia’s example to ban social media for youth, their eSafety commissioner has released a new report that should raise alarm bells. 

Three months after Australia’s groundbreaking social media ban took hold, more than four in five youth are still using age-restricted platforms, including Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. In fact, youth usage rates have barely moved since the ban took hold, with the eSafety commissioner saying that there has been “little to no change” in youth online behaviour.

According to youth themselves, age restriction measures are faulty, with the report showing numerous cases where platforms did not ask for age confirmation (with 50 per cent reporting this), platforms incorrectly guessing users’ age (18 per cent), and youth falsifying their age to gain access to platforms (37 per cent). 

These results should not be surprising. Beyond the media reports and research that demonstrate youth are still accessing these platforms, Australia’s online regulator also indicated that social media platforms themselves are not complying with the government’s new legislation. 

Instead, some social media companies are actively encouraging underage youth to re-attempt age assurance tests, as well as enabling youth access after repeated attempts to pass age checks, and failing to address barriers to flagging age-restricted accounts. 

Canada’s new Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, aims to mirror Australia’s approach, but with a few novel innovations, such as classifying AI chatbots as online platforms. However, the act plans to introduce these age verification requirements without the necessary infrastructure to support them, instead introducing a new Digital Safety Commission responsible for outlining these age verification measures.  

Even if the commission is established within the government’s limited timeframe, critics argue that its massive mandate comes with questions about accountability, and that its new authority will weaken existing oversight, effectively stripping the powers of Canada’s privacy commissioner to investigate privacy and safety violations. 

Insights from McGill’s Centre for Media Technology and Democracy show that in order for age verification to work, it needs to be technically viable, and have a strong regulatory infrastructure in place. As we have seen in Australia, enforcement of age authentication highly depends on platform co-operation. Canada’s privacy commissioner has also investigated age verification policy approaches, arguing that age assurance needs to consider privacy protections for Canadians’ personal information, and ultimately build (and not break) trust.

The risk for this country’s social media ban is that we may not only fail to prevent youth from accessing online platforms, but that we may also fail to actually address the root of the problem: harmful algorithms. 

We have seen the very real harms that online platforms actively cause for youth, including emotional and psychological manipulation, damaging youth mental health, fuelling addictive behaviour, and amplifying harmful misinformation. As echoed by a wide body of experts, Canadian youth cannot be protected from online harms without ensuring that online platforms are safe by design, and that means effective algorithm transparency and stronger platform regulation. 

The ultimate lesson here from Australia is that age verification is an insufficient policy response on its own. It means Canada needs to rethink how we approach addressing online harms—not by simply launching a flat social media ban, but rather by building the infrastructure needed to design and regulate safe spaces for youth online—all without compromising privacy or safety protections. 

This starts with meaningfully engaging the very group—Canada’s youth—that we are trying to protect. They are the active users of these online platforms, and have a right to help shape how platforms are designed and regulated. By tackling the root of the problem, we can ensure that youth are both empowered and safer online, and avoid the pitfalls of Australia’s social media ban.

Trevor Potts is the director of research and policy at Evidence for Democracy. 

The Hill Times