Yesterday, Liberal Leader Iain Rankin reiterated his call for a provincial ban on social media use by children under 16.
I think most people would agree that kids shouldn’t be on the often-toxic, usually exploitative, and always reality-distorting social media platforms. Heck, all of us, regardless of age, should be limiting our time on social media.
There’s a big world out there that has nothing to do with the internet and its limiting cultures. Touch grass, as they say.
I don’t know how much I believe in the “masculinity crisis” among young men, but to the extent that it exists, it undoubtedly mostly reflects the lack of social development that comes with staring at a screen most of the day. Boys should be stumbling their way through awkward infatuations and learning how to talk directly with actual real girls and not being socialized via the two-dimensional gamified bots and unrealistic porn on their phones.
And girls, well, I can’t imagine. They are basically prey for an online world looking to exploit them, the Epstein class digitized.
Stay off that shit, kids!
But it’s one thing to say that kids shouldn’t be on social media, and another thing entirely to pass a law banning kids from social media.
To begin, how would that work? Rankin pointed to Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, who announced such a ban earlier this week. But, as Steve Lambert reported for the Canadian Press, “Kinew did not reveal details of his plan, such as the age limit he is considering or how a provincial government might have jurisdiction over international platforms.”
In December, Australia instituted a social media ban for those under 16, putting the onus of enforcing the ban on the social media companies. The companies, in turn, use a variety of age identification methods, including facial, age, and voice verification systems. The problem is, those systems are easily worked around, and when they’re not, kids are either using VPNs or going to more obscure social media platforms that have even fewer safeguards than the big players. And sometimes actual adults are caught up in the bans.
It seems likely that governments seeking to ban kids from using social media will ultimately age-gate the entire internet. That creep towards universal age-gating started with porn, reported Samantha Cole for 404 Media in December:
Age verification laws reach beyond porn sites, however. In Wyoming, South Dakota, Mississippi and Ohio, where the laws are written broadly enough to cover social media sites and any platform hosting adult content, Bluesky users have to submit to a face scan by the third-party company Yoti or upload a photo of their credit card to verify they’re over 18 years of age. In July, Bluesky started requiring all UK users to verify their ages in response to the Online Safety Act. We’ve previously reported on the security risks in uploading sensitive personal data to identity verification services, including the potential for hackers to then get ahold of that information themselves. In October, after Discord started requiring UK users to verify ages, the platform announced hackers breached one of its third-party vendors that handles age-related appeals, and said it identified around 70,000 users who may have had their government ID photos exposed as part of the breach.
Even if age-gating could work without the security failures, it still raises a host of other issues.
Like, what’s “adult content”? In practice, many U.S. states are defining sites containing information and discussions of LGBTQ+ issues as off-limits for kids. But these are precisely the sites kids growing up in controlling families and conservative communities need to find to explore their own identities. They can be a literal lifeline for kids.
Age-gating is also a half-step towards name verification, the requirement that people using social media use their real names. But requiring the use of real names will put people in danger — whistleblowers, dissidents living in repressive regimes, and simply those expressing an opinion contrary to the government’s all have reason to remain anonymous.
Last August, Cole reported that age-gating laws around the world are being applied to Netflix and Wikipedia:
“As we’re seeing in the UK with the Online Safety Act, laws designed to protect the children from ‘harmful material’ online quickly metastasize and begin capturing nearly all users and all sites in surveillance and censorship schemes,” Mike Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, told me in an email following the alert. “These laws give the government legal power to threaten platform owners into censoring or removing fairly innocuous content — healthcare information, mainstream films, memes, political speech — while decimating privacy protections for adults. Porn was only ever a Trojan horse for advancing these laws. Now, unfortunately, we’re starting to see what we warned was inside all along.”
It sounds so simple: ban kids from using social media. But as with most simple solutions to complex problems, it creates secondary and tertiary effects that are even more harmful.
There’s no simple solution to the problems arising from kids being on social media. Instead, addressing the problem involves a complex web of imperfect actions, including parental oversight, education about the internet, increased everyday involvement of adults in the lives of children, and broad and well-funded opportunities for kids to take part in sports, arts, and cultural opportunities.
The Nova Scotia government is slashing funding for arts programming and sports leagues. Teachers are saddled with more paperwork, and so have less time with students. Parents facing increased costs for rent and food need to work longer hours, keeping them away from home, and spending less money on their kids’ social growth.
And it can’t be missed that the proposed social media bans are coming exactly as schools and government itself are interjecting AI systems directly into schooling and the lives of children, mostly in order to reduce the cost of having actual humans interact with children.
It’s not ideal that kids are using social media, but when everything else is deemed too expensive, what else are they going to do?
The problem isn’t so much social media, but a society that has its priorities all wrong.
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NOTICED
1. Northern Pulp
There are updates on two insolvency cases affecting Nova Scotia.
The first concerns Northern Pulp. For the purposes of winding down the proceedings, the various companies in the British Columbia bankruptcy court have been amalgamated into one company called “Northern Timber Nova Scotia Corporation,” which in turn has requested a one-year extension, to April 30, 2027, to wrap up the distribution of its assets. That extension will undoubtedly be granted today.
Northern Timber Nova Scotia Corporation has essentially two assets, the sprawling timberlands that the company was more or less gifted by the provincial government (with sweetheart loan and mortgage deals like those executed by the Dexter government), and the old mill site itself.
