The framework Bill C-34 establishes
The Safe Social Media Act rests on a single, clearly articulated premise: certain Canadians are uniquely vulnerable to the documented harms of unregulated social media access, and the state has both the authority and the obligation to protect them. Parliament has already accepted this reasoning. It passed first reading with overwhelming cross-party support.
The bill targets under-16s. The criterion is vulnerability — cognitive, social, and experiential. Young people, Parliament has determined, lack the developed critical-thinking apparatus to navigate algorithmically amplified content, targeted manipulation, and predatory behaviour online without institutional protection.
We agree with the framework entirely. We insist only that it be applied consistently, to every Canadian demographic for whom the evidence of vulnerability is equally compelling.
That evidence, applied to Canadians 65 and older, is overwhelming.
National security and the integrity of Canadian democracy
Foreign interference in democratic elections is one of the defining national security challenges of the 21st century. Social media is its primary vector. And seniors are its primary target.
A landmark Princeton University study found that Americans over 65 were seven times more likely to share fake news on social media than users aged 18 to 29 — regardless of education level, political affiliation, or social media experience. Canadian researchers have replicated these findings in domestic contexts. The pattern is consistent: age is the single strongest predictor of susceptibility to disinformation, outpacing every other demographic variable.
Foreign state actors — Russia's Internet Research Agency, Chinese state-linked networks, Iranian influence operations — have refined their targeting accordingly. Declassified reports from the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) confirm that Canadian seniors are disproportionately targeted by foreign influence campaigns, specifically because their social networks (large, multigenerational, trusted) make them ideal amplification nodes. A piece of disinformation shared by a 70-year-old reaches her children, her grandchildren, her church group, and her book club. The reach-per-post of an older user, combined with the trust their networks place in them, makes them far more valuable targets than younger users.
During the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, Elections Canada and CSIS both flagged coordinated inauthentic behaviour targeting older Canadian voters with fabricated news about candidates, falsified electoral information, and coordinated misrepresentation of polling results. The goal was not merely to change opinions — it was to suppress turnout among specific demographics and amplify division.
When seniors share foreign-manufactured disinformation, they do so in good faith. They are not the villains of this story. They are its victims. And they are damaging our democracy in the process. The Digital Safety Commission, once empowered by Bill C-34, has both the mandate and the mechanism to address this. We call on Parliament to extend that mandate to the demographic the evidence most urgently demands.
Financial devastation: the fraud epidemic targeting seniors
The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre reported that Canadians lost over $554 million to fraud in 2023. A disproportionate share of those losses — in dollar terms and in psychological harm — fell on Canadians 65 and older.
Social media is now the primary delivery mechanism for the fraud typologies that most devastate seniors:
- Romance scams. Fraudsters build extended relationships — sometimes lasting months or years — with isolated seniors on Facebook, Instagram, and dating platforms before manufacturing a crisis that requires financial transfer. The average romance scam loss per victim is among the highest of any fraud category. Seniors, particularly those who are recently widowed or socially isolated, are the primary targets. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre documented over $50 million in romance scam losses in 2023 alone, with 65+ victims accounting for the majority of reported dollar losses.
- Investment fraud. Sophisticated investment schemes, amplified through social media advertising and Facebook groups, disproportionately target seniors who hold significant retirement savings and may have less familiarity with current financial products. Losses are typically large and non-recoverable.
- Grandparent scams. Fraudsters impersonate grandchildren (or lawyers and police officers representing them) in crisis situations — arrested abroad, in a hospital, in trouble — and demand emergency wire transfers. These scams, which originate and are coordinated through social media and messaging platforms, extracted tens of millions from Canadian seniors in the past year.
- Fake marketplace and charity fraud. Seniors are more likely to trust social media marketplace listings and charity solicitations at face value, with dramatically higher rates of loss per transaction.
The financial harm is not abstract. These losses eliminate retirement savings accumulated over decades. They force seniors to return to work, to sell homes, to depend on family members. They cause documented long-term psychological trauma including depression, anxiety, and social withdrawal. They are, in many cases, irreversible.
