ADAMS: Bill C-34 is mostly scaffolding, but still a threat to privacy and vulnerable kids
The Carney Liberals finally tabled their big online safety bill yesterday. After all the talk at their Montreal convention and in the press about protecting children from social media, the so-called Safe Social Media Act (Bill C-34) turns out to be mostly make-work for a currently non-existent commission.
The real rules on who gets regulated, what platforms actually have to do, and whether there will even be a minimum age for accounts are all left to cabinet regulations and the new Digital Safety Commission that doesn't exist yet.
Teenagers worried they're about to lose TikTok or Instagram can relax. This will take years to stand up, assuming it ever does. Setting up a brand-new commission, consulting everyone, gazetting them, and then actually enforcing new regulations across major platforms is going to be a multi-year bureaucratic slog. By the time anything meaningful happens, the kids who are teenagers now will be adults.
That doesn't make the bill good. It just makes the immediate panic premature.
The legislation dumps a pile of new duties on "regulated" social media services and chatbots. They have to mitigate “harmful content,” give users blocking and flagging tools, label AI-generated material, submit digital safety plans, and potentially make certain illegal content inaccessible.
