Canadian Bill C-34: Is Age Gating a Safety Measure or More Of A Political Optic?
- The White Hatter
- 9 minutes ago
- 9 min read
CAVEAT - This is a follow-up To Our Article “Canada Bill C-34 Social Media Act - The Good, The Bad, and The Concerning Unknown (1)”
Given that we have had a couple more days to digest the content of Bill C-34, one aspect that we find particularly interesting is the apparent exemption from the proposed age gating requirement of 16 for AI chatbots, private messaging applications, and many gaming platforms (2).
Based on the Bill as currently drafted, and on statements made by Minister Marc Miller during the government’s announcement, the proposed under 16 age gate does not appear to apply universally across all online services. Instead, it is focused primarily on what will eventually be classified as “regulated social media services” all of which have yet to be identified.
From what has been publicly stated so far, the age gating provisions do not appear to apply to:
Private messaging applications which could include WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and similar services.
AI chatbot services.
Many gaming platforms and online games, unless they are later designated as a regulated “social media services” through future regulations.
Other online services that do not ultimately fall within the legal definition of a “social media service” under the Bill.
To be clear, these services are not exempt from the legislation entirely. AI chatbots, messaging platforms, gaming environments, and other online services may still be subject to safety by design obligations, risk mitigation requirements, transparency measures, reporting obligations, and oversight provisions under the proposed legislation. However, according to the government’s current explanation, the proposed age gate of 16 would not apply to these categories.
This raises an important question, “If restricting access based on age is considered a critical component of protecting young people online, why exempt some of the very environments where many of today’s risks are increasingly occurring?” Was the decision to age gate certain social media services, while exempting others, driven primarily by evidence, or was it in part a political compromise designed to satisfy some of the most vocal advocates and lobbyists that were calling for age restrictions on youth access to online platforms, many of whom were on stage with the Minister during the press scrum?
This question becomes particularly relevant when considering that several digital environments frequently used by young people, including messaging services, gaming platforms, and AI chatbot applications, appear to fall outside the scope of the proposed age gating provisions that this Bill enacts. If the central objective is to reduce youth exposure to online harms, it’s reasonable to ask why some platforms are subject to age based restrictions while others, where many of the same risks can and do occur, are not.
The selective application of age gating raises an important policy question. Is the age gate primarily a targeted safety measure supported by clear evidence demonstrating where harms occur and how they can be prevented, or is it also serving a symbolic political function by demonstrating government action on a highly visible public concern?
As Parliament debates Bill C-34, Canadians deserve a clear explanation of the evidence and rationale used to determine which services are included, which are excluded, and why. Without that transparency, some may question whether the age gating provisions are being driven more by political optics, rather than an evidence based approach to online safety.
Over the past several years, as digital literacy and internet safety advocated who have presented to over 700,000 youth and teens from across Canada, we have observed a significant migration by those seeking to exploit, groom, radicalize, recruit, extort, or otherwise harm youth online. Increasingly, these activities are taking place through private messaging platforms, gaming ecosystems, and AI powered conversational tools rather than through traditional social media alone.
In fact, many of the youth exploitation cases we have assisted with began on one platform but quickly moved to private messaging services, encrypted communications apps, or other online spaces that would not appear to be subject to the proposed age gating provisions.
This is what makes the legislative distinction in this Bill so interesting. The government appears to be acknowledging that risks exist on messaging apps, gaming platforms, and AI chatbots by including safety obligations for these services within the broader legislative framework. However, those same environments are not currently subject to the proposed age restriction requirements of what we call legacy social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok.
If the risks are significant enough to justify regulatory intervention, then why is age gating considered necessary for one category of online service where risks are real, but not the others where the same risks apply?
That question becomes even more important when we recognize that many of the specific harms cited in support of age gating legislation, including grooming, sextortion, fraud, radicalization, coercion, and exploitation, often occur through direct messaging, private communications, gaming communities, and increasingly through AI enabled interactions.
This is why we continue to question whether age gating should be a focus at all in Bill C-34. If the objective is to reduce harm, then perhaps the more effective approach is to focus on the design of digital products themselves which this proposed Bill absolutely does. Safety by design requirements, transparency obligations, risk assessments, reporting mechanisms, effective moderation systems, and meaningful accountability for platform operators have the potential to protect users regardless of their age, or which platform they happen to be using.
The reality is that online harms are not created or prevented by a birthday. A young person does not suddenly become immune to manipulation, exploitation, fraud, coercion, or predatory behaviour when they turn 16. Risks are not confined to platforms that meet whatever legal definition of a social media service is eventually adopted through regulation.
One of the biggest unresolved issues with Bill C-34 is that many of the most important details have been deferred to future regulations and to the proposed Digital Safety Commission to be worked out sometime down the road. Canadians still do not know with certainty which platforms will ultimately be classified as regulated social media services, what age verification methods may be required, how exemptions may be applied, or how broadly the legislation will eventually be interpreted. This uncertainty matters because the real world impact of the legislation will depend far more on the regulations than on the Bill itself.
The important caveat is that Bill C-34 is only at first reading. The legislation can still be amended as it moves through committee review and parliamentary debate. The future regulations, which have not yet been published, will likely determine much of the Bill’s practical scope and impact.
For us, however, the question remains, “If policymakers acknowledge that messaging apps, gaming platforms, and AI chatbots present risks that require robust safety standards, then why age gate one category of online service while exempting others where many of the same harms are known to occur?”
Had the government introduced legislation focused exclusively on safety by design requirements, platform accountability, and the creation of a Digital Safety Commission to enforce the legislation, we believe there would have been broad support from a wide range of stakeholders, including from us here at the White Hatter. Requiring platforms to identify and mitigate foreseeable risks, improve transparency, strengthen reporting mechanisms, and be held accountable for failures to protect users are measures that many Canadians could likely agree upon regardless of their position on the age gating debate.
