Dr. Adam Dubé, Director of the Technology, Learning, and Cognition (TLC) Lab, contributed to a new national policy brief submitted to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage as part of its study of Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act.

The brief, Policy Brief on Bill C-34: Regulating Digital Platform Design to Protect Children and Adolescents, brings together a multidisciplinary coalition of experts from across Canada, including researchers, clinicians, legal and policy experts, and youth partners. Dr. Dubé is among the authors of the brief, contributing expertise on children’s development, learning, and interactions with digital technologies. 

Moving beyond screen time to how digital technologies are designed

The brief argues that efforts to protect children and adolescents online should focus not only on how much young people use digital technologies or whether they can access particular platforms, but also on how those technologies are designed.

While the authors describe Bill C-34 as an important step toward improving online safety, they recommend strengthening its regulation of design features intended to maximize engagement. These include infinite scrolling, autoplay, algorithmic feeds, and social comparison metrics on social media; human-like characteristics, excessive validation, and personalization in AI chatbots; and gambling-like mechanics, limited-time rewards, and daily login incentives in digital games. 

This perspective connects closely with the TLC Lab’s research on how the design of digital technologies shapes children’s learning, behaviour, engagement, and development.

A developmentally appropriate approach to digital policy

A central recommendation is that regulation should reflect the substantial developmental changes that occur across childhood and adolescence. The brief argues that children’s experiences with digital technologies cannot be treated as uniform: younger children, school-aged children, and adolescents differ in their developmental needs, vulnerabilities, capacities, and growing autonomy. 

The authors therefore call for digital policy that protects children while preserving their rights to privacy, freedom, access to information, self-expression, and participation. The brief also recognizes that safe and age-appropriate digital environments can provide opportunities for learning, creativity, social connection, and agency. 

Extending protections across the digital environment

The brief also calls for looking across the broader digital ecosystem rather than treating social media in isolation. AI chatbots and some digital games can employ many of the same engagement-maximizing strategies found on social platforms. In games, for example, the authors identify features such as loot boxes, randomized rewards, pay-to-win systems, and incentives for prolonged use. Importantly, the brief cautions against treating all digital games alike and does not support blanket age-based restrictions on games as a category. 

Other recommendations include stronger privacy protections and user control over data, greater transparency about how platforms collect and use children’s data, independent access to platform data for research and auditing, requirements to address harmful design features when they are identified, and meaningful penalties for non-compliance. 

The policy brief reflects a broader effort to translate research on children and digital technologies into actionable public policy. Its central message is that responsibility for online safety should not rest solely with children and families. Digital environments themselves can be designed—and regulated—in ways that better support children’s rights, development, and well-being. 

Access it here: https://bit.ly/4xJhljN