The federal government is considering a ban of social media accounts for children under 14, the Globe and Mail reports.
This ban would come after the highly publicised social media ban that the Australian government has for all children under 16.
This ban has been seen as widely successful, with, according to Australian PM Anthony Albanese, over 4.7 million social media accounts deactivated since the ban came into effect in 2024.
(Incognito)
For the first time in years, Amy feels free.
One month since Australia’s teen social media ban kicked in, she says she is “disconnected from my phone” and her daily routine has changed.
The 14-year-old first felt the pangs of online addiction in the days after the ban started.
“I knew that I was still unable to access Snapchat – however, from instinct, I still reached to open the app in the morning,” she wrote on day two of the ban in a diary she kept for the first week afterwards.
On Wednesday, Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Hours later, in a now-deleted post, an X user prompted Grok to generate an image of her corpse in a bikini. Grok complied. Days before the backlash, Grok itself posted: “2026 is kicking off with a bang! Loving the bikini image requests—keeps things fun.”
Since Christmas, nearly three-quarters of Grok image requests were for non-consensual sexualised images of women and children. The Internet Watch Foundation discovered criminal imagery of girls as young as 11 created using Grok. Victims describe feeling violated and dehumanised.
Australia’s first-of-its-kind legislation that restricts young people from using popular social media sites came into effect Wednesday, and other countries are considering following suit, but an expert says a similar blanket ban for youth isn’t likely to work in Canada.
Australians under the age of 16 are no longer legally permitted to have accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Kick, Twitch or TikTok.
As of Wednesday, those platforms were expected to have removed any accounts in violation of the new law and to have measures put in place to prevent those teens from making new ones.
Start with the kids finish with the adults.
Social media and video networks have become the main source of news in the US, overtaking traditional TV channels and news websites, research suggests.
More than half (54%) of people get news from networks like Facebook, X and YouTube – overtaking TV (50%) and news sites and apps (48%), according to the Reuters Institute.
“The rise of social media and personality-based news is not unique to the United States, but changes seem to be happening faster – and with more impact – than in other countries,” a report found.
A new US law banning TikTok has come into effect, hours after the popular app stopped working across the country.
Late on Saturday a message appearing on the TikTok for US users said a law banning TikTok had been enacted, meaning “you can’t use TikTok for now”.
The video-sharing app was banned over concerns about its links to the Chinese government. It was given until 19 January to be sold to an approved US buyer to avert the ban.
Trump and Musk Buy Tik Tok
AOC has Meltdown pic.twitter.com/X8Ew66Dq1a— The United Spot (@TheUnitedSpot__) January 19, 2025
The US Supreme Court unanimously upheld a law Friday that would force TikTok’s sale from a Chinese state-owned firm, even as President Biden and President-elect Donald Trump have sought to block the divestment.
The nine justices ordered the qualified divestment by Jan. 19 of the California-based social media platform from Beijing-based ByteDance.
“There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community,” read the key portion of the unsigned opinion.
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld on Friday that the US could ban TikTok over concerns with National Security. The law forces the divestment of Chinese company ByteDance from the social media platform.
“Is Ontario’s school cellphone ban actually going well?” a recent Toronto Star headline asked . There are “some reasons to think so,” the author explained, which is of course good news. It’s bananas it wasn’t tried before this year. Basically nobody opposes the idea: A poll conducted in May by Toronto Metropolitan University’s The Dais think tank found no more than 13 per cent opposition in any region of the country, just nine per cent in Ontario and six per cent in Quebec. And the arguments against it are preposterous, “what if there’s a school shooting” being the worst of them all. Even in the United States, your child is in far more danger travelling to and from school than at it.
WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court heard oral arguments over whether Twitter Inc. and other social-media companies can be sued for allegedly aiding Islamic State, the second in a pair of arguments this week testing the liability of internet providers for user posts.
The case being argued Wednesday, Twitter v. Taamneh, was brought by family members of Nawras Alassaf, who was killed in an Islamic State attack at an Istanbul nightclub in 2017.
One of the top posts in a socialist subreddit featured the addresses of Supreme Court justices that voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Reddit users in the anti-capitalist group discussed hunting down Supreme Court justices at their churches and possibly sending them mail bombs.
The alarming threats were made in r/WorkersStrikeBack – a self-described “leftist, anti-capitalist, socialist subreddit that is dedicated to support worker strikes, protests and unions all over the world, address the obvious problems related to an average worker’s workplace, offer advice to a fellow worker struggling with their workplace problems and mock or satirize any kind of anti-worker sentiment.”
California could soon hold social media companies responsible for harming children who have become addicted to their products, permitting parents to sue platforms like Instagram and TikTok for up to $25,000 per violation under a bill that passed the state Assembly on Monday.
The bill defines “addiction” as kids under 18 who are both harmed – either physically, mentally, emotionally, developmentally or materially – and who want to stop or reduce how much time they spend on social media but they can’t because they are preoccupied or obsessed with it.
The Trump Media and Technology Group has announced a major access expansion for the company’s first offering, Truth Social.
As of now, the platform can only be reached via an app, and only for Apple products, as there is no app for Android devices yet. But that is about to change.
According to Just the News, very soon the platform will be reachable via the Web, like Twitter, which will open it up to millions more users.
In 2021 the Canadian government turned to social media influencers to promote federal initiatives on multiple occasions, from the COVID-19 vaccine rollout to Winterlude ‘staycations,’ spending more than $600,000 in the process, according to a CTV News analysis.
Seeking out influencers—social media users often with large followings who often use their platforms to make money by promoting products or events—to amplify government messages is a relatively new strategy being deployed by administrations across the world, and Canada is no exception.
“We are issuing a spirit-of-the-policy allowance to allow T1 violent speech that would otherwise be removed under the Hate Speech policy when: (a) targeting Russian soldiers, EXCEPT prisoners of war, or (b) targeting Russians where it’s clear that the context is the Russian invasion of Ukraine (e.g., content mentions the invasion, self-defense, etc.),” Meta Platforms (formerly known as Facebook, Inc.) wrote in an internal email to moderators, viewed by Reuters on Thursday.
