Latest news with #OnlineHarmsAct
Scoop
5 days ago
- Business
- Scoop
Civil Society Calls For Overhaul Of Canada's Approach To Digital Policy
May 28, 2025 Today, OpenMedia and 13 other prominent Canadian civil society organizations and digital policy experts delivered a joint letter to key federal ministers, urging fundamental reform of Canada's strategy for digital policymaking. The letter calls for an end to the last government's practice of packing digital legislation into sprawling, multi-part omnibus bills such as Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, and Bill C-27, which covered private sector privacy reform and AI regulation. The signatories agree the government must address critical issues such as online safety, privacy, and artificial intelligence, but believe separate pieces of legislation advanced to fulfill a unified digital policy vision is the best approach for our new government to regulate them. 'Canadians deserve sensible, nuanced digital policy that can comfortably pass in a minority Parliament," said Matt Hatfield, Executive Director of OpenMedia. "We've seen how omnibus legislation plays out: the most controversial portions drown out the rest, and committees spend their time debating overreaching measures instead of getting effective digital regulation done. That's why we're asking our government to work with every party to pass basic rights-respecting privacy and online safety measures that are now many years past due." The signatories observe that a fragmented approach to Canada's digital policy, split between different government agencies with competing mandates and agendas, has led to the failure of long-promised digital policy reforms to receive due study, appropriate amendments, and be adopted by Parliament. The letter's authors point to the recent appointment of Evan Solomon as Minister for AI and Digital Innovation on May 13th as a key opportunity for the government to better signal its priorities and implement a more cohesive legislative vision. Many signatories engaged the government throughout its consideration of illegal online content that informed Bill C-63, including through a 2024 letter that recommended splitting the Bill, 2023 expert letter outlining red lines and recommendations for potential legislation, and by individual submissions to the government's 2021 consultation. Many also participated in Parliament's INDU Committee consideration of Bill C-27, delivering recommendations on privacy amendments, artificial intelligence regulation amendments, or both. Through this experience, the signatories observed Parliament struggle to grapple effectively with either bill. Controversial proposals attached to both overwhelmed productive discussion, preventing amendment and passage of more substantive and widely supported sections. The letter concludes with five core recommendations for future legislation, including placing overall coordination responsibility for digital policy under a single department; advancing Canada's digital policy agenda through separate legislative proposals; and prioritizing areas of broad consensus for rapid legislative improvement first.
Epoch Times
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Epoch Times
Canada Needs ‘Even-Handed' Policy to Protect Youth From Social Media Harm Without Compromising Free Speech: Report
As social media is increasingly linked to youth mental health concerns, Canada should consider focusing on how children use these platforms rather than regulating online content, a new report suggests. It argues that content-based regulation could raise concerns about privacy and freedom of expression. While governments in some countries have introduced policies aimed at reducing online harm to youth by moderating content on social media platforms, enforcing these policies in a consistent and impartial way can be difficult, as definitions of 'harmful' content are often subjective and context-dependent, says an April 15 The report, titled 'Wired for worry: How smartphones and social media are harming Canadian youth,' examines the link between declining youth mental health and the widespread use of smartphones and social media, as well as the measures adopted by some governments to reduce social media's impact on youth. It notes that efforts to regulate social media content to curb its effects on youth, such as those proposed in Canada's Online Harms Act, could be misused, if implemented, to silence critics or dissenting voices. 