Government Orders ·
Safe Social Media Act
In response to a question from Guillaume Deschênes-Thériault
“I want the House to pass this bill. Social media is hurting young people through cyber-bullying, sexual exploitation, and algorithms that keep them hooked. Parents cannot fix this alone. This bill makes tech companies design safer platforms, assess risks, and remove harmful content.”
“Mr. Speaker, it is great to be here this evening and debate Bill C-34, the safe social media act, a bill that I strongly support. Before I begin, I want to ask every member of the House to think just for a moment, not as parliamentarians but as parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, coaches and mentors, whatever position they hold in relation to younger people. Think about the young person in one’s life. Think about how different their childhood is from the one many of us experienced. A generation ago, when the school bell rang, most bullying ended for the day. If a child was having a difficult time at school, home was often a refuge. There was a chance to step away, to breathe, to reset. Today, that is no longer the case. The playground follows our children home. It travels in their pocket. It sits beside their bed. It is there when they wake up in the morning and is often the last thing they see before they fall asleep at night. The comments, the likes, the notifications, the screenshots, the videos and the conversations continue long after the classrooms have emptied out. I know this is true not just as a member of Parliament but as a father of three girls. I am a proud father of three girls but I also take the responsibility of keeping them safe very seriously. Over the past few years, as social media has grown in influence, concerned parents throughout my community of Whitby have shared similar stories. Some have watched their children become withdrawn and anxious. Some have found themselves dealing with the aftermath of cyber-bullying. Others have discovered that their children were being pressured to share intimate images or repeatedly exposed to content that no child should ever have to encounter. What is most striking is that these parents often feel powerless. They try but they cannot monitor devices. They set rules and have conversations, but they are operating in an online environment that changes faster than any family can reasonably keep up with. It never stops. My wife and I have tried to keep my 15-year-old daughter off social media. She does not have a cell phone, and that is an ongoing battle in our household. We have done that for a specific reason, which is to try to keep her safe, to keep her self-esteem high and to protect her mental health, realizing that she cannot always self-regulate, and that most kids are not able to self-regulate at such a young age. I know I was not able to do that with video games when I was a kid, and my parents gently encouraged me to get off the computer games at night. Social media is a whole new reality, and that reality is what brings us here today. We need to make social media safer for our children and grandchildren. One of the things that has struck me most in those conversations with parents is that they are not looking for government to solve every problem in their child’s life. They understand that raising resilient, thoughtful young people starts at home. They know there is no substitute for parenting, for open conversations around the dinner table or for teaching children how to navigate difficult situations. What they are asking for is fairness. They are asking why the responsibility seems to fall almost entirely on families while some of the most powerful companies in the world face so little accountability for the environments that they create. Parents can set rules. They can limit screen time. They can talk to their children about making good and better decisions but they cannot redesign algorithms that are designed specifically to target them and that are almost impossible to counteract. They cannot rewrite recommendation systems. They cannot remove harmful content from platforms or build safer products. Those responsibilities belong rightfully with the companies that create those services. I think most Canadians would agree that if a company profits from the attention of young people, it should also have a responsibility to consider their safety. The Internet has transformed our world in remarkable ways. It has connected families, opened doors to learning and created opportunities that previous generations could never have imagined. Our children are growing up in a world where communication, education, entertainment and community increasingly exist online. The challenge is not the technology itself. The challenge is that many of the safeguards we would expect to accompany that technology have not evolved at the same pace as the technology. The evidence of that gap is impossible to ignore. More than half of Canadian teenagers report receiving unwanted sexual images online. Nearly half say they have felt pressure to send intimate images themselves. One in four young people between the ages of 12 and 17 report experiencing cyber-bullying. Police-reported incidents of online child sexual exploitation have increased dramatically in recent years. In fact, it is up 500% since 2014. Research consistently shows that young people who experience online victimization are far more likely to struggle with serious mental health challenges. I have a very active constituency youth council. Members of my constituency youth council often cite mental health issues as their top issue. It is no doubt that online involvement and things they encounter online are contributing to the youth mental health crisis across the country. When we look at those numbers, it becomes clear that online harms are not isolated incidents. They are affecting children in communities right across our country, including in my own community of Whitby. What is also becoming increasingly clear is that these harms are not solely the result of individual bad actors. They are often amplified by the design of the platforms themselves. Many online services are built to maximize engagement. The longer users remain on a platform, the more valuable that engagement becomes. Recommendation systems continuously serve up new content. Endless scrolling eliminates natural stopping points. Autoplay features keep videos running long after