Canada’s Leading Child Health and Safety Organizations Unite to Demand Action on Social Media Harm

New “Six Clicks” national campaign mobilizes Canadians to push Parliament to quickly pass Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, and require technology platforms to place children’s safety ahead of engagement and profit

OTTAWA, Ontario, Oct. 19, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — A coalition of leading Canadian child health, safety, and advocacy organizations today is calling on Parliament to quickly pass Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, and establish meaningful, enforceable protections for children online. Through a national public awareness campaign called “Six Clicks,” the coalition is showing parents how quickly an innocent online experience can lead a child down a path towards a chatbot that mirrors their despair, a stranger who can find and message them, a feed that teaches them to hate other people, images that make them hate their own body, violence they didn’t want to see. The campaign asks Canadians to visit https://saferonlinespaces.ca/en/six-clicks/ and demand their Members of Parliament support Bill C-34.

In an online world designed to maximize attention and profit, children are routinely six clicks away from harm. Social media platforms use deliberate design features like recommendation algorithms, autoplay, infinite scroll, engineered notifications, and unsafe defaults to keep young people online, collecting more data and generating more revenue as their engagement grows.

“Canada’s children deserve digital spaces designed with their safety and well-being in mind,” said Dr. Bolu Ogunyemi, President, Canadian Medical Association (CMA). “This coalition is coming together because technology companies have shown that they will not make the necessary changes on their own. Parliament now has an opportunity to establish clear standards, meaningful accountability, and stronger protections for Canadian families.”

Parents cannot solve a platform design problem alone

Corporate technology platforms play an outsized role in this fight. The campaign emphasizes that keeping children safe online cannot rest solely on parents. Families cannot control every recommendation, notification, or algorithmic decision shaping what children see, and they should not be expected to outmanoeuvre systems intentionally designed to manipulate young people for profit.

“It takes only a handful of clicks for a child’s life to change,” said Carol Todd, parent advocate and mother of Amanda Todd. “Parents are doing everything they can, but no family can monitor every moment or anticipate every decision made by an algorithm. Safer design is not about limiting connection. It is about making sure connection does not cost children their safety.”

The scale of the challenge is immense:

• One in three adolescents report unhealthy psychological symptoms linked to social media use.
• Seventy-one per cent of young Canadians report encountering hateful content online, and 12% report exposure to intimate images or videos online once or a few times a month.
• More than 61,000 incidents of online child sexual exploitation were reported to police in Canada between 2014 and 2022.
• Technology companies can collect millions of data points about a child before they turn 13, supporting a business model that depends on sustaining their attention.

“Children are in crisis,” said Dr. Charlotte Moore Hepburn, Medical Director of the Child Health Policy Accelerator at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids). “Young people’s engagement with the online world is the largest fully unregulated clinical trial affecting human development in the history of human civilization.”

A critical opportunity for Canada

Introduced in Parliament on June 10, Bill C-34 would create new duties for online platforms to protect children, reduce exposure to harmful content, publish digital safety plans and respond quickly to the most serious illegal material.

Canada’s proposed approach is genuinely novel. It is not an outright ban, but a safety standard with an earned exemption: any platform that demonstrates adequate safeguards for children can continue interacting with young Canadians. This makes reaching children a privilege a company earns by building a product worthy of their use, not a right it holds by default. That conditional pathway distinguishes Bill C-34 from Australia’s under-16 ban, and gives Canada an opportunity to establish a new model for protecting children online.

The Coalition supports quickly passing Bill C-34 and ensuring that its safety-by-design requirements are clear, enforceable, and measured against outcomes for young people. Any young Canadian using these services should be able to expect that:

• they are not findable or contactable by adults they don’t know;
• they control who sees their posts, their profile, and their location;
• they can put the phone down, on services not engineered to pull them back;
• what is recommended to them is age-appropriate and does not escalate toward harmful content;
• when someone targets them, the platform intervenes quickly rather than after the harm is done; and
• an independent regulator has the powers to verify these outcomes and report publicly on whether they are being met.

“Canada must set strong, enforceable standards that ensure tech accountability. We cannot leave the safety of Canadian children in the hands of profit-driven tech companies, says Miranda Jordan-Smith, director of impact and engagement, Canadian Centre for Child Protection. “Bill C-34 is a foundational step, but it must address design choices that shape children’s online experiences every day. Children deserve digital environments designed with their safety in mind – not platforms that knowingly cause online harm”

Growing Global Momentum to Protect Children Online

Canada’s debate punctuates the global conversation and movement to strengthen protections. The European Union plans to raise the minimum age for autonomous social media accounts to 15 (with parent-controlled “mini accounts” for 13- and 14-year-olds), impose safety-by-design duties on platforms, video-sharing services, games, and AI companions. Australia has banned children under 16 from accessing major social media platforms, while the United Kingdom has announced plans for similar restrictions. In the U.S., states have pursued sweeping legal action against technology companies over evidence that addictive platform design has harmed young people. Together, these developments reflect a growing consensus that technology companies require serious and effective oversight – and must be held responsible for their public health failures.

The “Six Clicks” campaign will reach Canadians through television, digital advertising, social media, and public installations. At https://saferonlinespaces.ca/en/six-clicks/, Canadians can learn more about this issue and contact their MPs in support of a stronger Safe Social Media Act.

The Safer Online Spaces Coalition brings together the clinicians who treat the harm, the organizations that protect children from exploitation, the networks that shape child health policy, and the families who have lived the consequences. United by a shared commitment to the safety and well-being of young people, we are calling on the Parliament of Canada to quickly pass Bill C-34.

Media Contact

Tom Suiter, Public Inc. tom@publicinc.com