Today, the Government of Canada introduced the Safe Social Media Act (Bill C-34), which would enact legislation to make online services responsible for addressing harmful content and creating a safer online space for all Canadians, especially children.
The proposed legislation will create safety requirements for social media services and artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot services to provide strong protection against online harms. The legislation will ensure that services are accountable for the environments they design and operate by establishing a Digital Safety Commission of Canada to enforce the new legislation and ensure compliance.
Regulated services will be required to take greater responsibility for the risks created by the design and operation of their services. Social media services, including livestreaming and user-uploaded adult content services, would be required to identify risks of harm on their services, adopt measures to address those risks, implement safety-focused design features, apply labels to synthetically generated content, make user guidelines accessible, provide tools such as blocking and flagging, submit publicly disclosed Digital Safety Plans, and comply with oversight by the new independent regulator.
Legislative and Regulatory Framework for Regulated Services
The legislation will establish a targeted online safety and service accountability framework for regulated online services operating in Canada. Services will have clear expectations for how they assess, mitigate, and respond to serious risks of harm arising from the design and operation of their services. The proposed approach would also include regulation-making authorities to allow the regime to adapt to technological change, emerging harms, and future online services. Regulated services will be required to be transparent with the public and the regulator about how they are working to protect users, especially children and survivors.
Categories of Harmful Content
The Safe Social Media Act will target seven categories of harmful content:
Content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor;
- Content that induces a child to harm themselves;
- Content used to bully a child;
- Content that incites violence;
- Content that foments hatred;
- Terrorism or violent extremism content; and
- Intimate content communicated without consent.
Obligations would be organized under three duties: a Duty to Act Responsibly; a Duty to Protect Children; and a Duty to Make Certain Content inaccessible.
Duty to Protect Children
The legislation will require social media services and AI chatbot services to implement age-appropriate protections and safeguards for younger users. This will include obligations related to safer design features, child-focused risk mitigation, measures intended to reduce children's exposure to harmful material and high-risk online interactions, and an obligation to prevent children from accessing pornographic content. For social media services, this duty will also include an age restriction for children under 16 years old on having accounts on these services. The age restriction on social media accounts would be subject to an exemption process in the future, should the regulator determine that a service has implemented sufficient safeguards for children.
Duty to Act Responsibly
Operators of social media services and chatbot services would be required to assess and mitigate risks of exposure to harmful content and behaviour on their services. Separate duties have been tailored to social media services and chatbot services. Depending on the type of services, this can include:
- Implementing proportionate safety measures to reduce the risk users will be exposed to harmful content;
- Maintaining accessible reporting and complaint mechanisms;
- Providing user safety tools such as blocking and flagging functions; and
- Implementing systems and design measures to reduce harm to users.
Duty to Make Certain Content Inaccessible
This duty will require regulated social media services to make two specific categories of harmful content inaccessible to their users in Canada: (1) content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor; and (2) intimate content communicated without consent, including sexualized deepfakes. These two categories represent the most harmful content online; it only takes a single piece of content under these two categories to cause substantial and lasting harm.
In addition to the three core duties, regulated services will also need to be transparent in how they meet their obligations under the Act. All regulated services will need to prepare Digital Safety Plans describing how they identify, assess, and address risks on their services. These plans will support transparency, regulatory oversight, and public accountability. There will also be an obligation and privacy-preserving process under the new regime to provide accredited researchers access to certain data from regulated services.
Creation of a Digital Safety Commission of Canada
The proposed legislation will see the creation of a new independent regulator called the Digital Safety Commission of Canada. This new Commission will be responsible for developing regulations and guidance, assessing compliance, conducting audits and inspections, and enforcing obligations under the Act through compliance orders and administrative monetary penalties. The new Digital Safety Commission will:
- Enforce legislative and regulatory obligations and hold regulated services accountable for their responsibilities by auditing for compliance, issuing compliance orders, and penalizing services that fail to comply;
- Collect, triage, and administer user complaints and reports about services' obligations under all three duties of care; and
- Set new standards for online safety by conducting research on global best practices, providing guidance to services on how to comply with obligations, and by developing educational resources for the public.
The Act is informed by previous and ongoing federal policy work and extensive consultations on online safety, including engagement with victims and survivors, civil society organizations, Indigenous partners, experts, industry, and Canadians. This includes the recent reconvening of the Expert Advisory Group on Online Safety (March to May 2026) to provide advice on new and emerging issues, as well as targeted engagement with industry and other stakeholders. Previous consultation, including public consultations, expert workshops, roundtables, and a Citizens' Assembly focused on democratic expression and protecting youth online, have also informed the proposed approach.
