Canada's Social Media Age Law and What Adolescents Actually Need

In June 2025, Canada's Culture Minister Marc Miller introduced the Safe Social Media Act, a bill prohibiting children under 16 from creating accounts on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and comparable platforms.[^1] The legislation mandates age verification, requires deletion of existing underage accounts, and imposes penalties up to $10 million or 3 percent of global annual revenue. A new Digital Safety Commission of Canada would enforce compliance.

The bill follows Australia, the first country to enact a comparable ban for users under 16. Governments are no longer treating adolescent exposure to algorithmically curated environments as a private matter between families and their devices. They are treating it as a public health concern.

What the evidence says

Canadian officials drew on advisory statements from the U.S. Surgeon General and studies cited by the American Psychological Association documenting associations between heavy social media use and elevated rates of anxiety, depression, sleep disruption, and distorted body image in adolescents. These findings appear across methodologies, populations, and national contexts.

The neurological dimension is instructive. Adolescent brains are still forming the prefrontal cortex structures responsible for impulse regulation and long-term judgment. Platforms engineered around infinite scrolling, autoplay, and personalized feeds are not neutral delivery systems. They exploit the developmental vulnerabilities that define adolescence. The Safe Social Media Act addresses this directly, requiring companies to limit or eliminate addictive design features when serving young users.

Addictive design is not incidental to the business model. It is the business model. Applied to a population whose capacity for self-regulation is biologically incomplete, the result is not merely distraction but systematic interference with the formation of identity, relationship, and interior life at the moment those capacities are most fragile.

The formation question beneath the policy question

Legislation can remove an obstacle. It cannot build the conditions that allow a young person to develop well.

Catholic anthropology begins with a specific claim: the person is a unity of body, soul, and spirit, constituted for relationship and oriented toward truth. Adolescence, within this framework, is a period of integration during which the developing person asks foundational questions about identity, meaning, belonging, and vocation. Those questions require silence, mentorship, embodied community, and the experience of being genuinely known by another person.

What algorithmic platforms offer is a simulation of that environment: the appearance of community without its substance, the sensation of being seen without the vulnerability of actual disclosure. Positive psychology reaches a compatible conclusion through different methods. Research on adolescent flourishing consistently identifies secure attachment, autonomy support, and competence within meaningful activity as the conditions most predictive of long-term wellbeing. None of these are naturally produced by a feed designed to maximize time-on-platform.

Presence as a clinical and theological category

Developmental science and Catholic anthropology converge because they are describing the same reality: young people require genuine presence, not mediated attention, to develop well.

In clinical terms, presence refers to the quality of attunement between a person and their relational environment. Therapeutic alliance research has established that the relational bond between clinician and client is among the strongest predictors of treatment outcome across modalities. What works in therapy works partly because it replicates something the person needed and did not fully receive: being genuinely attended to by another consciousness.

Family life, mentorship, spiritual direction, and friendship carry the same logic. A young person formed within relationships of genuine presence develops interior resources to navigate digital environments, peer pressure, and the ordinary suffering of human life. A young person formed primarily within algorithmic environments is trained to seek stimulation rather than depth, approval rather than understanding.

Resilience is relational before it is individual

One durable finding in resilience research: protective factors are relational before they are individual. Young people who navigate adversity well do so because they have at least one stable, committed relationship with an adult who sees them clearly. The internal capacities we associate with resilience, emotional regulation, realistic optimism, the ability to seek help, develop within relationships before they can be exercised independently.

Social media platforms, designed around engagement metrics, undermine this process by replacing depth with frequency and training adolescent attention toward horizontal peer affirmation rather than the anchoring of mentorship and tradition.

A Catholic framework for youth mental health takes this relational logic seriously at every level. The sacramental life, the practice of prayer, and membership in a community ordered toward something larger than individual preference are among the conditions that produce psychological wellbeing, not merely spiritual goods appended to it. Presence, relationship, interiority, and meaning are not competing with the therapeutic goals of positive psychology. They are, in many respects, the same goals described in a different register.

Canada's Safe Social Media Act creates a structural window of opportunity. Australia's early experience suggests that age verification faces implementation challenges and that determined young users find workarounds. What happens inside the window depends on factors no government can legislate: the quality of family relationships, the presence of mentors, the availability of communities that give young people something worth showing up for. Protecting young people from algorithmic harm is a necessary beginning. Forming them into persons capable of genuine relationship and resilient hope is the goal that gives protection its purpose.

References

[^1]: EWTN News, 'Canadian government introduces bill to shield youth from social media harms,' June 12, 2025.