Why Canada’s Upcoming Safe Social Media Act May be Dead on Arrival

Australia’s world-first attempt to legally ban teenagers from social media has suffered a major breakdown just months after going live. According to a Reuters report, the country’s under-16 social media ban is failing to clear the very first step of age verification.

The collapse offers a timely warning to Ottawa, where the federal government is currently pushing forward with its own matching legislation under Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act.

The alarming findings come from a study by KJR, a software testing firm that originally advised the Australian government on how to roll out its age-assurance infrastructure. Researchers decided to test the real-world compliance of the law by opening fifty dummy accounts across nine major online networks, including Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.

For every single account, the testers manually declared the user’s age as sixteen. Astonishingly, not a single platform asked for verification or proof of age before opening the account. The massive failure exposes a fundamental structural flaw in how tech companies handle age tracking.

This failure of the Australian model directly undermines the core logic behind Canada’s proposed Bill C-34. Introduced by Heritage Minister Marc Miller, the Safe Social Media Act aims to impose a strict 16-year-old minimum age limit for creating social media accounts in Canada, threatening non-compliant tech firms with fines of up to 3 percent of their global revenue.

However, the messy reality on the ground shows that a blunt ban is structurally impossible to enforce. If sophisticated tech giants cannot accurately trigger an initial age check across millions of active daily users, a Canadian mandate will hit the exact same roadblock.

A separate study published in the British Medical Journal highlights the absurdity of the situation. Researchers tracking teenagers three months after the Australian ban took effect found that a staggering 86% of adolescents under sixteen simply continued to use their favorite apps. The most common workaround was the oldest and simplest trick in the digital book i.e. teenagers just lied about their birthday or logged into an account belonging to a friend or older sibling.

The push for a Canadian ban ignores the unintended consequences that are already hurting younger users overseas. Legal experts note that Canadian youth are already experiencing a massive news deficit following the Online News Act, which resulted in Meta blocking all news links across Facebook and Instagram nationwide.

Canadian teens have since relied heavily on YouTube and TikTok to follow current events and civic discussions. Imposing a broken account-level ban will cut them off from these vital informational spaces entirely. Rather than keeping kids safe, Ottawa risks isolating an entire generation from the digital world while doing absolutely nothing to solve the underlying online harms they face.