the user intended to stop. For adults, these features can be difficult enough to navigate. For children and teenagers, whose brains are still developing, the impact can be far greater. We need to remember that young people, as they develop, do not have the same self-regulation abilities that are developed in adults and this is the challenge that we experience. Even adults become addicted to online doom scrolling. We are all probably guilty of that in this place. My daughter often says to me, “Dad, you’re always on your cell phone. You’re always on social media, so why can’t I?” I say to her, “Because you don’t know how to regulate. I know how to put it down.” The reality of it is that she is right. We are all guilty of this. We all need to do a better job regulating ourselves. I think young people are more vulnerable and susceptible to not being able to control that urge and the online platforms are designed specifically to exploit that addictive behaviour that we see in most young people when they get online. This is why Bill C-34 represents such an important shift in how we think about online safety. Rather than responding only after a child has already been harmed, the legislation asks for a fundamental question to be answered: What responsibilities should platforms have to prevent harm in the first place? At the heart of this bill is the duty to protect children. It recognizes that children are not simply smaller adults and that services used by millions of young Canadians should be designed with their safety in mind from the outset. That safety by design is a principle that is sound and straightforward, but it represents a significant change. For years, much of the responsibility has rested with parents, educators and children themselves. While those roles remain essential, there is growing recognition that platforms must also be accountable for the environments they create. The expectation is not perfection. No legislation can eliminate every risk and no platform can prevent every harmful interaction. What Canadians are asking for is something much more reasonable. They want companies to identify foreseeable risks, take meaningful steps to reduce those risks and be transparent about the measures they have put in place. Bill C-34 would establish those expectations and obligations, and hold online platforms accountable. It would require regulated services to consider how their products affect children and build age-appropriate safeguards into the way those products operate. It would require companies to assess risk, publish digital safety plans and provide users with practical tools that help them protect themselves. Most importantly, the bill would focus attention on some of the most serious forms of harm that exist online today. Specifically, it would entrench a duty to make that content inaccessible. Whether it is non-consensual sharing of intimate images, the sexual exploitation of children, persistent cyber-bullying, content that encourages self-harm, or material that promotes hatred, violence or extremism, Canadians increasingly expect platforms to take responsibility when their services contribute to those harms. I will end it there, but I just want to say I am really proud to stand with a government that has put forward this legislation. It is a really essential topic for me and the constituents in my community, and it will help keep my children safe.”
Mr. Speaker, it is great to be here this evening and debate Bill C-34, the safe social media act, a bill that I strongly support. Before I begin, I want to ask every member of the House to think just for a moment, not as parliamentarians but as parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, coaches and mentors, whatever position they hold in relation to younger people. Think about the young person in one’s life. Think about how different their childhood is from the one many of us experienced. A generation ago, when the school bell rang, most bullying ended for the day. If a child was having a difficult time at school, home was often a refuge. There was a chance to step away, to breathe, to reset. Today, that is no longer the case. The playground follows our children home. It travels in their pocket. It sits beside their bed. It is there when they wake up in the morning and is often the last thing they see before they fall asleep at night. The comments, the likes, the notifications, the screenshots, the videos and the conversations continue long after the classrooms have emptied out. I know this is true not just as a member of Parliament but as a father of three girls. I am a proud father of three girls but I also take the responsibility of keeping them safe very seriously. Over the past few years, as social media has grown in influence, concerned parents throughout my community of Whitby have shared similar stories. Some have watched their children become withdrawn and anxious. Some have found themselves dealing with the aftermath of cyber-bullying. Others have discovered that their children were being pressured to share intimate images or repeatedly exposed to content that no child should ever have to encounter. What is most striking is that these parents often feel powerless. They try but they cannot monitor devices. They set rules and have conversations, but they are operating in an online environment that changes faster than any family can reasonably keep up with. It never stops. My wife and I have tried to keep my 15-year-old daughter off social media. She does not have a cell phone, and that is an ongoing battle in our household. We have done that for a specific reason, which is to try to keep her safe, to keep her self-esteem high and to protect her mental health, realizing that she cannot always self-regulate, and that most kids are not able to self-regulate at such a young age. I know I was not able to do that with video games when I was a kid, and my parents gently encouraged me to get off the computer games at night. Social media is a whole new reality, and that reality is what brings us here today. We need to make social media safer for our children and grandchildren. One of the things that has struck me most in those conversations with parents is that they are not looking for government to solve every problem in their child’s life. They understand that raising resilient, thoughtful young people starts at home. They know there is no substitute for parenting, for