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TORONTO – The Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) is warning that Bill C-34, the federal government’s proposed Safe Social Media Act, may pose the greatest threat to Canadians’ free speech in decades.

Bill C-34 would create a Digital Safety Commission of Canada, which would consist of three to five commissioners whose job would be to police speech for all Canadians on social media and AI platforms, supported by a new bureaucracy.

The Digital Safety Commission would enforce:

• a “duty to act responsibly” for social media companies and artificial intelligence chatbot companies by mitigating the risk that Canadians are exposed to “harmful content,” 
• a “duty to protect children” requiring social media companies to keep children under age 16 off social media services and pornographic websites, and
• a duty for social media companies to remove content “that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor and intimate content communicated without consent.”

While the CCF supports measures to protect children online and to combat non-consensual sharing of intimate images, Bill C-34 goes much further. It would require social media and AI companies to mitigate users’ exposure to content that is “harmful,” including speech that “foments hatred.” The bill would force platforms to choose between censoring lawful but controversial expression or face fines of up to $10 million or three percent of global revenue.

The CCF has created an Explainer that examines the bill in more detail, including its proposed age-verification requirements for social media.

CCF Interim Executive Director Christine Van Geyn said that regulating the output of AI chatbots is particularly worrying.

“Controversial questions posed by journalists, academics and policymakers could be considered harmful by AI chatbots,” Van Geyn said. “An AI or social media company may fear that factual answers could be characterized as fostering hostility toward a protected group and be censored.” 

“Instead of outright banning these conversations, which the government knows it cannot do, it is outsourcing censorship to private companies by creating a regulatory chill,” Van Geyn added.

Josh Dehaas, Interim Litigation Director for the CCF, noted that the government can only limit expression if the limit is demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. 

“Some of the limits proposed in C-34 easily pass this test, including requiring social media companies to take down intimate images communicated without consent or child abuse images, and blocking AI from telling its users to commit crimes or to engage in self-harm,” Dehaas said. “But the duty to act responsibly also includes much more subjective speech that must not be censored. It is a grave risk to free speech.”

Alongside the Explainer, the CCF launched a new petition urging Parliament to abandon Bill C-34.