'Given the risks to free speech and privacy posed by many attempts at social media regulation, Canada should aim for an even-handed policy response that protects the mental health of young people without significantly threatening privacy, creating new bureaucracies, or demanding complex changes to social media platforms,' reads the report. The report's author, Jonah Davids, a Toronto-based researcher and writer, says that 'beyond clearly depraved content like child pornography and snuff films, or material explicitly promoting self-harm or suicide, there is little consensus about what constitutes 'harmful' content.' Related Stories 4/11/2025 4/5/2025 'Liberals might view an Instagram video cautioning adolescents against gender transitioning as harmful, while conservatives might see a video encouraging gender transitioning as harmful,' Davids wrote, adding that it would be 'deeply problematic' for governments to restrict content in a 'neutral, consistent, and fair' manner. The Liberal government under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, in Parliament in February 2024, but the legislation died earlier this year when Trudeau The legislation Ottawa previously Civil liberties groups like the Canadian Civil Liberties Association had Then-Justice Minister Arif Virani said at the time the bill would enhance free expression by targeting 'the worst' online content and 'empowering all people to safely participate in online debate.' The Impact of Social Media on Youth The report's author says social media is a major contributing factor, if not the main cause, of declining mental health among young Canadians. Depression rates among Canadians aged 15 to 24 doubled to 14 percent over the decade leading up to 2022, while anxiety rates quadrupled in the same age group, says the report, with the increases coinciding with the widespread adoption of smartphones and social media in the early 2010s. 'Time spent on social media now often replaces in-person interaction, exposes users to damaging content, and leads some to interpret normal distress as mental health symptoms,' reads the report. 'Studies suggest that one to two hours of daily social media use is associated with good mental health, but mental health worsens as use increases beyond that.' Davids cites a theory developed by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, which suggests that social media harms youth mental health by limiting in-person social interactions. [Page 8] 'The introduction of smartphones and social media have created a developmental environment where youth spend less time in person with friends and family and more time online,' says the report. 'As social media saps time away from building these critical relationships, youth grow more anxious and depressed.' In addition to limited in-person contact, social media may expose youth to various risks, the report says, including cyberbullying, mockery and harassment through private messages, or public humiliation through posts shared by others. They can also be blackmailed, threatened, and extorted through social media, which can result in serious consequences, as observed in the As well, exposure to social media content can not only trigger the desire in youth to compare themselves to others, thus leading to body image, self-esteem, or self-harm issues; but also lead to the conscious or unconscious adoption of symptoms of mental or neurological disorders. One example cited by the author involves a group of The author notes that the rise in mental health diagnoses since 2010 may also reflect a longer-term trend of 'diagnostic inflation,' where mild symptoms of distress are increasingly labeled as mental health conditions or other disorders. 'Given that information and ideas about mental health spread through social media, using these platforms could increase one's chances of interpreting normal distress as a mental health issue or diagnosable disorder, which would help to explain the uptick in self-reported mental health symptoms,' reads the report. Policy Proposals The author argues that regulating the content youth encounter on the Internet is less likely to tackle the harms of social media than limiting the time they spend on these platforms. 'Given that the exorbitant amount of time youth spend on social media is a major contributor to its adverse impact on their mental health, bills that restrict young people from using social media until they are a reasonable age are likely to be better at getting to the root of the problem than bills that protect them from specific types of content,' writes the author. He proposes raising the minimum age of social media use in Canada from 13 to 16, following He also recommends strengthening school policies that restrict cellphone and social media use. Eight provinces currently have some form of restriction, says the report, ranging from requiring phones to be kept out of sight to fully banning them in classrooms. Re-orienting children around 'free play' and in-person interactions instead of screens is another proposal outlined in the report. Schools could contribute to the initiative by reducing reliance on screens in education, and promoting outdoor time and socialization when possible, it says. Families could play a role in this regard by 'setting clear limits on screen time, ensuring their children have ample opportunities for independent outdoor play and face-to-face socialization, and modeling healthy screen use themselves,' Davids wrote. Matthew Horwood contributed to this report.
