2023 Youth Assembly on Digital Rights and Safety: Recommendations to promote the safety, well-being and flourishing of Canadian youth online

Executive Summary

The Youth Assembly on Digital Rights and Safety brought together 35 diverse young Canadians, representing rural, suburban, and urban communities, for one virtual session and four days in person in Winnipeg at the end of June 2023. The Assembly was mandated to learn about the impacts of digital technologies on Canadian youth, examine international governance frameworks for protecting youth online rights, and produce recommendations to strengthen Canada's response to the challenges digital technologies pose to youth. Members heard from over a dozen speakers, including Frances Haugen, Baroness Beeban Kidron, and Maude Bonenfant, and collectively spent well over a thousand hours learning, deliberating, and arriving at consensus declarations and recommendations.

Overwhelmingly, members felt that companies and platforms prioritize profit over people, and that youth in particular experience significant and compounding negative impacts from these profit-driven practices, including exploitation, diminished mental, physical and emotional wellbeing, and greater proclivity for addictive, risky and dangerous behaviours. The Assembly identified nine values that should shape Canada's approach to youth online safety and rights, including transparency, accountability, safety, and a "human-oriented" value emphasizing community empowerment and ethical decision-making.

Members unanimously endorsed 21 recommendations to promote the safety and flourishing of young people online and produced a Declaration of Digital Rights outlining freedoms and protections Canadian youth ought to have. Declared freedoms include equitable access to technology, safe digital spaces, control over personal data, and freedom from exploitation, privacy violations, and manipulative or addictive algorithmic design. Key recommendations include creating an arms-length regulatory body that compels platforms to publish and act on plans addressing known harms, enforcing strong age-assurance identification measures, standardizing clear and barrier-free terms and conditions, mandating offline periods in academic settings, setting all accounts of users under 18 to private by default, and embedding youth voices in ongoing policy-making, content moderation, and platform design.