Parliament determined that the financial and psychological harms of social media exposure justified restricting access for under-16s. The per-capita financial harm to Canadians 65+ exceeds, by every available metric, the equivalent harm to that demographic. Consistency demands the same remedy.
Predators, con artists, and targeted exploitation
The harms to seniors online are not limited to fraud. Social media platforms have created optimized environments for the targeted exploitation of the isolated and the trusting.
Elder financial abuse — estimated to cost Canadians billions annually, much of it unreported — increasingly originates online. Predatory individuals cultivate relationships with seniors through Facebook groups, community pages, and direct messaging before exploiting those relationships for financial gain, property transfer, or changes to wills and beneficiary designations. The platform's architecture — designed to maximize connection and time-on-platform — is ideally suited for long-form manipulation of vulnerable individuals.
Medical misinformation spread through senior-focused Facebook groups has driven documented harm: seniors discontinuing effective medications based on false claims, seeking fraudulent treatments for cancer and cardiovascular disease, and avoiding evidence-based care in favour of products sold through social media marketplaces. The harms are not hypothetical. Canadian hospitals and pharmacists have documented the downstream effects.
Bill C-34 invokes the concept of a "safe" digital environment — one in which the most vulnerable users are shielded from the algorithmic amplification of harmful content and the predatory actors who exploit it. There is no principled reason to define that protection's boundary at age 16 when the evidence of equivalent or greater vulnerability exists at the other end of the age spectrum.
Artificial intelligence and the end of digital discernment
The emergence of generative AI has introduced a qualitatively new category of online harm — and seniors are, by every available measure, the least equipped to identify or resist it.
AI-generated synthetic voice has already been weaponized against seniors at scale. The "grandparent voice scam" — in which a fraudster uses AI to clone the voice of a senior's grandchild and simulate a crisis — has spread across North America with devastating results. Unlike earlier phone scams, these calls are indistinguishable from genuine family calls. The emotional triggers — a grandchild's voice, panic, urgency — bypass the rational evaluation that might catch a text-based fraud.
AI-generated deepfake video of political figures, public health authorities, and community leaders has been documented circulating in senior-heavy Facebook groups, spreading false medical claims, fabricated political positions, and manufactured endorsements. Multiple studies have shown that older adults have significantly lower rates of deepfake detection than younger cohorts — not due to intelligence, but due to exposure and the development of intuitive pattern-recognition that only comes from extended engagement with AI-generated content.
AI-generated advertising content targets seniors with personalized health claims, fake endorsements from trusted figures, and manufactured urgency — and converts at significantly higher rates among 65+ users than in any other demographic.
The pace of AI development guarantees that these capabilities will only improve. A generation of Canadians who learned to read the internet before AI content existed is being asked to navigate a media environment that has become fundamentally untrustworthy — with no training, no tools, and no institutional protection.
Parliament has decided that teenagers need protection from content their developing minds are not yet equipped to critically evaluate. The same logic, applied to seniors navigating AI-generated content they were never equipped to detect, demands the same response.
Digital literacy and the structural disadvantage of older users
The justification for protecting minors online rests in part on the observation that young people's critical reasoning is still developing — they are cognitively less equipped to evaluate online content than adults. This is well-documented and accepted.
The equivalent observation for seniors is not about cognitive decline — it is about structural disadvantage. Canadians who are now 65 and older formed their media literacy in an era of institutional, edited, authoritative information: newspapers with editorial boards, broadcasters with regulatory obligations, publishers with reputational accountability. They learned, correctly, that published information in established channels was generally reliable.
Social media inverts every one of those assumptions. There are no editorial boards. There is no regulatory accountability for individual posters. There is no reputational mechanism that functions at the speed of viral sharing. The mental models that served older Canadians perfectly for decades actively mislead them online — a post shared by a friend carries the same apparent authority as a peer-reviewed study; a Facebook group has the same apparent legitimacy as a government health website.
