441-02214 (Health)

The Government would like to thank the petitioners for expressing their concerns regarding the protection of young people online, especially with regards to sexual extortion and exposure to sexually explicit material. The Government recognizes that is a very important issue and is committed to ensuring the safety of young people online. 

The Government recently tabled legislation (Bill C-63) on February 26, 2024, to promote online safety by reducing the exposure to harmful content on social media services, with a special emphasis on protecting children. Bill C-63 creates a new Online Harms Act – a baseline standard for online platforms to keep Canadians safe and to hold online platforms accountable for the content they host. 

The Online Harms Act imposes three statutory duties that establish minimum standards that services must meet to ensure the safety of Canadians online: 

1. Duty to Act Responsibly  

2. Duty to Protect Children 

3. Duty to Make Certain Content Inaccessible  

The Duty to Act Responsibly establishes a standard of conduct that social media services must follow to ensure the safety of users on their platforms and to create more transparency and accountability about how they deal with harmful content.   

As raised in your petition, the Government also agrees there is a need for platforms to implement user empowerment tools to protect children. Under the Duty to Protect Children, social media services would need to provide protections for children online including the integration of age-appropriate design features on their platforms, and to be more transparent by reporting on the specific measures that they are taking to protect children. Design features could include things like defaults for parental controls, default settings related to warning labels for children, or safe search settings for a service’s internal search function. They could also include design features to limit children’s exposure to harmful content, including explicit adult content, cyberbullying content, and content that incites self-harm.  

The Duty to Make Certain Content Inaccessible requires social media services to expeditiously remove two categories of content from their services:   

1. Content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, and   

1. Intimate content communicated without consent.   

The Act also creates a new Digital Safety Commission of Canada to oversee and enforce the Act; a Digital Safety Ombudsperson of Canada to advocate for and support victims and a Digital Safety Office of Canada which supports both administratively. Part of the Digital Safety Commission’s mandate would be to enforce the removal of content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor and intimate content communicated without consent; and to set new standards for online safety by providing guidance to services on how to mitigate risk, perform research, work with stakeholders, and develop educational resources for the public, including children and parents. Resources for parents would help raise awareness for online safety as it relates to their children, and to promote safe usage of social media services. Overall, the Digital Safety Commission would be able to enact guidelines and regulations under the three duties, which would allow the legislation to be adaptable and to grow over time as the landscape of harmful content affecting children changes. 

The Online Harms legislation was developed following extensive consultations by the Government of Canada since 2021, including public consultations, an Expert Advisory Group on Online Safety, a Citizens’ Assembly on Democratic Expression focused on online safety, and 22 online and virtual roundtables across Canada, as well as consultations held in 2020 by the Minister of Justice, when he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice. Among all the engagements there was strong consensus for protecting children and youth from online harm. Summaries of consultations can be found online https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/harmful-online-content.html 

Overall, the Government recognizes that the digital world can pose significant risks. Social media can be used to sexually exploit children, promote self-harm to children, incite violence, put people’s safety at risk and foment hate. Bill C-63 would create stronger online protections for children and better safeguard everyone in Canada from online hate and other types of harmful content. It would hold online platforms, including livestreaming and user-uploaded adult content services, accountable for reducing users’ exposure to harmful content on their platforms and help prevent its spread.