There’s a growing push across Canada to ban kids from social media. The federal Liberals are behind it, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew is championing it, and the political momentum is real. But Michael Geist, a tech law professor at the University of Ottawa, thinks the whole thing is a mistake and he’s not mincing words about it (he never does in his analysis of questionable government policy).
Age limits don’t actually work
Australia is often held up as proof that this kind of legislation can succeed. Geist says the numbers tell a different story. About 70 per cent of underage Australian users kept their accounts within three months of the country’s under-16 ban taking effect. The kids found workarounds (they always do), as expected.
Age restrictions also don’t touch the real problems: addictive platform design, algorithmic rabbit holes, and the deliberate engineering of compulsive use. Instead of forcing tech companies to change how their products work, bans let them off the hook entirely. As Geist puts it, an age-based ban “functions as a pressure-relief valve for legislators and a gift to the companies,” shifting scrutiny away from how platforms operate and onto who’s allowed to use them.
Your ID, their database
Enforcing any age ban requires age verification. And at scale, that means millions of Canadians handing over government ID to third-party companies, many of them operating outside the country, with no guarantee of how that data gets stored or used.
Geist calls this a “catastrophic breach potential.” Even softer approaches, like AI-based age estimation, come with their own problems: they require platforms to analyze private messages and social connections, which is its own form of surveillance. As Geist frames it: “In the name of greater protection, the technology puts people at greater risk.”
Canadian children also have rights under the Charter, including freedom of expression and access to information. Blocking an entire age group from lawful platforms may not just be bad policy; Geist says it could be unconstitutional.
Political theatre with real costs
Essentially, Geist says the ban won’t keep most kids off these platforms, it won’t meaningfully reduce harm, and it will impose privacy and free speech costs on everyone in the process. He concludes that protecting children is an easy thing to campaign on. Actually changing how social media platforms are designed and regulated is harder, and that’s exactly what these proposals avoid doing.
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