Bill C-34, An Act to enact the Digital Safety Act and the Digital Safety Commission of Canada Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, would create two new Acts; its proposed short title is the Safe Social Media Act. Its stated goal is to reduce online harms, including harms to children, while respecting freedom of expression. These provisions are not in force, and the bill says they would start on dates set by the Governor in Council.
It would establish a Digital Safety Commission of Canada to administer and enforce the new rules. The Commission would have three to five full-time members and could hire staff.
Duties would apply only to services that meet regulatory user thresholds or are specifically designated; online services would also need to fall within a prescribed category. Many details would be set later by regulations.
Regulated services would have child-protection duties. For some prescribed social-media services, operators would have to prevent people under 16 from opening accounts or registering.
Regulated social-media operators would have to reduce users’ exposure to defined harmful content, provide flagging and blocking tools, publish safety plans, and follow rules for certain child-sexual-victimization and non-consensual intimate content.
Regulated chatbot operators would have to respond immediately to specified expressions of suicidal or self-harm intent by interrupting the interaction, directing users to crisis services available at that time, and allowing contact with a human.
Users of regulated services: You would have tools to flag harmful content and, on social media, to block other account-holders from finding or contacting you. Operators would generally have to tell users who flagged content, and the person who posted it, what action they took.
People affected by certain intimate or child-sexual-victimization content: If an operator identifies qualifying content, or receives a flag about it, it would have to make it inaccessible in Canada while it assesses the content. Users could make representations and seek reconsideration. A person in Canada could complain to the Commission after making best efforts to use the operator’s process. The Commission could order the content blocked while it decides, and permanently blocked if it finds reasonable grounds that it is covered.
Children and parents: Regulated services would have to use prescribed child-protection design features. Where an operator has reasonable grounds to suspect its service provides access to pornography, it would have to use approved age-verification or age-estimation measures to reduce children’s exposure. Under-16 account restrictions would apply only to social-media services or classes prescribed by regulation—not automatically to every service.
Operators: Regulated social-media services would face duties on harmful-content risk reduction, user tools, synthetic-content labels, safety plans and recordkeeping. Chatbot operators would have duties on harmful responses and behaviour, user flags and support. The bill does not require operators to proactively search for harmful content, though regulations may require measures to prevent child-sexual-victimization content from being uploaded.
Researchers: The Commission could accredit qualifying research or education organizations and order access to specified service data, subject to conditions and privacy, security and confidentiality safeguards.
Taxpayers and service operators: The new Commission would require public resources. The Governor in Council could also set charges on regulated operators to recover some or all of the Commission’s costs.
No public cost estimate is included in the supplied material.
The Commission would have paid members and staff, but the bill gives no staffing plan or cost estimate.
The Governor in Council could set charges on regulated operators to recover Commission costs; the bill does not itself set charges or amounts.
Administrative penalties for violations could reach the greater of $10 million or 3% of gross global revenue. Separate offences could carry larger fines in some cases.
The bill leaves user thresholds, service categories, many safety measures and important timelines to regulations. Their eventual scope is not known from the supplied material.
The bill does not give a start date; commencement depends on future orders.
It is unclear how many services would be regulated, how many would be prescribed for under-16 restrictions, or how much compliance would cost operators.
The bill gives the Commission a role in facilitating participation by Indigenous peoples and official-language minority communities, but does not set out how that participation would work.
Some terms and standards—including “significant psychological or physical harm”—would need further definition or application through regulations or Commission decisions.
The bill appears intended to make online services take responsibility for reducing specific harms, with duties adjusted in part for service size and capacity.
Requiring crisis responses from chatbots could provide a direct route to timely human help when users express specified risks.
Flagging, blocking and review processes could give users ways to challenge harmful content while allowing the person who posted it to respond.
Public safety plans, Commission oversight and possible research access could make operators’ practices more visible and help assess whether measures work.
Many key rules would be set later, so operators and users cannot yet know the full requirements or how broadly they would apply.
Temporary blocking while content is assessed, and the Commission’s power to order blocking across Canada, could restrict access to content that is later found not to meet the bill’s definitions.
Age checks and data access for research could create privacy or security risks; the bill sets safeguards, but many requirements are left to later rules.
A new Commission, compliance duties and possible operator charges could impose significant costs. The bill does not estimate those costs.