Everything You Wanted to Know About a Kids’ Social Media Ban (But Were Rightly Afraid to Ask): A FAQ on Age Verification and Mandated ID for Everyone
Key takeaway: a kids’ social media ban is an ineffective and harmful policy that raises privacy concerns for tens of millions of Canadians through mandated age verification requirements
The government is expected to table the Digital Safety Act on Wednesday with reports that it will include a ban on social media for those under 16, framed as a “temporary” measure that platforms can exit once a new digital regulator certifies their safety standards. I have been writing about these issues, from the original Online Harms Act to mandated age verification and website blocking and now the kids’ ban, for several years. This FAQ gathers the analysis in one place, with links throughout to the longer pieces for anyone who wants to go deeper. The key takeaway is that a kids’ social media ban is an ineffective and harmful policy that raises privacy concerns for tens of millions of Canadians through mandated age verification requirements. The policy fails to address the underlying concerns with social media and the prospect of a “temporary” ban makes little sense since the requirement might be reversible, but the data collection and regulatory infrastructure are permanent.
What is the government reportedly about to introduce?
According to the Globe and Mail, the forthcoming bill would bar anyone under 16 from social media. The government will indicate that this is a temporary safeguard with an opt-back-in once a regulator certifies safety standards. The government will frame this as “temporary” measure, but I argue that once established, there is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube given that the policy will require a regulator and proof of age from everyone.
Didn’t this start with Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act? What happened to it?
Bill C-63 was the government’s 2024 online harms bill, and from my first-day take I described it as effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of provisions focused on platforms that featured a duty to act responsibly, more contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act provisions, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission modelled on the CRTC to be funded by the tech companies. My view was that the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions should have been dropped or incorporated into a separate piece of legislation. Bill C-63 itself died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election, but the duty-to-act-responsibly model is likely to survive as part of the forthcoming bill.
Why is a kids’ social media ban bad policy?
I set out at least six reasons in this post on the issue. The most important is the first: the harms people associate with social media, such as algorithmic manipulation, addictive engagement design, weak content moderation, inconsistent enforcement, inadequate transparency, and privacy risks, affect users of every age. Treating them as a children’s problem misidentifies both the source of the harm and the right target of regulation. By focusing legislative attention on who is permitted to use social media rather than on how the platforms operate, an age-based ban lets legislators and the companies off the hook from more effective broad-based regulation. The other reasons identified in the post include the absence of evidence that bans work, the privacy harms they create, and the constitutional rights of the children they claim to protect.
Does the ban actually work?
The evidence to date says no. Australia’s under-16 ban took effect in December 2025, and the eSafety Commissioner’s first compliance report found that roughly 70 per cent of children who had accounts before the ban retained access to at least one platform three months later, with no discernible reduction in cyberbullying or image-based abuse complaints from under-16 users. Children route around age gates through VPNs, borrowed accounts, and false birthdates, and the most at-risk users are the most likely to circumvent them. Professor Lisa Given laid out much of this on a Law Bytes episode before most of the data was even in. Canadian politicians now citing the Australian approach with approval are pointing to a model whose own regulator’s data suggests has thus far proven ineffective. At a recent Canada 2020 event in Ottawa, Australian professor Amanda Third confirmed that kids are actively circumventing the ban and indicated that parents are concerned that their children are now less safe.
Doesn’t polling show overwhelming public support for a ban?
The headline number is real but misleading. The March 2026 Angus Reid Institute survey found that three-quarters of respondents support a full ban on social media for those under 16, and politicians have cited it repeatedly. But as McGill’s Sara Grimes documented on this Law Bytes podcast episode, the less-quoted numbers in the same survey complicate the picture: 72 per cent said parents, not governments, should be primarily responsible for regulating teens’ social media use, only 32 per cent picked 16 as the right threshold, and the survey did not ask respondents anything about the mechanism any ban would actually require. Simply put, public support for “protect kids from harm” is not the same as public support for “every Canadian must submit ID to a third-party provider in order to use the internet”.
Hasn’t social media been proven harmful to kids?
The data on social media harms to kids is far more mixed than is often portrayed in the media and in Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation book that has fuelled much of the legislative panic. Grimes has produced a very accessible explainer on the issue that walks through the science. As she notes in Panic First, Evidence Later, “there is a serious problem. Researchers who have spent their entire careers studying adolescent mental health, children’s digital media, developmental science, and media psychology – the people who actually built the evidence base Haidt draws on – have raised sustained, substantive objections to his core claims.”
What do you mean when you say a “kids’ ban” means ID for everyone?
There is no way to keep people under 16 off a platform without determining the age of everyone who uses it, because identifying who falls below the line necessarily means identifying who sits above it. A rule aimed at a minority of users is therefore an age-verification mandate imposed on the whole population, and it makes no difference whether the government calls the result a ban, a restriction, or a safeguard. Tens of millions of Canadians who are not the target of the policy would be required to prove their age, typically to foreign third-party verification services, before doing the ordinary things they already do online, such as posting a photo or uploading a video. That is why the government’s “AI for All” policy turns, in practice, into ID for all for social media.
Why is mandated age verification a privacy risk?
