OTTAWA: The Canadian government introduced a new digital safety bill on Wednesday that would ban social media for children under 16 with exemptions for platforms that meet certain safety standards, months after Australia enacted the world’s first social media ban for young people.
The bill also aims to make AI chatbots safer by setting up a digital regulator to establish safety standards, a government official said.
Its introduction in Parliament comes weeks after families affected by one of the country’s worst mass shootings sued OpenAI, alleging that the company knew the alleged killer was planning the attack on ChatGPT but did not warn police.
In December, Australia became the world’s first country to ban social media for children under 16.
A month after its law was introduced, social media companies collectively deactivated the accounts of nearly 5 million teenagers.
