Canada introduced Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, on June 10. It would bar children under 16 from social media accounts, force platforms to design for child safety, and regulate AI chatbots for the first time. It is a bill, not a law, and Canada’s recent record on digital bills is not encouraging.
What this article covers
Police across Canada reported 16,905 incidents of online child sexual exploitation in 2024. That is a 347% rise since 2014. Bill C-34 is the government’s response. It is the most ambitious online safety legislation Canada has tabled, and on June 10 it began the long road that most bills do not finish.
What is Bill C-34?
Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, was introduced on June 10, 2026 by Canadian Heritage. It would create a new Digital Safety Act, set safety rules for social media services and AI chatbot services, and establish an independent regulator called the Digital Safety Commission of Canada to enforce them.
The framework rests on three duties: protect children, act responsibly, and make certain content inaccessible.
This is a bill at first reading. It is not in force.
What would change for users under 16?
The bill would bar children under 16 from holding accounts on social media services.
Platforms could apply for an exemption. To get one, a service would have to prove to the regulator that it has put sufficient safeguards in place for children. That process does not exist yet. It would be written later, in regulation.
The Duty to Protect Children goes further than accounts. It would require services to build age-appropriate protections, reduce children’s exposure to harmful material and high-risk interactions, and prevent children from accessing pornographic content.
The under-16 restriction comes with an exemption pathway. How strict the limit turns out to be depends on regulation that does not exist yet.
What does it ask of platforms?
Regulated services would carry three duties.
- Protect children
Applies to every regulated service, including AI chatbots. Age-appropriate design, reduced exposure to harm, and the account restriction for social media. - Act responsibly
Assess and reduce the risk that users are exposed to harmful content. Label content that is synthetically generated. Provide reporting tools, blocking, and flagging. - Make certain content inaccessible
Rapidly remove two categories: content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, and intimate content shared without consent, including sexual deepfakes. The bill singles these out because a single piece of either can cause lasting harm.
The Act targets seven categories of harmful content in total:
- 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
- Intimate content communicated without consent
Services would also have to publish digital safety plans explaining how they identify and address risk, and provide accredited researchers access to certain platform data through a privacy-protective process.
Why are AI chatbots included?
This is the new part. While previous privacy bills tried to regulate AI broadly as a commercial industry, C-34 is the first time Canada has pulled AI chatbots directly into a child-protection and online safety framework.
Chatbot services would carry their own version of the Duty to Act Responsibly, tailored to how they work. They would be required to reduce the risk the chatbot communicates harmful content, be transparent about when they report crisis situations such as a user intending to harm themselves or someone else, and reduce the risk the chatbot behaves harmfully.
C-34 is Canada’s first attempt to set child-safety expectations for these tools. If the bill survives, this section may shape the next decade more than the social media account limit does.
What happens to a bill like this?
A bill is not a law. C-34 has had one reading. Ahead of it are further readings, committee study, possible amendment, votes in both chambers, and royal assent. Any of those stages can stall. A prorogation or an election can end it entirely.
Canada has lived this recently. The previous online harms bill (C-63), along with privacy bill C-27 and cybersecurity bill C-26, all died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued in early 2025. Following the election, this reset the deck, which is why the government is trying a completely fresh approach with C-34.
The numbers
Bottom line
C-34 is the most ambitious digital safety bill Canada has tabled. If it passes, it changes how children under 16 use the internet and writes the first rules for AI chatbots.
Resources & tools
Read the bill
- Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act (Bill C-34) (Canadian Heritage)
- An Act to enact the Digital Safety Act and the Digital Safety Commission of Canada Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts (Parliament of Canada)
- News release: legislation to make social media and AI chatbots safer for children (Canadian Heritage)
- Backgrounder: legislation to combat online harms (Canadian Heritage)
The evidence behind it
- Online child sexual exploitation: A statistical profile of police-reported incidents in Canada, 2024 (Statistics Canada)
- Cybervictimization and mental health among Canadian youth (NIH)
Related regulatory work
- Age assurance guidance for websites and online services (Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada)