By Paul W. Bennett, June 11, 2026
Canada’s Culture Minister Marc Miller has proposed a Digital Safety Act and signalled the federal government’s intention to move forward with a social media ban for minors up to 16 years of age.
The Canadian government is late to the game. Social media addiction is rampant among the smartphone generation and is so far advanced that curbing screen time is now a matter of child protection.
Two short years ago, my MLI report Weapons of Mass Distraction identified social media addiction as a major crisis affecting kids and one that held a grip on the entire smartphone generation. Banning or severely restricting the devices, I contended, was missing the point because that debilitating addiction was quickly emerging as the most serious threat to children’s well-being of our time.
Today, banning social media for minors up to age 16 is de rigueur, especially since the December 2025 nationwide ban in Australia. First out-of-the-gate in Canada was the Manitoba government, with Premier Wab Kinew pledging at an April 25 provincial NDP meeting to ban children from using social media accounts and artificial intelligence chatbots.
Going far beyond existing school restrictions, Kinew announced that the province plans to introduce legislation to protect kids from technology platforms that he says hurt their physical, mental, and social development. The trigger, in the case of Manitoba, appears to have been recent court decisions in California and New Mexico that found social media corporations responsible for damaging the health of children.
Social media’s “Big Tobacco moment”
On March 26, a Los Angeles jury found Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google liable for designing products that, over several years, caused severe harm to a 20-year-old California woman. The verdict concluded that the companies deliberately designed features of their social media platforms to be addictive, drawing comparisons to “Big Tobacco.” It also exposed a potential crack in the legal shield that has largely protected tech companies from liability for harms linked to activity on their platforms.
Since then, rumblings about the harms inflicted by “Big Social Media” have grown louder across Canada as well as the United States. Federal political parties are studying Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age Act (SMMA 2025) and the American court decisions, especially since the deadly school shooting at Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. Investigators say the teenaged perpetrator, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot during the attack, engaged in alarming Chat GPT conversations prior to the massacre.
Australia’s ban on social media for kids
Australia was the first country to introduce an outright ban for children. A study the Australian government commissioned in 2025 found that 96 per cent of children aged 10 to 15 used social media, and that seven out of 10 had been exposed to harmful content. This included misogynistic and violent material, as well as content promoting eating disorders and suicide. One in seven also reported experiencing grooming-type behaviour from adults or older children, and more than half said they had been the victim of cyberbullying.
The SMMA law also banned minors under age 16 from using ten social media platforms including TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and Threads. They were prohibited from setting up new accounts and their existing profiles were deactivated, affecting some 550,000 users in the first week.
The goal was to reduce the negative impact of social media’s “design features that encourage [young people] to spend more time on screens, while also serving up content that can harm their health and wellbeing.” One glaring omission is that there’s no restriction on highly addictive and potentially harmful online gaming sites like Roblox and Discord.
A sobering assessment: Lessons learned from Australia
The Australian government’s ban on social media for minors, like most initial experiments on such a scale, managed to “stick” but fell short of its lofty policy goals. A March 2026 Social Media Minimum Age: Compliance Update, issued by Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, produced some sobering results.
Three months into the ban, an estimated seven in 10 children remain on major platforms. Most concerning, the eSafety report also provided evidence that so far, there had been no notable change in cyberbullying or image-based abuse reported by children. Vocal critics and many technology experts saw the findings as vindication. That’s hardly surprising because the Australian government was responding to rising public and parent concerns in overriding the “experts” and lobby groups who attempted to block the legislation.
The only option with a chance of success? No social media
Social media use is so prevalent and entrenched across all age levels – from children to teens and adults – that only a blanket ban on social media can break the cycle of overuse and dependence. That’s why Federal Culture Minister Marc Miller told the media in early April that the Mark Carney government was “very seriously considering” a social media ban for kids. The federal Liberal Party made it official policy on April 11 when it passed at its national convention.
A national campaign led by Unplugged Canada, with the support of the Canadian Medical Association, the B.C. Pediatric Society, and the Ontario Psychiatric Association, has built momentum for legislation addressing online harms to children. A March 2026 Angus Reid Institute poll found that 75 per cent of Canadians are prepared to support a full ban on social media for youth under the age of 16. Under Canada’s new Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Joss Reimer, a former CMA president from Manitoba, you can expect a long-overdue policy statement supporting such initiatives.
Citizen’s rights advocates are gathering and plan to raise objections to the Digital Harms Act and across-the-board bans on social media access for minors. They are likely to intervene on behalf of children, but their motivation is likely a broader opposition to any restrictions on freedom of access. Let’s hope we don’t lose sight of what’s really at stake – reclaiming the minds and ensuring the social well-being of younger generations.
Paul W. Bennett, EdD, is the director of the Schoolhouse Institute, and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. He’s one of Canada’s best-known education commentators and the author of eleven books, including The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada’s Schools (2020). His 2024 MLI policy paper, Weapons of Mass Destruction, made the case that social media addiction was an emerging crisis that had seized the “smartphone generation” and would ultimately require a broader, public health strategy.
