The Carney Liberals will be introducing their "Digital Safety Act" this evening, and the centrepiece is a ban on social media for anyone under the age of sixteen.
Social media platforms will have to figure out how to keep children off, which in practice almost always means some form of age verification. That usually means ID checks or data collection that strips away the assumed right to privacy that most of us have taken for granted online for decades.
I have said the same thing regarding similar proposals for years; I did not buy your child a phone. I did not pay for their data plan or hand them the device at dinner. If a twelve-year-old is spending hours on TikTok or Instagram when they should be doing homework or sleeping, that is a decision made inside someone else's house.
Canadians should not be required to upload their ID and surrender the ability to speak without attaching our real names just because some lazy parents have decided supervision is someone else's problem.
That is my entire argument in its simplest form. Anything else is just a cherry on top. But the cherry matters when the people who will choke on it first are the most vulnerable—specifically, LGBTQ youth who rely on the very spaces this bill would gatekeep. I am going to be very direct about who gets hurt when Ottawa decides it knows better than families and individuals do.
I went to high school with trans kids whose homes were not safe places to exist as themselves. Their own parents would have reacted with rage or worse if they had tried to come out at the dinner table. For those kids, social media platforms like Discord were the only space where they could use the name that felt right and get basic information without risking abuse in their own house.
They were not looking for validation from strangers on the internet because it was "trendy." They were looking for it because the alternative was total isolation.
Timing this announcement ten days into Pride Month/Pride Season makes the stakes harder to wave away. A generation of LGBTQ youth have used social media to build the first real peer networks many of them have ever had. Study after study shows that gender-diverse youth who lack support at home consistently turn to social media for emotional connection, identity exploration, and practical advice they cannot get from family or school. Removing that access does not magically make their lives safer.
The predictable response from some Liberals has already arrived. On Threads and elsewhere, I have been called a "pedophile" for making my case.
The accusation is as lazy as it is vicious. If the price of opposing a policy that will push the most vulnerable kids toward less moderated corners of the internet is to be smeared that way, then fine. Call a bisexual man a pedophile for refusing to trade his right to privacy for the convenience of parents who will not do the job.
You will sound exactly like the reactionaries you claim to oppose, except instead of being honest, you will only be doing it to protect this Liberal government from any real scrutiny and to avoid admitting that some adults simply do not want to parent.
Here is the line I am drawing: If you support this approach because you cannot be bothered to set rules in your own home, or because you have decided that criticizing the Carney Liberals on anything is off-limits, or because you have quietly reversed every privacy instinct you once claimed to hold, then you have given up the right to call yourself an ally to the LGBTQ community.
You cannot champion our rights in one breath and then back a measure that severs some of us from the only communities keeping them afloat in the next. Those positions are not compatible. Pretending they are is how movements lose whatever credibility they still have left.
The internet has plenty of problems that deserve attention. Predators exist. Addiction is real. Platforms optimize for engagement over well-being. None of those facts requires the rest of us to accept a system of digital ID that will follow every user who wants to comment on the news or express their position on whatever.
Parents have always had the tools to manage what happens inside their own walls. Ottawa does not need to, nor have they made a convincing argument for, why they should have the right to conscript everyone else's privacy to do the work some adults refuse to do themselves. That was true in 2023. It remains true today.
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