Google and TikTok have said they will work with the government following the tabling of a new online safety bill that would ban children under the age of 16 from using social media.

Tabled on Wednesday by Culture Minister Marc Miller, the bill also includes plans for the creation of the Digital Safety Commission, a standalone regulator to police online platforms and chatbots. The regulator would have the power to levy fines of up to $10 million against non-compliant companies.

“Kids deserve spaces to learn, grow and explore safely online. We’re committed to working with the federal government to establish higher safety standards for all platforms, so parents have the confidence and control to choose better, safer online experiences for their children,” Google spokesperson Shay Purdy told The Logic.

TikTok spokesperson Danielle Morgan said the company would collaborate “constructively with the government on this important issue.”

The online safety bill also plans to compel AI companies with “public-facing conversational chatbots that can mimic human-like relationships” to have crisis-intervention protocols and take measures to ensure chatbots don’t communicate harmful content. OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic didn’t respond to requests for comment before publication.

Charlotte Moore Hepburn, a pediatrician at Toronto’s SickKids hospital and child safety advocate who focuses on the need to curtail social media use by youth and adolescents, said she was “excited” and “heartened” about the bill’s focus on child safety. “The evidence base, both association and causation evidence, regarding social media harms and negative physical and mental health outcomes for children is undeniable,” she added. “This bill, with its eyes squarely on the need to address child and youth safety, is welcome and is of the moment.”

Federal privacy commissioner Philippe Dufresne said the new regulator would tackle a lot of serious issues his office has struggled to address for years, including intimate images being shared online without consent.

“That is an ongoing issue that we have been having with Pornhub and MindGeek, in terms of their take-down mechanism,” said the commissioner, who took Canadian pornography company MindGeek, now called Aylo, to court following an investigation into the company’s privacy violations. 

The new digital safety regulator will be able to impose heavy fines against platforms that break the rules and issue binding orders, unlike the privacy commissioner. 

Dufresne also said Thursday that his investigation into the rash of disturbing deepfake images generated by Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok had found that the platform broke Canada’s privacy laws, but added that there is little Canada can do about it in the short-term.

“My alternatives under the current law would be action before the court, which is lengthy and [time-]consuming,” said Dufresne, who has previously asked the government to grant him similar powers to punish companies that violate Canada’s privacy laws.

At one point, Grok was generating more than 6,000 sexualized images per hour, Dufresne said. The platform has since reduced that number by half, but even one such image is unacceptable, he argued. xAI, Grok’s parent company, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.