(Bloomberg) — The Canadian province of Manitoba plans to ban young people from accessing social media and chatbots of artificial intelligence, said its leader.
Wab Kinew, premier of the northern North Dakota region of 1.5 million, announced the policy during a speech Saturday at an event hosted by his center-left New Democratic Party.
“Increasingly, social networks and now chatbots AI technologies are being used to ‘hack’ our children’s attention spans,” said Kinew. “They were built this way to maximize engagement and generate money for a group of technology oligarchs who don’t share our values as Canadians or as citizens of Manitoba.”
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The move would put Manitoba ahead of Canada’s federal government considering national restrictions. It is part of a global wave of similar rules limiting young people’s access to technology platforms.
Australia has passed a law banning the use of social media by children under 16 to address mental health issues, cyberbullying and sexual extortion. French President Emmanuel Macron is trying to impose restrictions on the European Union.
A Manitoba government representative said there are no further details yet on which age group would be affected or how the policy would be implemented by the province.
Despite social media criticism, Kinew often produces viral posts for Instagram, where he boasts 441,000 followers — more than any other provincial premier in Canada, even though Manitoba is only the fifth most populous province.
British Columbia, a province on the west coast of Canada, has drafted legislation in 2024 to hold social media companies responsible for “the harm their algorithms cause to people, especially children.” However, it later shelved the project and instead created an online security dashboard with technology companies.
Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, apologized to the city of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, on Thursday after his company failed to alert authorities about the ChatGPT account of the alleged perpetrator of one of the worst massacres in Canadian history, which occurred earlier this year.
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Canada has already clashed with the US government over rules affecting Silicon Valley technology companies. Last year, the country abandoned plans to implement a digital sales tax after President Donald Trump threatened to abandon trade negotiations over the measure.
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