However, by introducing a blanket age gate of 16, the conversation has shifted away from what many would consider the strongest parts of the legislation, namely platform accountability, safety by design requirements, and meaningful oversight. Instead, and rightly so, the debate has become increasingly focused on a series of far more controversial issues, including age verification, age estimation technologies, privacy rights, data collection, enforcement, and constitutional concerns which the inclusion of age gating creates.
More importantly, the age gating provision does not affect only those under the age of 16. In practice, if platforms are required to prevent underage users from accessing their services, they must also be able to determine who is over the age of 16. This means that Bill C-34 and its age assurance mechanisms will likely affect all 40+ million Canadians who wish to access regulated online services that this Bill creates, regardless of their age. Because there is no practical way to prevent individuals under the age of 16 from accessing a platform without first determining the age of everyone attempting to use it, the impact of age gating extends far beyond the population it is intended to regulate.
In practice, this means that tens of millions of Canadians, including adults who are not the target of the legislation, could be required to verify their age before engaging in routine online activities. In many cases, this verification would likely be conducted through third-party age assurance providers, some of which may be foreign based entities.
This raises significant and important privacy concerns. To restrict access for a relatively small segment of the population, all users may be required to provide additional personal information or biometric data simply to access services they have used for years. As a result, the debate is no longer limited to youth access and online safety. It also becomes a discussion about privacy, data collection, data retention, cybersecurity risks, and the proportionality of requiring millions of law-abiding Canadians to verify their identity in order to participate in everyday online communication and social interaction.
As a result, what began as legislation aimed at protecting youth now raises broader questions about how every Canadian will verify their age online, what personal information may need to be collected or processed, who will have access to that information, how it will be safeguarded, and what risks may emerge from creating new systems of digital identity verification.
This is why we believe the age gating provision will now become a focal point of the debate. Rather than concentrating exclusively on improving the safety of online environments, the discussion has expanded into broader concerns about privacy, civil liberties, technological feasibility, and the unintended consequences that may arise when age verification becomes a prerequisite for participation in digital spaces.
One of our primary concerns is that there is currently very little evidence demonstrating that age gating, by itself, meaningfully reduces the online harms that proponents claim it will address. While the objective may be well intentioned, public policy is generally strongest when it is supported by clear evidence that the proposed intervention is likely to achieve its intended outcome.
The introduction of an age gate also creates a host of additional questions that now become central to the public debate. How will age be verified? Will platforms be required to collect government issued identification? Will age estimation technologies be used? What safeguards will be in place to protect personal information? How will these systems impact privacy rights for both youth and adults? What happens when age verification systems make mistakes? How will accessibility and equity concerns be addressed?
These are not minor implementation details. They are significant policy questions that touch on privacy, civil liberties, data security, digital inclusion, and proportionality.
By introducing age gating into the legislation, the government has effectively expanded the debate from one focused on platform accountability to one that now encompasses privacy rights, surveillance concerns, technological feasibility, enforcement challenges, and constitutional considerations. As a result, what may have otherwise been a relatively straightforward discussion about safety by design, has become a much larger and more complex policy battle in our opinion.
It is also reasonable to expect that the age gating provisions could invite legal scrutiny under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a legal foundation that other countries who have implemented age gating, such as Australia, do not have to contend with. Any law that restricts access to lawful forms of communication, expression, or participation in digital spaces based solely on age will likely face Charter challenges about whether those restrictions are justified, proportionate, and minimally impairing (3). Whether such challenges ultimately succeed is a question for the courts, but this possibility alone could significantly slow implementation and create years of legal uncertainty.
Ironically, the aspect of Bill C-34 receiving the greatest amount of media attention and public debate may ultimately be the provision that delivers the least measurable improvement in online safety, while generating the greatest amount of controversy, legal uncertainty, and political division.
In our view, the most meaningful and potentially effective components of Bill C-34 are not the age gating provisions, but rather the sections focused on platform accountability, safety by design requirements, risk mitigation, transparency, and regulatory oversight. These measures aim to address the underlying conditions that can facilitate harm online, regardless of the age of the user.
Unlike age based restrictions, which attempt to control who can access a service, safety by design approaches focus on how a service operates. They seek to reduce harmful features, improve reporting and response mechanisms, increase corporate responsibility, and create incentives for platforms to prioritize user safety from the outset. In other words, they target the architecture of harm rather than relying on a birthday as the primary line of defence.
This distinction matters. Online harms such as predation, fraud, exploitation, harassment, coercion, and manipulation are not problems that suddenly appear at age 15 and disappear at age 16. They are risks that can affect people across one’s lifespan. By focusing on platform design and accountability, lawmakers have and opportunity to create protections that benefit all Canadians, whether they are 13, 16, 30, or 60 years old.
In fact, one could argue that if Bill C-34 had concentrated exclusively on strengthening safety by design obligations and establishing a robust regulatory framework to hold platforms accountable, there may have been far broader consensus and significantly less controversy. Instead, the inclusion of the age gating provisions will now shift much of the public discussion away from platform responsibility and toward contentious debates about age verification, privacy, enforcement, effectiveness, Charter challenges, and government overreach.
As a result, a provision that may have the smallest, if any, impact on reducing online harm has become the centrepiece of the public conversation, while the provisions that may have the greatest potential to improve online safety for everyone risk being overshadowed.
Digital Food For Thought
The White Hatter
Facts Not Fear, Facts Not Emotions, Enlighten Not Frighten, Know Tech Not No Tech
References:
