Canada’s Carney government has tabled Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, which would create a new independent regulatory body and proposes banning teens under the age of 16 from social media. Critics question the ban’s constitutionality and its potential risks to privacy and freedom of expression by requiring all users to submit proof of age. They also doubt its effectiveness, noting that in Australia, a “substantial proportion” of teens are circumventing a similar ban, sometimes with help from the targeted social media companies. The bill is largely a copy of key parts of a 2024 online harms proposal that died when Parliament was prorogued, with the new version adding the social media ban and extending coverage to chatbots and online services. Its central concept remains the “duty to act responsibly,” a form of corporate social responsibility that relies on companies to police themselves, with government stepping in only after the fact to evaluate their efforts. The article argues this trust-based model is flawed, given tech companies’ history of acting against the public interest. The Canadian Commission on Democratic Expression requires platforms “to show that reasonable measures are being taken and, when necessary, adjustments made to avoid the occurrence of harms to individuals and groups.” Legal scholar Vivek Krishnamurthy calls the concept a “made-in-Canada alternative to both American-style social platform immunity and European-style prescriptive regulation.”