It’s an honour to rise today, on the day that the Legislature is going to be recessing, to debate declaring September as Kids’ Online Safety and Privacy Month, and I want to thank the member from Ottawa–Vanier for bringing this bill forward. In the NDP, we’re very supportive of this. I think it will start a conversation, and it’s an opportunity to educate parents, children, educators, government officials and concerned citizens about the potential harms that are happening when children are online.

Before becoming an MPP, at one point I was a researcher. Some of my research was on gambling. One of the things that I learned about gambling is that slot machines have an algorithm, and the algorithm is designed to pay out a certain amount. It’s usually set at 80%, for example. So if you go in and you gamble $100 and your luck is totally even—it never would be—you would win $80. And then if you gamble that $80, you would win 80% of that, which is $64. And if you gamble the $64, you would win 80%, which is $48. So by the time you’ve gambled $500, you’ve won $400 and you’ve lost $100, and the $100 that you lost is the $100 that you walked in with, so you’ve come out broke, but you’ve gambled so many times. The lemons and the cherries and everything that keep coming up on the slot machines have nothing to do with the algorithm. The algorithm is just a very simple mathematical function. You could say, “I’m going to play this for an hour. I’m going to punch it 150 times an hour. What is the outcome going to be? Where will I be?” Your calculator or your phone or whatever device you’re using would be able to calculate that in a fraction of a second.

What those cherries and lemons and anchors and all those things are designed to do is—they design them, they show them in a way that makes you think that it’s going to pay out soon. It creates addictive—and it’s called engagement loops. So the idea of the slot machine—it’s designed to make players lose track of time so that they keep playing.

In social media, the scrolling is an engagement loop. The scrolling of apps is actually addictive for young people—for all of us, but for young people, in particular.

New York Times reporter Max Fisher wrote in a book called The Chaos Machine—and this is what it does. They say that slot machines are the heroin of gambling. It’s highly addictive because it gives you a dopamine response. Max Fisher wrote, “Dopamine creates a positive association with whatever behaviours prompted its release, training you to repeat them.... When that dopamine reward system gets hijacked, it can compel you to repeat self-destructive behaviours. To place one more bet, binge on alcohol—or spend hours on apps even when they make you unhappy.” And it’s not just those notifications that make them addictive; in apps, it’s the positive affirmation—it’s the likes; it’s the followers; it’s the updates from friends; it’s the photos of family and friends. That’s what makes social media apps, in particular, addictive.

The designer of some of these apps, Aza Raskin, who designed, actually, the infinite scroll in 2006—he was also an employee with Mozilla and Jawbone—said, “It’s as if they’re taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that’s the thing that keeps you ... coming back and back and back.” He said that many designers were driven to create addictive app features by the business models of the big companies that employed them.

“‘In order to get the next round of funding, in order to get your stock price up, the amount of time that people spend on your app has to go up’....

“‘So, when you put that much pressure ... you’re going to start trying to invent new ways of getting people ... hooked.’”

And that’s what’s happening to our children online. Social media is rewiring their brains. There was a study of university students who used social media for more than three hours each day, and those who did suffered from poor sleep, poor academic performance, much higher rates of depression, substance abuse, stress and suicide.

And the effect is even greater on younger people. Among those ages 10 to 19, that’s when your brain is in a fast development stage. You’re developing your sense of self-worth, and social media, the more you’re on social media, the more negative impact it has on your learning, on your behaviour, on your impulse control, on your emotional regulation.

More often, people who are on social media, young people who are on social media more have a negative body image, and 61% of Canadians aged 12 to 17 engage in social media several times a day, so we’ve got to be careful about what’s happening.

And the MRI scans—like when I said they’re rewiring their brains—MRI scans on teenagers showed that the reward centres in their brains lit up with increased blood flow when they were on social media.

And this is having a real impact on our schools. I spoke with some directors of education, with educators, and they said that kids are acting out. They’re getting up in the middle of class. There’s increased violence in schools. The elementary teachers have reported that violent incidents have increased by 72%, and the vast majority, 80% of teachers and staff members in schools, report that violence incidents have increased since they started working in public education.

