CALGARY, Alberta (LifeSiteNews) — Canada’s foremost pro-freedom legal group has launched a national campaign to try to stop a proposed Liberal social media ban for children under age 16, which the federal government says aims to “regulate the internet in the future.”
In a press release sent to LifeSiteNews, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) warned that Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, “goes far beyond protecting children from harmful online content and prohibiting AI companies from encouraging users to commit crimes.”
Canada’s Identity and Culture Minister Marc Miller claimed that Bill C-34 is about “ensuring that social media services and artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are responsible for addressing harm before it occurs.”
The JCCF, however, says that the bill will put in place a social media ban for minors and that it “effectively regulates AI chatbot inputs and outputs, and grants the federal Cabinet broad powers to regulate the internet in the future.”
As a result, the JCCF is urging all Canadians to contact their MPs and participate in its national campaign by using its online letter-writing software to send pre-written letters to MPs and Prime Minister Mark Carney.
LifeSiteNews reported that Bill C-34 was introduced by Culture Minister Miller on June 10. Besides banning social media for youth, the new bill will also force online platforms to adopt measures to report credible threats of violence or self-harm to the police.
It is expected that the social media ban will be like the one in place in Australia, which bans youth under 16 from having accounts on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, and other platforms.
Canadians will be ‘forced to surrender’ personal information, warns JCCF
The JCCF, in its initial assessment of the bill, warned that it could lead to Canadians being forced to “surrender” their personal data as some sort of condition to use the internet.
Breaking the bill down, the JCCF warned that as Section 27(1) of the bill bans minors from accessing social media, it will force the companies to implement “age-verification and age-estimation measures.”
“To keep minors off social media, all Canadians will have to verify their age and identity,” warned the JCCF.
“If the legislation passes, Canadians will be forced to surrender more of their personal information to the government or foreign social media companies in order to express their views, participate in public discourse, and access information about the world.”
Going further, Sections 48 to 58 of Bill C-34 will regulate what Canadians can say to AI chatbots and also what the chatbots can say to Canadians.
Because of this, the JCCF said that faced with “vague obligations and significant financial penalties for non-compliance (up to three percent of global revenue), AI companies will be forced to monitor all Canadians’ private AI conversations and may increasingly report private, law-abiding conversations to police.”
“Furthermore, section 53(e) will give future regulators broad powers to prohibit what AI chatbots may say in the future. Canadians increasingly rely on AI chatbots and search tools in place of traditional search engines. Our experts warn that government authority over AI chatbot outputs may have serious implications for Canadians’ access to information.”
Another section of the bill, the JCCF said, will create a Digital Safety Commission of three to five full-time members, “to be appointed by the federal Cabinet, with broad power to regulate online content.”
Michael Geist, a Canadian privacy expert and law professor, said the Digital Safety Commission will have the power to decide on 50 large questions not included in Bill C-34. These questions include which specific social media and AI companies will be targeted by the bill, what counts as “significant psychological or physical harm” in online content, as well as how the government plans to restrict kids under 16 from accessing social media.
MPs elected by Canadians, warned the JCCF, will have “limited oversight over these decisions.”
The Liberal government has been flirting for some time with the idea of creating a national digital ID that could become part of any social media ban.