This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a predictable consequence of bringing a generation's hard-won information heuristics into an environment those heuristics were never designed for. It is structurally equivalent to asking a new driver to navigate a Formula 1 circuit and attributing the outcome to incompetence.
Bill C-34 does not blame teenagers for being susceptible to social media harm. It recognizes that the environment is the problem and acts accordingly. We ask for nothing less in the case of seniors.
Why C-34 is unlikely to protect anyone — and what would
Before Parliament uses the framework of Bill C-34 on any demographic — teenagers, seniors, or otherwise — it should reckon with a more fundamental question: will it work?
Age verification is trivially bypassed. A teenager — or a foreign disinformation operator, or an organized fraud syndicate — can circumvent any platform age check in minutes: a VPN, a false birthdate, a borrowed account, a secondary device. The compliance burden falls entirely on law-abiding users, who must now submit identity documents to access routine internet services. The actors actually driving harm — foreign state networks, scam call centres, AI-powered fraud operations — face no obstacle whatsoever.
This is not a theoretical concern. Australia's Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 was the world's first enacted social media age ban. Six months into enforcement, the verdict was already in: as researchers at Charles Sturt University concluded in a widely-cited analysis, the ban simply isn't working. Teens bypassed it through VPNs, false birthdates, and secondary accounts with minimal friction. Platforms struggled to enforce checks that determined users could defeat in seconds. The vulnerable people the law was designed to protect remained exposed. The surveillance infrastructure built to enforce it remained operational.
A system that stops zero bad actors but places every Canadian's identity into a centralized database is not a protection regime. It is a liability — for privacy, for civil liberties, and for every future government that inherits the power to query it.
There are better tools. They are less dramatic, less surveillant, and more likely to actually work:
- Algorithm regulation based on psychology. The documented harm of social media — to teens, to seniors, to democratic discourse — flows primarily from engagement-optimized feeds, not from access itself. Require platforms to offer chronological, subscriber-based defaults. Prohibit algorithmic amplification of content shown to increase anxiety, outrage, and division. Regulate the mechanism that causes harm, not the identity of the user.
- Dark-pattern bans for minors. Prohibit infinite scroll, autoplay, compulsive notification design, and "like" counts visible to users under 18. These design patterns are documented drivers of addictive use — and they are targetable without a national identity database.
- Device-level restrictions on smartphones for minors. France, the UK, and several US states have explored restricting smartphone sales or features for minors — an approach that is substantially harder to bypass than a platform-level age check, and does not require logging every adult's identity.
- Encouraging lower-tech alternatives. The growing movement toward minimal phones — and even pagers — for younger users reflects a genuine appetite for less algorithmically hostile devices. Public policy can encourage this without a surveillance mandate. Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation (2024) surveys the evidence base for phone-free environments and device norms as the most tractable intervention available.
- Digital literacy for seniors. Investment in AI detection education, fraud awareness, and media literacy for older Canadians addresses the documented harm directly — without restricting anyone's access to anything.
None of these alternatives require Parliament to build an identity verification system. None of them create a honeypot that a future government can exploit. All of them address the actual documented mechanisms of harm.
The only consistent position
Parliament has accepted, with 75% public support, that the vulnerability of a demographic group is sufficient grounds for restricting its access to social media platforms. The Digital Safety Commission exists. The legal and administrative framework exists. The precedent exists.
The evidence that Canadians 65 and older are at least as vulnerable — by the bill's own criteria, across every harm category the bill invokes — as Canadians under 16 is not in serious dispute. The data on disinformation susceptibility, financial fraud victimization, AI deception, and predatory exploitation all point in the same direction.
There are two consistent positions available to Parliament:
- Use the bill to its full extent. Extend C-34's protections to all demonstrably vulnerable Canadians — including those 65 and older. If the principle is sound, apply it consistently. We will help you do that.
- Repeal the bill. Acknowledge that mandatory demographic-based internet restriction is the wrong tool, abandon the surveillance infrastructure, and pursue the less authoritarian alternatives outlined above. We will help you do that too.
Half-measures are not available. A principle that applies only when it is politically convenient is not a principle. It is a preference. Parliament must choose.