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Members of the Liberal party voted in favour of setting 16 as the age for Canadians to be able to use social media accounts at the federal policy convention on Saturday — but experts say it’s not that simple.
Quebec MP Rachel Bendayan, who presented the idea to her caucus and championed it at the convention, said prolonged social media use can be harmful to the mental health of young Canadians.
This comes as Australia’s current social media ban for youth under 16 years old continues to spur debate in a growing number of countries about whether to follow suit.
In addition, it raises the question of how age verification and implementation could be enforced if such a ban were to be enacted, which would still require Prime Minister Mark Carney and the federal government to put forward proposals to do so.
An Angus Reid Institute poll released in March had found that “banning those under 16 from platforms would be well received by the vast majority of Canadians,” with three-quarters (75 per cent) say they support a “full ban on social media use for anyone under the age of 16.”
Among parents with kids in the household, support is also strong at 70 per cent.
A September 2025 Ipsos poll has also found an average of 71 per cent across 30 countries believe children under 14 “should not be able to access social media,” with 74 per cent of school-age parents feeling the same.
Twenty-five per cent of those surveyed also stated that social media is a “top challenge” for young people.
“In the same way that we have concerns when there’s a dangerous activity that we want to make sure that we protect children from, like drinking or smoking or driving a car or any of these other things, we put rules in place so that we make sure that people are fully matured and fully developed before they start to engage in what we have identified to be dangerous practice,” said David Gerhard, the head of computer science at the University of Manitoba.
He also said that enacting such a ban could help protect children’s digital identities as they grow older, calling it a “digital amnesty.”
“When you turn 16, everything that you did before gets erased and you start fresh, or you invent a new persona and you just start again,” he said. “The history of the dumb things we do when we’re kids can stick with us if we’re not given a chance to reinvent ourselves when we find out who we are.”
Matt Hatfield, an executive director at Open Media, says that there are three main means being utilized in Australia to confirm users’ ages that could be replicated in Canada.
“Either providing some kind of government ID or an age estimation done by an algorithm, generally of someone’s appearance,” he said. “Or it’s indicators about an account; so, they don’t actually even contact the user, they just look at who the person’s following, what other accounts they’re connected with, and make a judgment of whether it’s likely a young person’s account or an adult’s account based on that.”
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He added: “In Australia, they kind of went to the companies and said, ‘We want you to take a mix of these methods to determine whether someone’s a young person’s account or adult’s accounts. We only want government ID as a last resort and we don’t want any adults, clearly adult accounts to be forced to provide their ID.’”
Gerhard believes that a “third-party private organization will build some tool that the government will then buy to do the age verification.”
“We have our social insurance number, which is just a number. Then when you get to be of a driver’s age, you get a driver’s licence or a learner’s permit or some other ID that identifies you and has your photograph on it. But we don’t really have that for children yet,” he said.
“We’d (have) to have a software development company who we trust to own all of the IDs of everybody in the country and then validate against every login.”
On March 24, a New Mexico jury declared after a seven-week trial that social media conglomerate Meta is “harmful to children’s mental health and in violation of state consumer protection law.”
Jurors sided with state prosecutors who argued that Meta — which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — prioritized “profits over safety.”
There are currently lawyers in British Columbia are also suing Meta in a proposed class action civil suit, which could include thousands of children across the country.
The lawsuit accuses Meta, through its Facebook and Instagram platforms, of exposing children to “harmful content,” like images and videos promoting “high-risk behaviour, such as risky challenges or extreme dieting, as well as health misinformation and content which caused or aggravated psychological insecurities, including anxiety about body image.”
Meta denies the allegations, none of which have been proven in court.
Recovery Alberta, a mental health and addiction service, states that 43 per cent of teens using social media hourly, also stating that “overuse of social networking platforms, particularly among youth, negatively impacts life satisfaction, leading to issues like sedentary lifestyles, sleep disturbances, and isolation.”
This is something that Hatfield believes would need careful regulation.
“If we look at the example of how we regulate around alcohol, you don’t turn 16 or 18 and suddenly anything that occurs in the alcohol industry is fair game,” he said.
“We have safety laws around how alcohol is produced. And from a media’s perspective, it would be more reasonable than a ban that’s defined by age, to look at some of the predictable harms that are being created by the business decisions of these platforms and regulate around that.”
Christopher Dietzel, a communication studies affiliate assistant professor at Concordia University, believes that although there is “an urgency for action to be taken here in Canada,” a ban would not be the right move to make.
“A proposed solution like a social media ban, it does nothing to prepare young people to actually address these harms. There’s no education, there’s no awareness raising, it doesn’t take advantage of the time then that you know you would have to be of a certain age,” said Dietzel.
“There is nothing that actually helps young people to identify and address these harms.”
Dietzel also believes that such a ban would not include holding social media companies responsible for adapting their product to be more child-friendly.
“It is nothing of the sort to actually remove those harms or address those harms in a systematic way.”
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