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New “Six Clicks” national campaign mobilizes Canadians to push Parliament to quickly pass Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, and require technology platforms to place children’s safety ahead of engagement and profit

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OTTAWA, Ontario, Oct. 19, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — A coalition of leading Canadian child health, safety, and advocacy organizations today is calling on Parliament to quickly pass Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, and establish meaningful, enforceable protections for children online. Through a national public awareness campaign called “Six Clicks,” the coalition is showing parents how quickly an innocent online experience can lead a child down a path towards a chatbot that mirrors their despair, a stranger who can find and message them, a feed that teaches them to hate other people, images that make them hate their own body, violence they didn’t want to see. The campaign asks Canadians to visit https://saferonlinespaces.ca/en/six-clicks/ and demand their Members of Parliament support Bill C-34.

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In an online world designed to maximize attention and profit, children are routinely six clicks away from harm. Social media platforms use deliberate design features like recommendation algorithms, autoplay, infinite scroll, engineered notifications, and unsafe defaults to keep young people online, collecting more data and generating more revenue as their engagement grows.

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“Canada’s children deserve digital spaces designed with their safety and well-being in mind,” said Dr. Bolu Ogunyemi, President, Canadian Medical Association (CMA). “This coalition is coming together because technology companies have shown that they will not make the necessary changes on their own. Parliament now has an opportunity to establish clear standards, meaningful accountability, and stronger protections for Canadian families.”

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Parents cannot solve a platform design problem alone

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Corporate technology platforms play an outsized role in this fight. The campaign emphasizes that keeping children safe online cannot rest solely on parents. Families cannot control every recommendation, notification, or algorithmic decision shaping what children see, and they should not be expected to outmanoeuvre systems intentionally designed to manipulate young people for profit.

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“It takes only a handful of clicks for a child’s life to change,” said Carol Todd, parent advocate and mother of Amanda Todd. “Parents are doing everything they can, but no family can monitor every moment or anticipate every decision made by an algorithm. Safer design is not about limiting connection. It is about making sure connection does not cost children their safety.”

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The scale of the challenge is immense:

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“Children are in crisis,” said Dr. Charlotte Moore Hepburn, Medical Director of the Child Health Policy Accelerator at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids). “Young people’s engagement with the online world is the largest fully unregulated clinical trial affecting human development in the history of human civilization.”