On Wednesday, the Liberals tabled Bill C-34, which would restrict minors from social media. That is the headline pitch, but the bill goes much further, offering cabinet the power to ban children from online games, shut online entities out of Canada completely, and order websites to censor content deemed “harmful” by the government. It is a Great Canadian Firewall in the making.
The legislation aims to censor political speech while putting draconian rules around what kids can do online. The bill does not specify what specific kinds of safety measures will have to be followed, which kinds of websites will have to follow them, how big a site’s userbase must be to attract regulation, which AI chatbots will be regulated, and a number of other things. Michael Geist, the privacy and internet expert at the University of Ottawa’s law school, has counted a total of 50 decisions that will be left to cabinet and digital safety decision-makers. These would be made after the bill passes, comfortably outside the oversight of Parliament.
Broad Scope of Regulation
This means just about everything on the internet is in scope. The bill only makes two types of websites completely off-limits: online services “whose primary purpose is to facilitate the sale, listing or advertisement of goods or services” and those “whose primary purpose is to provide directories, search results, maps or navigation tools.” Even this is a tough line to draw: where does one put Steam, the PC games store-plus-social platform? And why are we to tolerate the harm that can come from sales and search engines? There are brothels on Google Maps; there are sex games on Steam; there are personal … very personal … ads on Craigslist.
Exceptions and Requirements
Also off-limits would be private chats. The bill also states that online entities would not be required to “search content on a regulated service that it operates in order to identify harmful content” — but rules could still be made requiring these entities “to use technological means to prevent content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor from being uploaded to the service,” which is reasonable, especially now that AI should make scrubbing for abusive content much easier.
In 94 pages, the bill proposes broad power for cabinet to come up with other categories of online services to regulate. It does give the broad strokes of some of the rules that will come with that. Sites that have pornographic content will have to include “age-verification or age-estimation measures” that are “effective” and that destroy whatever information was used to verify a user’s identity; these sites would also have to retain “all records, including information and data” that are necessary to prove compliance. Similar requirements would exist for social media sites, with cabinet reserving the option to exempt platforms whose age verification methods it finds satisfactory. Cabinet could also mandate that these websites use specific age-verification methods.
