Luke Neilson is Vice President of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms.Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, will implement a social media ban on all Canadians under age 16 in the name of protecting children from online harms. It will be for the federal Cabinet to determine which social media platforms are affected, and it will fall to social media platforms swept within the ambit of the Act to achieve the age verification and age estimation systems required to keep minors off social media. But Bill C-34 does not merely regulate social media access. It transfers decision-making authority from parents to the state. Social media bans for minors arise in part from the premise that parental supervision is insufficient to protect children from harmful online content. While Bill C-34’s social media ban effectively displaces parental authority, its practical success will depend either on parental supervision or invasive surveillance measures. This is the contradiction of Bill C-34. And Australia’s experience illustrates the tension. Australia’s Online Safety Act came into effect in December 2025, banning minors under age 16 from holding accounts on social media platforms such as X, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit. Soon after, 4.7 million ineligible accounts were deleted from these platforms. The ban still fell far short of its objective. According to Australia’s own eSafety Commissioner compliance update from March 2026: “Of the parents who reported their child had an account on each platform prior to 10 December 2025, around 7 in 10 reported that their child still had an account on Facebook (63.6%), Instagram (69.1%), Snapchat (69.4%), and TikTok (69.3%)…One in two of these parents (48.5%) reported that their child still had an account on YouTube following the age restrictions coming into effect.”.These numbers do not illustrate a social media ban that worked “on the whole.” Far from it. But the eSafety Commissioner ultimately concluded that the problem of non-compliance ultimately rested with social media companies, not with children, and not with parents. For social media companies to effectively ban all minors’ accounts, companies would have to implement much more stringent and continuous age verification and age prediction methods. This is precisely what the eSafety Commissioner advised: that social media companies should capture more data than ever before — banking data, email database data, biometric data, and, notably, inferences about that data — in order to verify eligibility. (See pages 20 and 24 of the Compliance update.) If Australia pursues this path, all Australians will be exposed to increased monitoring because social media bans for any segment of a population only work if the entire population verifies their eligibility to access social media. Without considering the security risks associated with platforms capturing the identifying information of the approximately 78% of Australians who use social media, Australia’s ban will likely mean more cameras on, more faces scanned, and banking details linked with X and Instagram accounts.This is the cost of removing parents from the problem of harmful online content. .If Canada follows Australia’s example (and Bill C-34 provides no assurances that it will pursue a different approach), parents will lose meaningful authority over their children’s access to social media, and the ban’s efficacy will depend on social media companies continuously collecting sensitive data about both minors and all Canadians. Nobody denies that vast swaths of the internet are far from beneficial to children and even adults. But Bill C-34 will both undermine the right and responsibility of 12.5 million Canadian parents to guide, protect, and educate their own children. The cost? Undermining the privacy of 41 million Canadians. The more the state reduces reliance on parents, the more it must rely on age verification and estimation methods. The more it relies on these methods, the greater the privacy risks to all Canadians. Will Ottawa entertain the possibility that parental rights and responsibilities are a practical alternative to surveillance? Luke Neilson is Vice President of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms.
