Canada is joining a growing list of countries seeking to protect young people from harm online by restricting their access to social media platforms.
The Canadian government on Wednesday introduced a new digital safety proposal that would require users to verify that they are at least 16 to access websites like Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. A new regulator called the Digital Safety Commission of Canada would administer the proposed measures, officials said.
Young people would be allowed on online platforms of companies that meet safety standards, to be defined by the regulator, government officials told reporters on Wednesday. The proposal, the Safe Social Media Act, sponsored by Canada’s minister of identity and culture, Marc Miller, would need to be passed by the House of Commons and Senate before becoming law.
“The safety of children can’t be an afterthought,” Mr. Miller said. “We need basic protection in place so every child in this country can be safe on platforms they use every day.”
Over the past year, countries including Britain, Malaysia, France, Greece and Spain have considered similar proposals to address issues among young people like mental health problems, including social media addiction and depression, as well as cyberbullying and distraction in schools.
Australia became the first country to pass such legislation in November 2024, blocking young people from social media apps like TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube. Under Australia’s law, tech companies are required to disable the accounts of underage users or risk fines of up to $33 million. In response, platforms deactivated about five million accounts of under-aged users, the government said.
But all of these countries have also faced opposition from some tech companies and civil society groups that say identity verification steps amount to surveillance and introduce risks that personal data could be hacked.
The United States, headquarters to many of the world’s largest social media companies, strongly opposes regulations that would use government-issued identification to check ages because of the potentially chilling impact on civil liberties. Officials in the United States have said that they favor much more narrowly defined regulations targeting pornographic and gambling sites, for example.
As Canada weighs imposing safety regulations on tech companies, it has considered relaxing other requirements. This month, the government decided to reassess a policy that would require foreign streamers to invest in Canadian programming.
While the government said its reasoning was to prevent costs from being passed on to consumers, critics have accused the government of making the decision to appease the Trump administration.
The online safety measures introduced on Wednesday could have the same fate, said Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa who studies technology regulation.
Excluding a segment of users from social media platforms, rather than establishing effective regulations to make the internet better for everyone, Dr. Geist said, “feels like a Band-Aid solution.”
Meta and TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
An attempt by Canada in 2024 to regulate tech giants, called the Online Harms Act, failed amid fears of limits on freedom of speech.
Other aspects of that act — including taking some sexually explicit content down and imposing liabilities on platforms that failed to do so — were resurrected in Wednesday’s bill.
Australia’s eSafety commissioner surveyed parents in a report published in March that said that about 31 percent of children continued to have access to their own accounts on at least one social media platform, down from 50 percent before the ban went into effect.
Some critics have also raised concerns that Australia’s ban is steering children from accounts that have some level of safeguards for them into less secure online platforms.