So, the school boards in Ontario, several of them, have launched a lawsuit, and they’re against the social media companies, because they’re looking for money to pay for the supports that students need in order to overcome this. So it’s seven different school boards as well as two private schools that have joined this lawsuit.

And these school boards, their first concern, their primary concern is children’s mental health. When this lawsuit was announced, the Premier was asked, “Well, what do you think of this?” And his response, immediately—without investigating this, without even looking into it, without even looking into it, his immediate response was “Nonsense.” He criticized the school boards for standing up and taking the social media apps to court for the negative mental health impacts that they’re having on our children.

The government did come back, and as the government member just mentioned, they decided to ban cellphones in schools, or to make students shut off their cellphones while they’re in schools. And I was thinking about this. I’m thinking, yes, that’s probably a good thing, because it will reduce the amount of time that children are online, especially because it can be very distracting to have them in schools, but it really doesn’t get at the root of the problem.

And the root of the problem is that we need to find ways for children to be safe online, including using social media apps, and we need to look at the design of those social media apps and how they can be redesigned so that they’re not having a negative mental health impact on children.

When I’m talking about mental health impacts, that’s just one aspect, and as my colleagues have mentioned in here, there are also privacy issues. What happens to children’s data when these companies have it? Who owns it? How is it being sold? What algorithms are being developed to target them for advertising? This is something that we need to look at as legislators. I know the House is rising today, but this is what we should be looking at. We should be developing legislation to protect children from online harms. It goes to sexual exploitation, to deepfakes, artificial intelligence deepfakes.

I was a trustee before this, and there was a girl who had sent her boyfriend a picture of herself, and that went all through the school. It was intended just for him, and it went all through the school. She was just devastated by this. Her family was devastated by this. And this is just one incident. I say this—I know this has happened thousands of times across this province.

The member is bringing up this bill today to create online safety awareness month in September. It’s a good step. We need to do much more, because the other thing that happens online is sexual grooming.

The police have reported that there’s an increase in child sexual exploitation in Canada. In 2014, there were 50 incidents for 100,000 children; by 2022, it was 160 incidents for 100,000 children. For seven in 10 victims identified in online sexual offences against children, the victims were aged, for girls, 12 to 17, and 13% were girls under 12; and among boys, those aged 12 to 17 were 11% of the victims and 3% of those were under 12. We need to protect our children from this when they’re online.

The other thing that happens online, the other really damaging thing, is self-harm. There are violent online groups who are pressuring youth into harming themselves. This is from a CBC article this year: A 15-year-old girl carved the numbers “764” into her chest and then tried to kill herself. The RCMP said it is aware that there is an online group referred to as 764. As well as targeting minor victims internationally, it is connected to violent extremist groups. The father of that girl said in The Fifth Estate he discovered images of self-harm and disturbing messages between his daughter and a self-proclaimed member of 764 on a site called Discord.

We need to look at this. We need to make sure that this is not repeating itself. We need to cast light on the harms that are coming to our children online.

I’ve got a minute left, so I’ll talk about some of the policy recommendations that have come up and the research. They say you need to strengthen standards for age verification within social media apps, so that there aren’t children 12 who are pretending to be older on social media and becoming vulnerable.

The government needs to fund research on the impacts of social media on children and youth and well-being, and the results have to be transparent. They have to be made public.

They need to develop regulations for tech data collected on children and on the algorithms that are used to target them for advertising. We need to restrict harmful advertising from being directed at children and youth. This includes gambling, vaping, alcohol and unhealthy food.

The Canadian Paediatric Society also recommends that we need media and digital literacy training for students as part of the curriculum.

I welcome this legislation. I want to thank the member from Ottawa–Vanier for bringing it forward, and I look forward to using September as an opportunity for all of us to work toward educating parents, students, educators, government members and the general public about the potential harms and how to protect our children online.