Canada joins push for social media age assurance with new digital safety law

Canada will follow Australia in prohibiting kids under 16 from having social media accounts. CBC News reports that the measure is included in the Liberal government’s new Digital Safety Act, to be tabled in the House of Commons today.

The bill will also address AI chatbots and establish a new digital regulatory body.

The government of prime minister Mark Carney has moved quickly on online safety legislation in the wake of prior governments’ failed efforts, and in the context of a global push to regulate social media and other online content considered a risk to youth.

Age assurance is not identity verification

One of the loudest opponents of age checks in Canada is privacy lawyer and technology commentator Michael Geist, who argues that a social media age ban would create privacy risks for millions of Canadians through mandated age verification requirements.

But much of the debate hinges on a fundamental question: what kind of age assurance are we talking about?

Critics often treat age assurance, age estimation and identity verification as interchangeable concepts. They are not.

Modern age assurance can take several forms, ranging from facial age estimation and reusable age credentials to device-based and account-based approaches. Many are specifically designed to establish whether a user is above or below a threshold age without revealing their identity.

Geist argues that age estimation raises privacy concerns because it may rely on additional surveillance of users’ posts, messages and contacts. That criticism applies to profiling approaches proposed by some social media platforms, but not necessarily to facial age estimation systems offered by specialist providers. In those systems, an image is analyzed to estimate age, not to identify the person.

Questions about accuracy remain legitimate. According to guidance published by the UK Home Office, facial age estimation performance can vary across demographic groups depending on training data, image quality and other factors. For that reason, many providers deploy age buffers rather than attempting to distinguish precisely between, for example, a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old.

The broader policy question is whether governments can realistically enforce minimum-age requirements without some form of age assurance. Critics argue the focus should be on regulating platforms rather than users. Supporters counter that age restrictions become difficult to enforce if platforms are never required to determine a user’s age.

That debate is now moving from theory to policy. Australia has already adopted a social media age minimum. The UK is implementing age-check requirements under the Online Safety Act. The European Union is developing age verification tools. Canada now appears poised to join that trend.

The question is no longer whether governments will intervene. It is what form age assurance should take, how privacy can be protected, and who should be responsible for enforcing the rules.

‘Fix the platforms’ or die trying

Like many, Geist ultimately makes the argument that age restrictions fail to address the underlying concerns with social media.

“Rejecting a ban does not mean rejecting regulation. Rather, it places the emphasis on the need to regulate the platforms, not the user. The right model is the duty to act responsibly that was at the core of the original Online Harms Act, combined with algorithmic transparency requirements and meaningful safety obligations. The government can impose requirements on how platforms are designed and create liability for failure to meet them without locking anyone out or assembling a nationwide ID system.”

As is typical with this assertion – it’s better for the government to try and make social media safer than it is to require every user to prove their age – Geist’s argument hinges on three massive, highly dubious assumptions.

The first is that establishing a law requiring age assurance for every user equates to “a nationwide ID-verification system.” There is no indication that an age assurance mandate for social platforms has any connection whatsoever to a nonexistent plan for a Canadian national digital ID.

Moreover, Geist does not seem to understand the capabilities of current privacy preserving age assurance technology, which does not perform identity verification. Even as this second assumption contradicts Geist’s fear that third-party providers will wreak havoc on Canadians’ data, it undergirds the whole notion that “since Canada has required every user to prove who they are in order to police a single age line, that requirement and the system built to enforce it remain in place regardless of whether a particular restriction is later lifted.”

Regulating Big Tech means wrangling with trillionaires

Finally, while Geist doesn’t want private age assurance providers to know your age, and wants nothing to do with a centralized government identity system, he’s okay with Meta and X having your data; he’d just like them to be a bit nicer. This is “the need to regulate the platforms, not the user.” Thus, the final assumption: if governments just came down a bit harder on Big Tech, they might clean up their products and get serious about contributing to the greater social good.

The evidence overwhelmingly shows that Silicon Valley’s social media tycoons will use their legal apparatus, political influence, and practically limitless wealth to fight any regulation that disrupts business as usual. They have tied up U.S. courts seeking injunctions against state-level age laws. They have challenged regulatory fines and used their platforms to insult regulators. They have roused the U.S. government to lash out at Europe, the UK and Australia on their behalf, branding the wave of overseas online safety laws as a “censorship regime.”

Which is to say, if the solution is not biometric age assurance, but regulations that crack down on what platforms are actually allowed to do and be, the Canadian government should be mustering enough lawyers to fill a dozen hockey rinks. If Geist cared as much about privacy as his brand would have us believe, he might better focus his attention and skills on Meta and Google, and see how well his arguments and vigor stand up under the crushing weight of the Palo Alto technopoly.

Should people need a social media license?

In coverage from Global News, Margot Denommé, a former Crown attorney who now leads the group Raising Awareness Against Digital Dangers, draws an interesting analogy between social media and smoking, driving and other potentially risky activities.

“We didn’t need to be sitting at our desk smoking to understand that cigarettes cause lung cancer,” she says. “We give youth driver’s education before we put them behind the wheel of a car.”

“I believe that we need to take the same approach when it comes to an age minimum (for social media).”

Article Topics

age verification  |  biometrics  |  Canada  |  identity verification  |  legislation  |  social media