OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) — Major social media companies are attempting to determine who will be in charge and essentially enforce the rules of the Canadian government’s social media minors ban should it become law.

Trying to find out who will gatekeep the Liberals’ new Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, executives from Meta (Facebook, Instagram) and Snapchat say the app stores should be tasked with age-verifying users.

Google and Apple, who control the app phone market via the Play Store and App Store, already have in place some age verification measures. Google and Apple do not take the same path as Meta and Snapchat, however, when it comes to age verification.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, Bill C-34 was introduced by Culture Minister Marc Miller on June 10. Besides banning social media for youth, the new bill will also force online platforms to have measures to report credible threats of violence or self-harm to the police.

It is expected that the social media ban will be like the one in place in Australia that bans youth under age 16 from having Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, and other platform accounts.

However, it has been reported that social media platforms may receive exemptions if they can prove that they meet new safety standards for users, especially minors.

Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, in an opinion piece in the Financial Times, said it has “advocated for age verification by app stores instead of individual apps — not because we support under-16 bans, but because if this policy exists it needs to have uniform implementation that safeguards privacy and security for users.”

Meta appears to agree with the same ideas as Spiegel, but it seems Google does not like that approach.

“Time and time again, all over the world, you’ve seen them push forward proposals that would have app stores change their practices and do something new without any change by Meta,” said Kareem Ghanem, who serves as the senior director of government affairs and public policy at Google.

He said that it seems policies of “advancing policy proposals that demonstrate more interest in shifting responsibility than in taking responsibility” are becoming more common.

Due to Australia’s social media ban laws, Apple recently made changes to its App Store, adding new features to kids’ accounts that limit which apps one can download.

Constitutional group warns social media ban could lead to surrendering ‘freedoms’ 

Some groups in Canada have cautioned that the proposed social media ban for children under age 16 could lead to Canadians being forced to “surrender” their personal data as some sort of condition to use the internet.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) warned that Bill C-34 “deputizes affected social media platforms into forcing Canadians to surrender more data as a precondition of participation in the digital public square.”

Bill C-34 “deputizes affected social media platforms into forcing Canadians to surrender more data as a precondition of participation in the digital public square,” it noted.

As a result, the JCCF launched a national campaign to try to stop the proposed ban that, according to the federal government, aims to “regulate the internet in the future.”

The Liberal government has been flirting for some time with the idea of creating a national digital ID that could become a part of any social media ban. 

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