Sarah Jamie LewisWe are still awaiting the details, but be prepared to hear Canadians say "C-34" a lot.
The text of the bill is now available: https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/bill/C-34/first-reading
- Outlines a duty to on regulated social media companies to prevent persons under the age of 16 from having an account
- "a service is not a social media service if it does not enable a user to communicate content to the public."
"a service does not enable a user to communicate content to the public if it does not enable the user to communicate content to a potentially unlimited number of users not determined by the user."
Interestingly the messaging around this bill is very much focused on changing the way that social media services are designed as opposed to banning users based on age.
A "moratorium" rather than a "ban" - with the idea being that once a regulator is setup it can exempt services from the requirement to prevent people from opening accounts.
We do no have any concrete idea on what such "safety measures" will be - but likely centred around exposure to the outlines restricted content.
The act explicitly excludes private messaging from any such obligations.
"The duties imposed under this Act on the operator of a regulated social media service or a regulated online service do not apply in respect of any private messaging feature of the service."
But there is a large carve out for (presumably private) communications to AI chat bots - where providers would have greater duty of care to monitor (but not necessarily report) certain patterns of behaviour.
A minor component of this bill, not the be overlooked is the required on sites that distributed pornographic content to implement "age-verification" technology.
"pornographic content means a visual representation the dominant characteristic of which is the depiction, for a sexual purpose, of a person’s genital organs or anal region"
That seems very broad and looking forward to the analysis on how such a restriction balances charter rights.
Personal opinion:
I'm all for the obligations on large social media service providers to mitigate exposure to and, in the obvious cases, actively censor obscene material. And I'm sympathetic to the idea that a regulator can make determinations of safeguards e.g. removal of auto-play, infinite scroll etc.
I welcome the exclusion of private messaging from these laws.
That being said, broad requirements for identity/age estimation/verification would be a privacy and economic disaster.
Paul_IPv6tech regulation, particularly "save the kids" attempts, are more often (like always) a prime example of "the cure is worse than the disease"...
Matilda Love@paul_ipv6 @sarahjamielewis and is also not a cure in the slightest ofc