Governments are increasingly turning to social media bans to keep minors safe online. But what does early evidence from these legislative changes tell us about how effective they actually are? What would it look like to focus on age-appropriate online spaces and safer design instead? And with AI now being introduced to the conversation, should chatbots face similar regulations?

Josh Tabish joins us for an episode of Explain to Shane to help answer these questions. Josh is currently the senior director for Canada at the Chamber of Progress. He previously served as the director of policy and advocacy at the Canadian Internet Registration Authority and as a Ford Foundation / Media Democracy Fund Technology Exchange Fellow for Fight for the Future. Throughout his career, he has covered domestic and international technology policy issues.

Below is a lightly edited and abridged transcript of our discussion. You can listen to this and other episodes of Explain to Shane on AEI.org and subscribe via your preferred listening platform. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review, and tell your friends and colleagues to tune in.

Shane Tews: What kinds of design changes is the Canadian government asking social media companies to make, and how does Canada’s approach compare with what we’ve seen elsewhere, including in Australia?

Josh Tabish: The government is asking platforms to implement privacy-respecting measures to prevent young people from accessing social media. The problem is that we already know that these bans have not been effective elsewhere. Data from Australia’s privacy commissioners suggest that as much as 7 in 10 kids are still on social media, and other studies show that between 73%-85% of kids are still on these platforms. This tells us these bans are easy to get around.

What’s unique to Canada is that the government has said social media companies need to create privacy-respecting age-verification mechanisms, and that a new Digital Safety Commission is going to review those mechanisms to make sure they work. But the new Digital Safety Commission isn’t going to be up and running for at least two years. The bill still has to pass, the regulator has to be established and staffed, and rules have to be developed for what actually counts as privacy respecting.

There’s an order-of-operations problem here. The safety standards platforms are ultimately expected to meet won’t have been established either. Kids are likely going to find ways around the ban, return to these platforms, and find that very little has changed. Meanwhile, platforms won’t know what safety standards they’re supposed to be building toward, and their age-verification mechanisms will be completely unsupervised by the government.

When it comes to safety by design, are there trusted experts who can have those technical conversations with legislators?

In Canada, we’re really lucky to have a number of experts on what safe design features look like for social media. For example, Prof. Sara Grimes at McGill University was recently on the Michael Geist podcast talking about this. There is a well-developed set of principles around limiting persuasive design for kids and addressing advertising in ways that are safer for them.

The challenge is that we’re going to spend so much time talking about how the ban will work and its challenges, instead of talking about the things that could actually make online spaces safer for kids. Social media is a very important place for young people to figure out their identities, find educational resources, and navigate their personal journeys. For an LGBTQ+ kid living in an abusive household, for example, social media can be a real lifeline if your parents don’t respect your identity and you need to find community elsewhere. The costs of putting a ban in place are especially high for vulnerable kids.

As Bill C-34 introduces new guardrails for AI chatbots, how can policymakers protect kids from potential harms without limiting the capabilities and benefits of these tools?

We were worried that there were going to be strict age gates on chatbots. The minister had trial-ballooned the idea and we were relieved in the end to see that the government was taking a much more flexible approach on AI chatbots. Chatbot operators will have new responsibilities to act responsibly and protect kids. What that looks like is subject to future regulation. There are many positive examples of how this could work that have been tried in other jurisdictions. This would mean that kids still get to use chatbots for beneficial uses such as tutoring, learning, general creativity, and coding. Kids used to need programs in high school to get into coding, but now it’s easier than ever to build an app using tools like Claude.

Based on public comments, I think the government is envisioning transparency requirements to make sure kids know that the chatbot they’re interacting with isn’t a person as well as methods to ensure that kids who are in crisis are having resources referred to them.

Chatbot operators and developers are getting the message that safety is a priority. ChatGPT announced recently that they are rolling out a new suite of parental controls to make sure that their kids are safe and only accessing things they’re supposed to. As the government develops new regulations and obligations for chatbots, we’re going to see the industry really step up in the meantime. The regulations may be less important in the end than they were when they started.

What’s going on with Bill C-22? Is it going forward? Has it found a resting place, or are people cooling off on that conversation?

The Canadian government introduced this lawful access bill designed to give law enforcement more timely access to user data in cases of national security issues or cybercrime. The bill is very broad. Its scope is what they define as an “electronic service provider,” which is any business or organization that touches the internet in any way. A doctor’s office, for example, would be scoped in. If you have a website, you’re scoped in. This gives the government the ability to force all sorts of obligations on these platforms.

There are secret ministerial order powers where the minister can direct any platform to build any kind of interception capability into their network so that if law enforcement or security agencies need data from them, they’re able to access it. It gives them the power to force a certain class of core providers to save metadata, which is data about data. Not the contents of your conversations, but who you called, when, for how long you talked, where you were when you talked to them, for example. This is the stuff that people lost their minds over when we found out that the NSA was keeping all of the metadata back in the Snowden days. There are obligations to keep all the metadata and new powers to weaken encryption so that the government can get access to encrypted communications. The list goes on and on.

This raised a lot of concerns for the privacy community, legal experts, and tech companies. The bill received extremely high amounts of engagement. It was a major story in Canada all through the spring. Right before the session ended, the government pushed through some amendments to target what they saw as the highest-consequence issues raised by privacy experts and tech companies. They put in some language to protect encryption. They changed the mandatory metadata retention period from up to 12 months to up to six months. They never provided a justification for why 12 months or six months, but they shortened it. And they time-boxed how long the ministerial orders can stay in place. If they direct a company to, say, build in interception capabilities, they have to review it after two years. It doesn’t just stay in place forever.

Ultimately, these reforms amounted to half measures. They weren’t what the privacy community was asking for. They weren’t what trade associations like Chamber of Progress or the Canadian Chamber of Commerce were asking for. They didn’t really cut it. And so the bill is going to sit over the summer, and in the fall, it’s going to be debated by the Senate, where senators have a lot of work to do to clean up the bill and resolve the last outstanding issues.