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Fourteen-year-old Darcee Redmond says if she woke up one day and couldn’t log into Snapchat, she’d have a strong reaction: “I’d cry my eyes out.”
Speaking with CBC News on Wednesday, Darcee said a federal plan to restrict social media access for young people would cut many teens off from friends they only communicate with online.
“I’d be so depressed without social media.… if I lose my phone for a day, it’s like the worst day of my life,” she said.
“If I’m just doing nothing all day at home, I’m bored, and I don’t like to read books, because books are so, like, hard to focus on … and I just feel like I’d be a lot sadder if I didn’t have social media, because then I’d have nothing to do, like, nothing to distract me from being bored.”
The federal government introduced Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, on Wednesday.
The proposed legislation would require social media services — including traditional platforms, livestreaming services and adult content services focused on user-shared content — to restrict accounts for children under 16 unless companies can demonstrate they have made their platforms safe for younger users.
When asked why the government did not outright ban social media for children under the age of 16, Culture Minister Marc Miller said ‘there’s part of my brain that agrees with it, but I think we know that social media can be made safe by design.’ He added that there is an important role for both parents and provincial governments to play.
Beyond staying in touch with friends, some P.E.I. teens say they use social media to learn new skills.
Fourteen-year-old Adrian Rakhshan said he has learned how to perform skiing tricks by watching videos online.
“I’d feel sad,” Adrian said when asked how he would react if his access to social media were restricted. “Social media helps, like, find the skills that you want to do, like sports.”
However, not everyone is opposed to the proposal. Fourteen-year-old Reid Wotherspoon, who also uses several social media apps, said he thinks the restrictions may have some benefits.
“It might not be a bad idea,” Reid said. “I feel like a lot of people spend a lot of time on it when you could be doing other things, like going outside or something.”
Responsibility should remain with platforms: expert
Amber Mac, a technology expert from P.E.I. and host of the radio program and podcast The AmberMac Show, said she was not surprised by the negative reaction from teenagers. She noted that her own 17-year-old son responded similarly when he learned about the proposal.
But she said blocking social media access for children may raise concerns that it could shift responsibility away from tech companies.
“It actually places the responsibility on the teens and the parents to be the ones who are doing the work, when actually the technology companies in the first place could actually just design social media platforms that were safer and algorithms that were less risky and unsafe,” she said.
After looking at the details of the bill, Mac pointed out that it would also create a digital safety commission to decide how platforms comply and allow for fines and restrictions.
But she noted that many aspects of the proposed legislation remain unclear, and so any restrictions on accounts for users under 16 are not imminent and would likely take a year or more to come into force.
“And it may evolve along the way,” she said.
Mac said other parts of the bill have received less public attention but could still have significant benefits, including new rules governing artificial intelligence chatbots.
“These services would not be able to share harmful content, act as humans,” she said.
“We all know the harm that can happen with these chatbots, and in some cases there are young people who have taken their lives because of these conversations.”
She added that the bill would also create a duty for platforms to make certain harmful content inaccessible, particularly non-consensual intimate images, by requiring them to remove such material.
Ultimately, Mac said that many online harms, from cyberbullying to misinformation, stem from how social media platforms are designed and run.
“We do really need federal legislation that says that these companies are not allowed to come into this country and operate like this to put anyone in harm’s way,” she said, noting the impact of online harms across all age groups, from teens to seniors.
