Canada bans social media for under 16s and simultaneously begins regulating AI chatbots

Canada's authorities, led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, introduced a bill to Parliament on Wednesday in June 2026, the Digital Safety Act — a "Digital Safety Act" that simultaneously prohibits users under 16 years old from registering on social networks and introduces regulation of AI chatbots. This makes Canada one of the first countries to combine both directions in a single legislative act, whereas most states so far regulate social networks and chatbots separately.

What the Digital Safety Act Provides

The bill became part of a global wave of state pressure on platforms due to the harm they cause to children and adolescents — over recent years, similar restrictions on access for minors to social networks have been introduced in other countries, although specific age thresholds and age verification mechanisms vary significantly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The distinction of the Canadian approach is that the document in one package covers two different types of products at once: classical social networks and conversational AI bots, which formally are not social networks but are increasingly used by teenagers for communication and emotional support.

Key facts about the bill:

• Name — Digital Safety Act ("Digital Safety Act")
• Date of introduction — Wednesday, June 2026
• Restriction — prohibition for users under 16 years old from using social networks
• New to the market — simultaneous regulation of AI chatbots in the same bill
• Context — part of a broader global trend to restrict children's access to platforms

How Canada Differs from Other Countries

In most jurisdictions that have introduced age restrictions for social networks in recent years, AI chatbots have remained outside the scope of the law — regulators viewed them as a separate category of products with their own risks, including emotional attachment of teenagers to conversational bots and the quality of moderation of generated content. Canada's decision to combine both directions in one document signals that for local lawmakers, the line between "social network" and "AI conversationalist" in terms of potential harm to minors has effectively blurred: in both cases, the key risk is the uncontrolled involvement of a child in the digital environment without parental control and without understanding that the other end of the dialog is not a human. Typically, chatbot regulation covers such topics as mandatory security testing before launch, escalation protocols when a teenager refers to a bot on sensitive topics, and requirements for protecting personal data of minor users — and there are reasons to believe that the Canadian bill will move in a similar direction.

What This Means for the AI Chatbot Market

For developers of chatbots and conversational AI services targeting a mass audience, the Canadian precedent is important regardless of whether they operate in the Canadian market or not: it shows that regulators are ready to extend to AI products the same age verification mechanisms and restrictions that were previously applied only to social networks. This increases the likelihood that similar requirements — mandatory age verification, restrictions on functionality for minors, special safety modes — will appear in the legislation of other countries that are now observing how Canada implements the Digital Safety Act in practice.

For the industry as a whole, this means that the topic of child safety in AI products ceases to be a matter of voluntary corporate policies and enters the sphere of direct state regulation — and Canada, apparently, is setting a new, broader template for this process, combining social networks and AI in a unified regulatory logic.

For platforms and chatbot developers working in the international market, the practical challenge is that they will now have to support several parallel modes of compliance with requirements — one for each jurisdiction with its own set of age thresholds, verification formats, and reporting requirements. Companies that have already built a flexible system of regional product settings for different regulatory regimes (which major social networks have done for years with respect to digital advertising and content moderation) will adapt to new requirements faster than startups that did not initially incorporate such flexibility into the architecture of their AI products. For small teams developing AI chatbots for children and teenagers as educational or entertainment services, the Canadian example is particularly significant — this very category of products, based on the bill's formulations, will be under the closest regulator attention in the first place.