John Carpay:
Social media is actually quite anti-social. Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and WhatsApp drive many teens and adults into isolation and loneliness as they spend less time in face-to-face interactions with others. Some people use artificial intelligence chatbots as a substitute for friendships. Pornography, now freely available to everyone at all times on an anonymous basis, has driven some men away from pursuing actual relationships with real women. Through social media, pornography and AI, the internet provides instant gratification that soothes only temporarily the ache of loneliness, isolation, and anxiety experienced by so many in our “advanced” society.
In many cases, Canadian parents have failed to restrict their children’s use of the internet. Many teens care far too deeply about how many “likes” their photos and posts have, rather than enjoying time with friends in person. Social media promotes envy, self-loathing, and even self-harm by relentlessly promoting an unrealistic body image. It’s impossible to achieve what appears to be the continuous state of happiness that others seem to enjoy.
Into this misery, anguish, and spiritual poverty arrives the government, eager to serve as both our Lord and our Saviour. “We must protect the children from online harms,” proclaim politicians, and nobody disagrees with the goal. “Trust us to solve your problems,” say the elites, always careful not to make some Canadians feel guilty about decades of permissive and irresponsible parenting.
Politicians will pretend that C-34 merely regulates social media access, but C-34 effectively transfers decision-making authority from parents to the state. The underlying premise is that parental supervision is insufficient to protect children from harmful online content; parents just aren’t up to the job, so government needs to step in. Sadly, while parents should be fully in charge of their children’s internet access, in fact many parents are not, thereby creating an opening and an opportunity for government to further undermine parental authority.
Doing the difficult work that all parents ought to have been doing, the federal government has introduced Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, in Parliament. C-34 is a big blank cheque, made payable to the very powerful Digital Safety Commission that C-34 will create. This new Digital Safety Commission will be responsible for preventing minors under 16 from accessing certain social media services. C-34 does not say whether Snapchat, Telegram, Reddit, or YouTube will be legally required to ensure that only people over 16 can access their services. Instead, the federal cabinet will decide in secret, without Parliamentary debate or input, which social media must deny access to children under 16, and which social media will be exempt from this requirement. Welcome to modern democracy, in which MPs debate only whether to create this Commission, but thereafter have very little to say in what this Commission will do.
The failure of C-34 to indicate which social media are (and are not) required to ban access to under-16 folks is just one example of the dozens of important issues that will be resolved behind closed doors by the federal cabinet, or by the newly created Digital Safety Commission.
Another issue that C-34 leaves to government (to decide later) is how Canadians will be required to prove that they are 16+ (to access social media) or 18+ (to access pornography). Similar “safe social media” laws were passed in Australia in December 2025. By March of 2026, it had become clear that more than two thirds of under-16 teens had easily accessed social media by using fake ID, or borrowing ID from their parents or an older sibling or friend.
When the law requires social media companies to verify that teenage users are 16 or older, the social media companies need to verify the age of all users, not just teens. Age verification for teens means age verification for everyone. If the age verification system fails to keep under-16 teens away from social media, as has happened Down Under, the next logical step would be to require a reliable and effective age verification method, like centralized government-issued ID. In other words: to protect the children from social media and pornography, every Canadian must give up basic privacy, and let government know each and every time that she or he uses social media. In this way, C-34 takes us quickly and smoothly to the nightmare presented by George Orwell in his book 1984.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.