The debate over Bill C-34’s social media ban for those under sixteen has largely focused on the impact on users, including mandated age verification for millions, the privacy risks of verification technologies, and experience elsewhere suggesting the policy is ineffective. Defenders of the ban have characterized the Canadian approach as a “soft ban” that will allow social media companies to obtain exemptions provided they meet yet-to-be-determined safety standards. This approach is said to create incentives for companies to address safety concerns and qualify for the exemption. But a closer look at the bill reveals that the approach does not work, as even “safe” services will be required to implement age verification for tens of millions of users. By the time the Digital Safety Commission has figured anything out, the services will have verified most of the country and likely lost users in the process. This is true not only for services that require significant design changes, but even those services that today would be widely acknowledged to be safe for children.

If the bill were to pass tomorrow, there would be no social media services covered by the law, no safety standards, no age verification standards, and no mechanism to obtain an exemption. Assuming the law passes, the government says it will need between 12 and 18 months to develop the necessary regulations to make the Digital Safety Commission at least partially operational and to implement the ban. This means that the purported benefit of a “soft-ban” is illusory, since the ban will take effect without safety standards in place and without the ability to obtain an exemption. That isn’t an incentive to establish a safe environment, but rather an uncertain regulatory framework that invariably leads to mandatory age verification for all Canadian social media users.

The social media ban is subject to Section 29, which provides:

The Commission may, on application by an operator, exempt, subject to any conditions it considers appropriate, the operator from the application of subsections 27(1) and 28(1) in respect of a regulated social media service if the Commission is satisfied that the operator provides adequate safeguards in the regulated social media service for the protection of children.

The exemption requires an application to the Commission, which will decide if it “is satisfied” there are adequate safeguards. The criteria the Commission must weigh come from cabinet regulations under Section 29(2) that have not been made, and the standard for what counts as adequate safeguards depends on guidelines the Commission may establish under Section 30 that cannot be written before there is a Commission to write them. In other words, the process is largely a blank slate for the moment.

That is a lot of uncertainty for any service, but it is particularly damaging to services that would likely qualify from the very outset. For example, a service such as YouTube Kids includes parental controls and content limits that would conceivably meet the necessary standard. Yet, with all services ineligible for an exemption at launch, it will likely need to implement age verification for its users as well.

It is possible that the government would want to exempt a service like YouTube Kids without waiting for the Commission. The problem is that Bill C-34’s standard for a “regulated social media service” is largely based on meeting a user threshold. There are some regulations to come on how to count the total number of users, but the bill focuses on users as the basis to determine whether a social media service is caught by the law (as an aside, this is another reason why the ban is so ineffective, since those under 16 easily gravitate to smaller, unregulated services that fall below the threshold and avoid specific government regulation).

A similar issue arose in Australia on whether YouTube should have been subject to the ban. It was first exempted on educational grounds, the exemption was attacked by rival platforms as a “sweetheart deal”, the eSafety Commissioner recommended reversing it, and the government brought YouTube back into the ban before the ban started on December 10, 2025. What made Australia different from Canada is that it had a regulator in place and a published set of rules and regulatory guidance to make, contest, and revise that determination before any liability attached. There will be none of that when the ban takes effect with Bill C-34.

If the government were serious about using the ban as a compliance incentive, the obvious way to do so would be to reverse its approach: no ban until the Commission is fully established, along with age verification and safety standards. With that in place, companies that fail to meet the Commission’s standards could face consequences, including an age-verification requirement. That would make age verification the exception, rather than the rule, and given the costs to the services and the risks to their users, there would be a real incentive to ensure compliance and avoid a ban. As it stands now, the absence of standards and the immediate application of the ban to all services means the exemption process does not provide an incentive to establish a safe environment, and far from a soft ban, the bill is effectively a hard requirement for the majority of Canadians to submit to risky age verification processes.