Canada's Safe Social Media Act vs the UK's Ban
If you’re a parent or a teacher in the UK, you’ll probably know that a social media ban for under-16s is coming. It was announced in June, and it’s due to take effect in Spring 2027.1 What you might not know is that Canada, in the same fortnight, introduced a law that takes a different approach, and I think it’s the one the UK should have copied.
Canada’s Safe Social Media Act, Bill C-34, also bans under-16 accounts by default.2 But it does something the UK’s version doesn’t. It gives platforms a way out of the ban, not through a loophole, but through proof. If a platform can show its new Digital Safety Commission that it has built adequate safeguards into the service to protect children, it can apply for an exemption and keep serving them.3
That single design choice changes everything about the incentive on the table. The UK’s approach tells platforms: keep children off until after they turn 16, full stop. Canada’s approach tells platforms: earn the right to have them by proving the platform itself is safe.
In my opinion, that’s exactly the stance the UK government should be taking. Child safety should be baked in from the very beginning of the planning stages of any social media platform, or any new capability that platform launches, not added afterwards because a regulator forced the issue. Canada has got that right.
Why “baked in from the start” isn’t just a nice idea
I spent eight years in DFIR before I came to this work, and the principle behind “safety by design” isn’t new to me, it’s standard practice in security engineering. You bake in safety and security at the planning stage because it’s simpler and cheaper to do it there than to try to bolt it on once the product already exists. Retrofitting is always harder, always more expensive, and always leaves gaps that a determined attacker, or in this case a determined child, will find.
There’s a second benefit that gets missed. If you put as many guardrails in place as possible from day one, you can actually test them and adjust, using feedback from the people who matter, the children using the platform, the parents watching them use it, and the professionals teachers, safeguarding leads and police, who deal with the fallout when something goes wrong. A platform built this way isn’t a finished product handed down from on high. It’s something that gets safer over time because it was designed to be able to.
Why the ban alone won’t be enough
I want to be careful here, because I’m not against the UK’s ban. I think age restrictions have a role to play. But the evidence so far suggests a ban on its own isn’t the whole answer.
Australia’s under-16 ban has been running since the start of this year.4 Researchers who surveyed around 400 children found that more than 85 per cent of them were still using social media platforms despite the restriction.5 Children are getting around the technical barriers with VPNs, or simply defeating the age verification technology itself, including with deepfakes.
That tells me a ban needs to be one part of a much wider strategy, not the whole strategy. In DFIR terms, this is defence in depth: no single control is trusted to do the whole job, because no single control ever does. You layer education, safer platform design, real communication with parents and teachers, and legislation with proper enforcement behind it, and you treat an outright ban as one of the tools you reach for, not the first and only one.
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What I want the UK to do
The UK’s ban takes effect in Spring 2027, and Ofcom is still working out what “highly effective age assurance” actually means in practice, with findings due in October.6 There’s still time to build something better into the framework than a ban on its own.
Safety by design shouldn’t be a badge platforms earn for being nice. It should be the bare minimum, a non-negotiable global standard for any platform serving anyone under 18, enforced through the Online Safety Act and by Ofcom, in exactly the way Canada is proposing to enforce it through its own regulator. Most of what “safety by design” actually requires is common sense. It shouldn’t take primary legislation to make platforms do the sensible thing from the outset.
I’d love to see this raised directly in Parliament. Samantha Niblett MP has been a contact of mine on child online safety issues, and this is exactly the kind of proposal that deserves a proper airing at Westminster, not just a policy paper nobody reads.
Canada won’t get everything right first time. No piece of legislation ever does. But the principle underneath Bill C-34 is sound, and it’s one the UK still has time to adopt before its own ban becomes law.
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UK Government, “Fact sheet: New rules to protect children online,” GOV.UK, accessed August 2026.
Government of Canada, “Government of Canada introduces legislation to make social media services and AI chatbots safer for children,” Canadian Heritage, 10 June 2026.
Heidi Tworek, “Canada’s Bet on Safer Social Media by Design,” Centre for International Governance Innovation, 14 August 2026.
Heidi Tworek, CIGI, 14 August 2026, citing the commencement of Australia’s social media restrictions at the start of 2026.
Study reported in the BMJ, cited via Tworek’s CIGI article. I haven’t reviewed the underlying BMJ study directly, so treat the 85 per cent figure as reported via CIGI’s summary rather than independently verified by me.
Ofcom, statement on preparations for the under-16 social media restrictions, June 2026.
This is Yulin Ke
I am here to talk
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Wow, this really helps me start to make sense of what we’re doing here in Canada to protect kids online. You hear from the government about their Bill, then you hear from the opposition, and it’s hard to sort out whether a Bill like this is really helpful or not. It’s great to have someone with the proper background assess it. Thank you!