National Post
09-05-2025
- Politics
- National Post
Amy Hamm: The Mark Carney threat to free speech
Prime Minister Minister Mark Carney cannot be trusted with our Charter-protected right to free expression. The man has been clear: during the election campaign, Carney spoke scornfully of our most essential freedom, our speech, from which all our other freedoms flow. Article content Carney has hinted that his Liberal government will bring back some iteration of Trudeau's tyrannical — there is no other word for it — Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, which was killed when the former prime minister prorogued parliament this January. You will recall that this now-defunct legislation would have granted judges the ability to mete out life sentences for hate speech, and would have created a government 'Digital Safety Commission' to police Canadians' speech, and impose life-destroying fines upon those whose speech was deemed hateful by our government censors. Article content Article content It was frightening legislation. But not, apparently, to Prime Minister Carney. Article content Article content In April, at two of Carney's rallies in Ontario, he announced his government's proposed plan to tackle crime and improve public safety. 'Large American online platforms have become seas of racism, misogyny, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and hate — in all its forms. And they're being used by criminals to harm our children. My government will act,' said Carney. Article content We have heard this before: Carney is using the same tactic of his predecessor. It was Justin Trudeau who first attempted to manipulate Canadians with fear for our children's safety as a means to sneak in repressive, anti-free speech legislation. Article content Consider then-prime minister Trudeau's words from a February 2024 news conference in Edmonton: 'We know and everyone can agree that kids are vulnerable online, to hatred, to violence, to being bullied, to seeing and being affected by terrible things online. And we need to do a better job as a society to protect our kids online,' Trudeau said, one week before tabling Bill C-63. Article content And now, back to Carney last month: 'New online platforms have created new threats, including and perhaps especially for children… And as much as we, as parents, want to protect our kids, we can't always be there. We can't always be looking over our kids' shoulders to see what they're doing, or what they're exposed to online. And so while protecting children is, first and foremost, a parent's responsibility, it is also a collective responsibility. And with the support of Canadians, my government will act to protect children online and bring those who seek to harm them to justice. We will first introduce legislation to protect children from online exploitation and extortion.' Article content Using Trudeau's old manipulation tactic, Carney has found an additional excuse to promote and justify government censorship. He revealed it at his April rally in Hamilton: 'One of the issues we're dealing with… misogyny, antisemitism, hatred, conspiracy theories — this sort of pollution that's online that washes over our virtual borders from the United States… and, that's fine… I can take the conspiracy theory and all that, but the more serious thing is when it affects how people behave in our society. When Canadians are threatened going to their community centres or their places of worship, or their schools,' said Carney.
CBC
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Who's protecting the 'beautiful, happy children' growing up online in influencer videos?
Mommy bloggers. Family vloggers. Kid-fluencers. Sharenting. There are any number of cute terms to describe the modern parenting phenomenon of sharing your children's lives online — and in the case of monetized influencers, making a hefty profit off them. But there's been a recent backlash to the sharenting trend, sometimes led by the kids of influencers themselves, and now some U.S. states even adding legal protections for children of online content creators. It's part of a growing reckoning about the dark side to those cute and funny videos of everyday parenting life. In Canada, despite some recent efforts to keep young people safe online, such as the Online Harms Act, current laws are lagging when it comes to the performative online work of children, explains Vass Bednar, the executive director of the Master of Public Policy Program at McMaster University in Hamilton. "I haven't seen any policy progress on this or even policy attention in Canada," Bednar told CBC News. "And maybe this is a generational problem, but we would still benefit from legislation in the meantime. Viewing your child as a potential way to monetize or perhaps get free stuff is, I think, so delicate and fraught." WATCH | Influencer explains why she's ditching gentle parenting: Why more parents are ditching the gentle approach 1 month ago Duration 9:20 A more empathetic approach, known as gentle parenting, has been a big trend in recent years, but experts and influencers are starting to push back. CBC's Deana Sumanac Johnson breaks down what's behind the growing resistance toward gentle parenting. Bednar admits that, like so many parents, she watches the cute influencer videos and funny reels when they come across her feed. Because there's a community to it, she explains. And as many studies and reports have pointed out, modern parenting can be extremely stressful and isolating. "But you start to wonder," Bednar said, "what is that like for those beautiful, happy children?" 