Canada Needs ‘Even-Handed’ Policy to Protect Youth From Social Media Harm Without Compromising Free Speech: Report

Social media apps are displayed on a phone screen in a photo illustration on Dec. 1, 2024. Roni Bintang/Getty Images

As social media is increasingly linked to youth mental health concerns, Canada should consider focusing on how children use these platforms rather than regulating online content, a new report suggests. It argues that content-based regulation could raise concerns about privacy and freedom of expression.

While governments in some countries have introduced policies aimed at reducing online harm to youth by moderating content on social media platforms, enforcing these policies in a consistent and impartial way can be difficult, as definitions of “harmful” content are often subjective and context-dependent, says an April 15 report from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

The report, titled “Wired for worry: How smartphones and social media are harming Canadian youth,” examines the link between declining youth mental health and the widespread use of smartphones and social media, as well as the measures adopted by some governments to reduce social media’s impact on youth.

It notes that efforts to regulate social media content to curb its effects on youth, such as those proposed in Canada’s Online Harms Act, could be misused, if implemented, to silence critics or dissenting voices.

“Given the risks to free speech and privacy posed by many attempts at social media regulation, Canada should aim for an even-handed policy response that protects the mental health of young people without significantly threatening privacy, creating new bureaucracies, or demanding complex changes to social media platforms,” reads the report.

The report’s author, Jonah Davids, a Toronto-based researcher and writer, says that “beyond clearly depraved content like child pornography and snuff films, or material explicitly promoting self-harm or suicide, there is little consensus about what constitutes ‘harmful’ content.”

“Liberals might view an Instagram video cautioning adolescents against gender transitioning as harmful, while conservatives might see a video encouraging gender transitioning as harmful,” Davids wrote, adding that it would be “deeply problematic” for governments to restrict content in a “neutral, consistent, and fair” manner.

The Liberal government under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, in Parliament in February 2024, but the legislation died earlier this year when Trudeau prorogued Parliament on Jan. 6, when he announced he would resign after the party chose a new leader.

The legislation would have amended the Canadian Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act “to address a range of harmful content online as well as hate speech and hate crimes both online and offline.”

Ottawa previously said it would set a “high bar” when defining hate speech, saying it “would not include mere dislike or disdain, or acts that merely offend or humiliate, nor would it cover political dissent.”

Civil liberties groups like the Canadian Civil Liberties Association had criticized the bill, saying it “includes overbroad violations of expressive freedom, privacy, protest rights, and liberty.”

Then-Justice Minister Arif Virani said at the time the bill would enhance free expression by targeting “the worst” online content and “empowering all people to safely participate in online debate.”

The Impact of Social Media on Youth

The report’s author says social media is a major contributing factor, if not the main cause, of declining mental health among young Canadians.

Depression rates among Canadians aged 15 to 24 doubled to 14 percent over the decade leading up to 2022, while anxiety rates quadrupled in the same age group, says the report, with the increases coinciding with the widespread adoption of smartphones and social media in the early 2010s.

“Time spent on social media now often replaces in-person interaction, exposes users to damaging content, and leads some to interpret normal distress as mental health symptoms,” reads the report.

“Studies suggest that one to two hours of daily social media use is associated with good mental health, but mental health worsens as use increases beyond that.”

Davids cites a theory developed by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, which suggests that social media harms youth mental health by limiting in-person social interactions. [Page 8]

“The introduction of smartphones and social media have created a developmental environment where youth spend less time in person with friends and family and more time online,” says the report. “As social media saps time away from building these critical relationships, youth grow more anxious and depressed.”

In addition to limited in-person contact, social media may expose youth to various risks, the report says, including cyberbullying, mockery and harassment through private messages, or public humiliation through posts shared by others.

They can also be blackmailed, threatened, and extorted through social media, which can result in serious consequences, as observed in the case of Amanda Todd, a British Columbia teenager who died in 2012 by suicide at the age of 15 after being blackmailed and bullied online.

As well, exposure to social media content can not only trigger the desire in youth to compare themselves to others, thus leading to body image, self-esteem, or self-harm issues; but also lead to the conscious or unconscious adoption of symptoms of mental or neurological disorders.

One example cited by the author involves a group of teenage girls who developed Tourette’s-like symptoms after consuming hours of TikTok content from online influencers with the condition. Tourette syndrome is a neurological disorder that causes sudden, involuntary, and repetitive movements or vocal sounds called “tics.”

The author notes that the rise in mental health diagnoses since 2010 may also reflect a longer-term trend of “diagnostic inflation,” where mild symptoms of distress are increasingly labeled as mental health conditions or other disorders.

“Given that information and ideas about mental health spread through social media, using these platforms could increase one’s chances of interpreting normal distress as a mental health issue or diagnosable disorder, which would help to explain the uptick in self-reported mental health symptoms,” reads the report.

Policy Proposals

The author argues that regulating the content youth encounter on the Internet is less likely to tackle the harms of social media than limiting the time they spend on these platforms.

“Given that the exorbitant amount of time youth spend on social media is a major contributor to its adverse impact on their mental health, bills that restrict young people from using social media until they are a reasonable age are likely to be better at getting to the root of the problem than bills that protect them from specific types of content,” writes the author.

He proposes raising the minimum age of social media use in Canada from 13 to 16, following Australia’s example. Social media platforms like Snapchat and TikTok require users to be at least 13 years old. Davids says age verification is necessary but adds that it raises privacy concerns that must be carefully considered.

He also recommends strengthening school policies that restrict cellphone and social media use. Eight provinces currently have some form of restriction, says the report, ranging from requiring phones to be kept out of sight to fully banning them in classrooms.

Re-orienting children around “free play” and in-person interactions instead of screens is another proposal outlined in the report. Schools could contribute to the initiative by reducing reliance on screens in education, and promoting outdoor time and socialization when possible, it says.

Families could play a role in this regard by “setting clear limits on screen time, ensuring their children have ample opportunities for independent outdoor play and face-to-face socialization, and modeling healthy screen use themselves,” Davids wrote.

Matthew Horwood contributed to this report.