Social media platforms dodge age-verification responsibility
As countries including Canada move toward bans on social media for under-16s, tech companies are clashing over who should enforce them—and experts say everyone needs to share the burden.
The day's top stories, food & events — every morning at 7. Unsubscribe anytime.
Canada is moving toward restricting social media access for users under 16, but tech companies are already fighting over who should bear the cost and complexity of enforcement.
Snapchat and Meta—owner of Instagram, Facebook and Threads—have argued that app stores, not individual platforms, should verify user ages at the point of download. Apple and Google, which run the App Store and Play Store respectively, have introduced some age-gating measures but appear reluctant to shoulder the full burden. The result is a corporate stalemate while policy tightens around them.
The federal government announced Wednesday that social media companies will eventually have to block access to their platforms for Canadian users under 16 unless they follow unspecified safeguards. But exactly how that enforcement will work remains unclear.
"It's all of our problem," said Kaitlynn Mendes, a sociology professor at Western University and Canada Research Chair in inequality and gender. "I don't think it's fair for any company to say, 'We're just the host, it's their problem.'"
The tension isn't new. Australia banned under-16 access to social media last year, but a study has since found that 70 per cent of affected Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok users have kept their accounts despite the crackdown. The U.K., France, Poland, Indonesia and now Canada are pursuing similar bans.
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel framed app-store verification as a privacy-protective measure, but Google senior director Kareem Ghanem accused platforms of "advancing policy proposals that demonstrate more interest in shifting responsibility than in taking responsibility." Apple recently introduced new parental controls for child accounts, but the company stopped short of saying it would handle age verification at scale.