Survey: 85% of Canadian teens have seen violence or gore online
Most encounters happen on YouTube and TikTok, often served by algorithms without user search.
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A new survey reveals that the vast majority of Canadian teens are encountering graphic content online, much of it without seeking it out.
Eighty-five per cent of the 1,007 teens surveyed in January reported seeing either violence or gore on the internet. More than 70 per cent had seen videos of physical fights, 65 per cent had viewed police violence, and 52 per cent watched someone being injured or killed in a war. Ten per cent reported seeing child sexual abuse material.
The survey was commissioned by scholarly organization DIY: Digital Safety and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. Alexa Dodge, the report's lead author and associate professor of criminology at Saint Mary's University in Nova Scotia, said the findings surprised even seasoned researchers.
"The rates at which young people were seeing this and the types of content they were seeing at high rates really surprised us, and I think even surprised the folks at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection—and they're not an easy group to shock because they see the worst of the worst online," she said.
YouTube was the most common platform where teens encountered graphic material, followed closely by TikTok and then Instagram. Almost 40 per cent of surveyed teens said the graphic content appeared unexpectedly in posts from strangers, while more than 30 per cent blamed algorithmic recommendations.
When teens reported violence or gore to platforms, the content often remained online. In the 11 per cent of instances when teens reported such material, platforms frequently failed to remove it—a finding Dodge called "really powerful" because it demonstrates how disturbing the content is to young people and how much they wish someone would act.