'Building their brand … off their children' On Tuesday, Utah — a hot bed of family influencer culture with its large, nuclear families and religious lifestyles — signed a law that gives adults a path to scrub from all platforms the digital content they were featured in as minors and requires parents to set aside money for kids featured in content. Under Utah's H.B. 322 Child Actor Regulations, online creators who make more than $150,000 US a year from content featuring children will be required to set aside 15 per cent of those earnings into a trust fund that the kids can access when they turn 18. This follows the child abuse conviction of Ruby Franke, a mother of six who dispensed parenting advice to millions on YouTube before her arrest in 2023. She was sentenced to up to 60 years in prison for her abuses, which were motivated by religious extremism and included starving her children. Due to Utah law, she can only serve up to 30 years. Her now-ex-husband and some of her children had backed the child actor regulations bill. While Utah's move comes out of an extreme and chilling case, experts have pointed out that even parents with no intention of harming their children can exploit them due to the profit and fame that can come with influencer culture. "These parents are building their brand, and in turn their wealth, off of their children," noted a 2023 paper in the Chicago Journal of International Law. Utah's new law follows several other U.S. states that have added certain safeguards to the largely unregulated content-creation industry in recent years. Illinois, California and Minnesota have enacted laws protecting the earnings of young creators, and Minnesota's law includes a similar provision to Utah's that allows content featuring minors to be taken down. Canada's laws fall short Children working in entertainment is certainly not new. But while there are existing protections for child performers, Canada does not have any legislation that extends to children featured in social media content, explained Ava Smithing, a youth fellow at the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University. Yet, "this form of legislation is crucial," she told CBC News. And white Utah's new law suggests progress is being made, Smithing says she'd like to see Canada go a step further than making parents set aside 15 per cent of earnings because it's not enough to be a disincentive given how much money influencers can make. "It's like a drop in the bucket," she said. Canada's existing provincial labour laws fall short when the employer is the parent, says Bednar. For instance, Ontario's 2015 Protecting Child Performers Act sets out the requirements for employing child performers, but presumes some other entity is employing the child, she said. And there are rules about ensuring kids get adequate breaks, Bednar points out, but how does that apply when mom and dad are constantly filming your life? And in Alberta and B.C., it's unclear whether current employment regulations can apply to child influencers, notes a 2024 research paper published in the University of Victoria Law's Appeal Publishing Society. In general, the paper concludes that the legislation needs clarity. WATCH | Online harms act is an important starting point: Online harms bill an 'important starting point,' says child protection group 1 year ago Duration 7:41 The Liberal government is hoping to crack down on harmful online content with new legislation that proposes heavier sentences, new regulatory bodies, and changes to a number of laws. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection's Signy Arnason says this type of bill is 'critical' to protect Canadian children. The rise and fall of mom-fluencers Sharenting is a relatively new term to describe a concept that has existed since the 2000s, with the rise of so-called mommy bloggers and family influencers. But it increased dramatically during the pandemic, researchers have found. Alongside this, family influencers who document their family's daily lives on social media for revenue has skyrocketed in the last decade, according to the 2023 Chicago Journal of International Law research paper. Some families can make as much as $40,000 US for a sponsored Instagram post, the paper notes. And audiences seemingly can't get enough of it, especially when it comes to those big Utah families. Just look at the success of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, an entire reality show on Hulu about eight Utah TikTok influencers that made #MomTok an entire culture. It was recently renewed for a second season. Now, amid cases like Franke's, and as the children of influencers become old enough to speak out, there's been a mounting backlash. Memoirs like The House of My Mother — written by Shari Franke, Ruby's eldest daughter — have exposed the perils of influencer culture. Articles have appeared in magazines like Teen Vogue, where anonymous child influencers describe the stress of having their parents as their boss. "Nothing they do now is going to take back the years of work I had to put in," said one child YouTube star in a 2023 article. Some well-known momfluencers have shifted away from featuring their children online at all. For instance, TikToker Maia Knight, with 7.7 million followers, announced in 2022 that she would no longer be showing her twin daughters online. "I'm making a choice for my daughters to protect them," she said in a video on Dec. 23, 2022. "Am I going to lose followers? Yes, I'm going to. Am I going to lose eight million followers? I hope not. Maybe, but I doubt it." Of course, most parents out there aren't influencers making their children perform online, aren't buying new cars with their YouTube earnings, and may be keeping their social media more private. But Bednar says there are still important lessons here for all parents when it comes to child privacy. "That bigger question of what's appropriate to share online, or should kid's faces be blurred out, is important," she said. "Always having the awareness of a camera takes away an element of privacy and kind of an immersive nature of your childhood, if you're also always thinking about how you look, or your expression, or kind of performing happiness, too."
