B.C. Attorney General Niki Sharma said the federal government’s proposed online safety bill can’t come fast enough. But she said the legislation falls short of what B.C. wanted to see for the regulation of artificial intelligence chatbots.
The federal government introduced Bill C-34, or the Safe Social Media Act, on Wednesday.
It would prevent children under 16 from having social media accounts, but it carves out an exemption for platforms that can demonstrate sufficient safeguards for children.
A new independent Digital Safety Commission would be set up to enforce regulations and ensure companies comply with regulations to address risks to children on their platforms.
Sharma said the bill has many of the elements that B.C. has been asking for to address online harms.
“This legislation needs to move through the House quickly and the regulations need to be set up quickly,” Sharma told reporters in Vancouver on Thursday.
“Kids have been waiting and parents have been waiting long enough, and there’s real harm happening right now,” she said.
Sharma said she recently met with a family in Williams Lake, whose daughter, she said, died after being exposed to dark content on TikTok.
She also pointed to the 2012 suicide death of B.C. teen Amanda Todd after years of online bullying and sexual extortion.
B.C. has pushed for stricter regulations on artificial intelligence chatbots in the wake of February’s mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, and Sharma said Bill C-34 falls short on that front.
OpenAI has apologized to the northeastern B.C. community for failing to alert police about the 18-year-old suspect’s concerning interactions with its ChatGPT chatbot, months before the shooting happened.
B.C. has called for a national threshold to require technology companies to bring information to law enforcement when they suspect someone may be using their platform to plan violent attacks.
Premier David Eby said B.C. will be pushing the federal government to amend the proposed legislation to ensure there is a minimum threshold for AI companies to report harmful activity to police.
He said OpenAI’s actions related to the Tumbler Ridge shooting show that tech companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves.
“If we can take just one thing from that horrific event in our province, it is that these companies cannot make those judgment calls for us. We have to make that judgment call for them,” said Eby in Kelowna on Wednesday.
The proposed legislation doesn’t ban children under 16 from using AI chatbots, but would create a regulatory framework for chatbot services. That would include requiring transparency around their reporting thresholds when there is risk of a user harming themselves or others.
Sharma said Ottawa’s reasoning for the decision not to ban chatbots for kids under 16 appears to be because the harms to young people associated with social media are more well-established, but the potential harms of AI are still unclear, due to it being a newer technology.
“We’re waiting to see if it’s enough. What we want to make sure is that the rules that are in place, the regulatory oversight that’s in place would be strong enough to prevent some of the tragedies that we’ve seen right here in our province but really also across the world,” she said.
Sharma said provinces should have a role in making sure that the regulations put in place are strong enough.
“We want to be at the table when it comes to making sure the regulatory regime has enough teeth to it,” she said.
Sharma said one of the other things she’ll be watching for is whether the federal regulations address concerns about addictive algorithms used by platforms.
The proposed legislation would require services to reduce exposure to seven categories of harmful content. That includes sexually victimizing content, and content related to bullying, self-harm, hatred, inciting violence, or terrorism.
The new Digital Safety Commission would collect complaints from users when social media companies fail to take action against harmful content.
Ottawa said police services across Canada reported 16,905 incidents of online child sexual exploitation in 2024, a 347 per cent rise since 2014.