open conversations around the dinner table or for teaching children how to navigate difficult situations. What they are asking for is fairness. They are asking why the responsibility seems to fall almost entirely on families while some of the most powerful companies in the world face so little accountability for the environments that they create. Parents can set rules. They can limit screen time. They can talk to their children about making good and better decisions but they cannot redesign algorithms that are designed specifically to target them and that are almost impossible to counteract. They cannot rewrite recommendation systems. They cannot remove harmful content from platforms or build safer products. Those responsibilities belong rightfully with the companies that create those services. I think most Canadians would agree that if a company profits from the attention of young people, it should also have a responsibility to consider their safety. The Internet has transformed our world in remarkable ways. It has connected families, opened doors to learning and created opportunities that previous generations could never have imagined. Our children are growing up in a world where communication, education, entertainment and community increasingly exist online. The challenge is not the technology itself. The challenge is that many of the safeguards we would expect to accompany that technology have not evolved at the same pace as the technology. The evidence of that gap is impossible to ignore. More than half of Canadian teenagers report receiving unwanted sexual images online. Nearly half say they have felt pressure to send intimate images themselves. One in four young people between the ages of 12 and 17 report experiencing cyber-bullying. Police-reported incidents of online child sexual exploitation have increased dramatically in recent years. In fact, it is up 500% since 2014. Research consistently shows that young people who experience online victimization are far more likely to struggle with serious mental health challenges. I have a very active constituency youth council. Members of my constituency youth council often cite mental health issues as their top issue. It is no doubt that online involvement and things they encounter online are contributing to the youth mental health crisis across the country. When we look at those numbers, it becomes clear that online harms are not isolated incidents. They are affecting children in communities right across our country, including in my own community of Whitby. What is also becoming increasingly clear is that these harms are not solely the result of individual bad actors. They are often amplified by the design of the platforms themselves. Many online services are built to maximize engagement. The longer users remain on a platform, the more valuable that engagement becomes. Recommendation systems continuously serve up new content. Endless scrolling eliminates natural stopping points. Autoplay features keep videos running long after the user intended to stop. For adults, these features can be difficult enough to navigate. For children and teenagers, whose brains are still developing, the impact can be far greater. We need to remember that young people, as they develop, do not have the same self-regulation abilities that are developed in adults and this is the challenge that we experience. Even adults become addicted to online doom scrolling. We are all probably guilty of that in this place. My daughter often says to me, “Dad, you’re always on your cell phone. You’re always on social media, so why can’t I?” I say to her, “Because you don’t know how to regulate. I know how to put it down.” The reality of it is that she is right. We are all guilty of this. We all need to do a better job regulating ourselves. I think young people are more vulnerable and susceptible to not being able to control that urge and the online platforms are designed specifically to exploit that addictive behaviour that we see in most young people when they get online. This is why Bill C-34 represents such an important shift in how we think about online safety. Rather than responding only after a child has already been harmed, the legislation asks for a fundamental question to be answered: What responsibilities should platforms have to prevent harm in the first place? At the heart of this bill is the duty to protect children. It recognizes that children are not simply smaller adults and that services used by millions of young Canadians should be designed with their safety in mind from the outset. That safety by design is a principle that is sound and straightforward, but it represents a significant change. For years, much of the responsibility has rested with parents, educators and children themselves. While those roles remain essential, there is growing recognition that platforms must also be accountable for the environments they create. The expectation is not perfection. No legislation can eliminate every risk and no platform can prevent every harmful interaction. What Canadians are asking for is something much more reasonable. They want companies to identify foreseeable risks, take meaningful steps to reduce those risks and be transparent about the measures they have put in place. Bill C-34 would establish those expectations and obligations, and hold online platforms accountable. It would require regulated services to consider how their products affect children and build age-appropriate safeguards into the way those products operate. It would require companies to assess risk, publish digital safety plans and provide users with practical tools that help them protect themselves. Most importantly, the bill would focus attention on some of the most serious forms of harm that exist online today. Specifically, it would entrench a duty to make that content inaccessible. Whether it is non-consensual sharing of intimate images, the sexual exploitation of children, persistent cyber-bullying, content that encourages self-harm, or material that promotes hatred, violence or extremism, Canadians increasingly expect platforms to take responsibility when their services contribute to those harms. I will end it there, but I just want to say I am really proud to stand with a government that has put forward this legislation. It is a really essential topic for me and the constituents in my community, and it will help keep my children safe.