I set out the legal and privacy concerns in detail in this post titled Risky Business. Age verification requires users to submit identity documents to third-party providers that are typically outside Canada, which makes it difficult to apply Canadian privacy law to the data they collect. A breach at any one of them exposes government-issued identification to the entire internet, as the October 2025 Discord breach demonstrated when roughly 70,000 users’ IDs were leaked. Age estimation, the alternative, carries even greater risks, because it cannot reliably distinguish a 16-year-old from a 17-year-old and so relies on additional surveillance of a user’s posts, messages, and contacts to improve its guess, with documented accuracy problems for darker skin tones raising racial bias concerns. Hundreds of scientists and technology experts signed an open letter calling for a moratorium on mandatory age assurance. Waterloo professor Ian Goldberg explained the technical case on this Law Bytes podcast episode.
If the ban is “temporary,” why does it matter?
Because the requirement might be reversible, but the data collection and regulatory infrastructure are not. Once Canada has required every user to prove who they are in order to police a single age line, that requirement and the system built to enforce it remain in place regardless of whether a particular restriction is later lifted. That is the toothpaste problem: a nationwide ID-verification system, once established, cannot be put back in the tube.
Don’t children need protection more than they need rights?
Children are both objects of protection and rights-holders, and Canadian and international law has been moving steadily toward recognizing the latter. Section 2(b) of the Charter protects freedom of expression, including the right to receive expression, so a law blocking an entire age cohort from lawful platforms restricts a Charter-protected interest of the very people the legislation claims to protect, since a teenager researching a medical condition, learning to code, exploring identity questions, or doing homework with AI assistance is engaged in receiving expression at the core of what section 2(b) covers. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child affirmed in General Comment 25 that children’s rights to information, expression, association, and participation apply in the digital environment. Social media is also a documented lifeline for marginalized youth, including LGBTQ+ youth in non-affirming environments, so a ban hits hardest the kids with the fewest alternatives. Australia’s High Court is already hearing a constitutional challenge to its under-16 ban on free expression grounds, and Canadian courts will face the same questions.
How does this connect to Bill S-209 (formerly S-210)?
It is the same age-verification machinery under a different justification. Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne’s age-verification and website-blocking bill, which a few years ago I called the most dangerous Canadian internet bill few had heard of, was nominally aimed at pornography sites but drafted broadly enough to capture search, social media, streaming, and AI services. Bill S-210, an earlier version, died with the election call and returned in the Senate as S-209. At committee, the bill’s own sponsor confirmed that the government could apply the age-verification and blocking requirements to any site, including social media like X, through a broad regulation-making power. S-209 has since cleared clause-by-clause review at the Senate committee, with the social media reach functioning as a feature rather than a bug. The bill is currently at first reading in the House of Commons. The social media kids’ ban and S-209 are best understood not as separate debates but as one continuous arc toward mandated age verification.
What about provinces doing their own thing?
A patchwork of provincial laws with different age thresholds, verification regimes, enforcement bodies, and definitions of a regulated service would make everything worse. Manitoba’s Premier Wab Kinew has announced his government would be the first to ban kids from both social media and AI chatbots, and a province-by-province approach would force platforms either to maintain separate compliance systems for each jurisdiction, which smaller services cannot bear, or to block Canadian users entirely. We have seen that second outcome before, with the Online News Act and the lost access to news links.
If not a ban, then what?
Rejecting a ban does not mean rejecting regulation. Rather, it places the emphasis on the need to regulate the platforms, not the user. The right model is the duty to act responsibly that was at the core of the original Online Harms Act, combined with algorithmic transparency requirements and meaningful safety obligations. The government can impose requirements on how platforms are designed and create liability for failure to meet them without locking anyone out or assembling a nationwide ID system. I made this case in the Globe in the wake of the Meta and YouTube verdict, arguing that the jury got the instinct right but the law wrong: the companies’ real wrong was knowing their services posed foreseeable risks to young users and failing to take reasonable steps to mitigate them, which is a duty-of-care problem that calls for a duty-of-care solution rather than a product-defect theory or a blunt ban. Modernized privacy law, rumoured to be coming before the House of Commons rises for the summer, is also essential.
Where can I learn more?
The fuller treatment is spread across the following pieces and podcasts, grouped by thread.
The kids’ social media and AI chatbot ban
You Can’t Put the Toothpaste Back in the Tube: Why a “Temporary” Ban Means Mandated ID for Everyone (June 2026)
The Illusion of Protection: Why Canada’s Push to Ban Social Media for Kids Won’t Work (the six-reasons centerpiece)
Government Has a Choice: Why an AI Chatbot Ban for Kids is an Even Worse Idea
Why the Defective-Design Verdict Gets the Instinct Right But the Law Wrong (the “regulate design, not the user” alternative)
Law Bytes Ep. 268: Sara Grimes on the moral panic behind the bans
Age verification and website blocking (S-210 to S-209)
The Most Dangerous Canadian Internet Bill You’ve Never Heard Of (foundational framing)
Risky Business: The Legal and Privacy Concerns of Mandatory Age Verification
Senate Bill Would Grant Power to Mandate Age Verification for Search, Social Media and AI
Law Bytes Ep. 261: Ian Goldberg on the privacy risks of age assurance
The original Online Harms Act (Bill C-63)
My First Take on the Online Harms Act (the “three-in-one” framing)
Why the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act Provisions Should Be Removed
Post originally appeared at https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/06/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-a-kids-social-media-ban-but-were-rightly-afraid-to-ask-a-faq-on-age-verification-and-mandated-id-for-everyone/
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It’s weird how “ineffective and harmful” (not to mention staggeringly expensive) are so irresistible to Liberal politicians. My bond trading mentor, back in the day, used to say that the two most dangerous things in the world were a hooker with a chipped tooth and a politician with an idea. Some things never change.