As Joan Baxter reported in December, John Bragg’s company, Tidnish Holdings, offered $235 million for 427,000 acres of Northern Pulp’s woodlands. That offer is now accepted, with the bulk of the proceeds going to Northern Pulp’s parent company, Paper Excellence Canada Holdings Corporation, and the related Pacific Harbor North American Resources Ltd. The province of Nova Scotia will get about $100 million of the sale, which covers the outstanding debt extended to Northern Pulp for the land.
Additionally, the new order from the court provides just $15 million for the closed mill, as follows:
Once the Transaction has closed, the only remaining asset of the Petitioners will be the Mill Site. At a certain threshold, the Settlement Agreement requires a reserve of up to $15 million to be set aside to maintain the Mill Site, prepare the Closure Plan, market the Mill Site for sale, and, if necessary, liquidate NPNSC’s assets, including by assigning itself into bankruptcy. The purchase price contemplated in the Amended and Restated Purchase Agreement reaches this threshold, and once the Transaction has been closed and the interim financing repaid, this reserve will be the sole source of funding for the continuation of this proceeding, the maintenance of the Mill Site, implementation of the Closure Plan, and future sales efforts in respect of the Mill Site.
The “Closure Plan” includes the contemplated cleanup of the site. And a budget sheet attached to the order shows that over the next year, just about half of that $15 million — $7,647,500 — will go towards actual “closure plan activities,” with the rest going towards operations and management, payroll, taxes, and the like.
Cleanup costs include ditching around the site, the deconstruction of the mill and other buildings, the possible rebuilding of a rail line to remove the deconstructed material, and a Class I environmental assessment to identify the full extent of the needed cleanup. The toxins include unknown amounts of asbestos and mercury. Ultimately, full cleanup will surely cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
At the end of the year extension, Northern Timber Nova Scotia Corporation will be declared bankrupt.
It’s possible, but unlikely, that someone will want to buy the mill site and incur the cleanup costs. More likely, while it isn’t stated plainly in the documents, it seems almost certain that the vast bulk of the expense of cleaning up the mill site will fall to the public.
You can read the latest bankruptcy documents here.
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2. SaltWire
The second insolvency case winding its way through the courts is that of SaltWire.
A recent report to the court reveals that SaltWire’s property at George Street in Sydney, the former Cape Breton Post building, has been sold to Joe MacDonald of Boardwalk Realty for $1.6 million. The sale had a closing date of April 15.
So far, these SaltWire real estate holdings have been sold:
• 311 Bluewater Rd., Bedford — $8.25 million to Mickey MacDonald;
• 2 Second St., Yarmouth — $250,000 to an unnamed buyer;
• 255 George St., Sydney — $1.6 million to Joe MacDonald
Still not sold is 36 Austin St., St. John’s, which is listed at $5.4 million.
I’m still reading details of the news side of the business — that is, PostMedia’s purchase of the various SaltWire newspapers — and will have an update on that Friday.
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Government
City
Tuesday
Regional Council (Tuesday, 10am, City Hall) — agenda
Wednesday
MPSA-2025-01929: Public Open House (Wednesday, 6pm, Dartmouth) — details
Province
Tuesday
Natural Resources and Economic Development (Tuesday, 1pm, One Government Place) — Energy pricing; with representatives from Affordable Energy Coalition, Department of Energy, Department of Opportunities and Social Development, Ecology Action Centre, Efficiency Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia Power, Town of Bridgewater
Wednesday
Public Accounts (Wednesday, 9am, hybrid) — 2026 Report of the Auditor General – Action for Health Key Performance Indicators, with representatives from the Department of Health and Wellness; Watch here
On campus
Mount Saint Vincent
Tuesday
No events
Wednesday
Hannah Epstein: Plato’s Goon Cave (Wednesday to Sunday, 12pm, MSVU Art Gallery) — until May 17
Literary Events
Tuesday
Imagining the Austens in Halifax (Tuesday, 6:30pm, Halifax) — Sarah Emsley will talk
Open Heart Forgery poetry open mic (Tuesday, 6:30pm, Halifax Central Library) — details
Wednesday
Shelf Indulgence book club (Wednesday, 7pm, virtual) — Jon Tattrie leads discussion of Imaro by Charles R. Saunders
In the harbour
Halifax
05:00: Atlantic Sail, ro-ro container, arrives at Fairview Cove from Liverpool, England
08:30: One Grus, container ship, sails from Pier 41 for New York
11:00: MSC Shannon III, container ship, arrives at Pier 41 from Montréal
13:00: Yellowstone, pipe layer, sails from Pier 27 for Rotterdam
16:30: Atlantic Sail sails for sea
17:30: MSC England, container ship, sails from Pier 42 for sea
Cape Breton
08:45: Zuiderdam, cruise ship with up to 2,364 passengers, arrives at Government Wharf (Sydney) from Halifax, on a 14-day cruise from Miami to Québec City
12:00: Victory II, cruise ship, transits through the causeway en route from Portland to Montréal
13:00: Leo A. McArthur, tug, transits through the causeway en route from Montréal to Eastern Passage
17:30: Zuiderdam sails for Charlottetown
Footnotes
Every day, I feel just a little bit older.
