Nearly 40 per cent of Canadian teens victimized online say it happened on Snapchat, new report says
OTTAWA — A new report has found that nearly 40 per cent of Canadian teens who say they have been sexually victimized online say it happened on the private messaging platform Snapchat.
The findings, released by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection on Tuesday, were collected through a survey based on responses from nearly 1,300 teens themselves.
It comes as calls grow from child safety advocates for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government to present new legislation to better protect children online, including by introducing new regulations for tech platforms.
The report from the child protection centre, a national charity which runs a tip line for child sex abuse and exploitation online, calls on platforms to enhance their safety regimes, particularly when it comes to private messaging, citing that it has been where a majority of the teens surveyed reported experiencing some form of online sexual violence.
“If the guiding principles of an online safety regime are to safeguard children and prevent harm, then it must devote significant attention to the outsized role private communication services and functions play in the facilitation of online sexual victimization of teens in Canada,” it read.
The Liberals’ last attempt to regulate tech platforms failed to pass Parliament before the spring federal election was called.
Known as the Online Harms Act, the former bill proposed establishing a new digital safety regulator and compelling platforms to develop safety plans outlining how they would reduce users’ exposure to harmful content online.
The former bill did not apply to private messages, which the centre, in its latest report, suggests the Carney government ought to consider to address what it called “the gaps” of the previous attempts to legislate for better online safety under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, as well as look to lessons learned in other jurisdictions.
Its survey, which was done in collaboration with the polling firm Leger, began by asking teens aged 13 to 17 whether they had experienced some form of non-consensual and inappropriate sexual behaviour online, from being threatened to have a naked photo of themselves circulated without their consent, including a fake one, to someone making sexualized comments to them.
Among the most common types of harm that teen respondents reported, the report found 79 per cent said they had experienced someone attempting to have them talk about sex, followed by 59 per cent who said they had been sent an unsolicited image or video depicting a sex act or genitals.
It also reported that of the nearly 1,300 teens who said they had experienced at least one form of sexual victimization online, 39 per cent named Snapchat as the platform where it happened, followed by 20 per cent who said Facebook and another 20 per cent who said Instagram, both owned by Meta.
Snapchat, a wildly popular private messaging platform, particularly among teens, allows users to send photos and other private messages to one another, which are set to automatically delete after a certain time.
In recent years, law enforcement in different countries, including the RCMP, have issued warnings about the frequency with which they encounter sextortion cases involving teens who have been manipulated into sending nude photos of themselves by perpetrators, who then threaten to release them publicly unless their demands are met.
The platform, which has committed to cracking down on those who use it for harm or extortion, reported that from July to December 2024, it made nearly three million enforcements related to sexual content and took action against another 960,000 instances of child exploitation.
The centre’s report also found that 17 per cent of teen respondents said they had experienced someone creating a naked image of them without their consent, a phenomenon that has increased since the expansion of generative AI leading to increasing concern about the distribution of images known as “deepfakes.”
Carney campaigned on the promise to criminalize the non-consensual sharing of these images as well as increase the penalties for the non-consensual distribution of intimate images.
The measures, which have yet to be tabled, have landed on the desk of Justice Minister Sean Fraser to include in an upcoming bill dedicated to tackling online crimes against minors, which he has committed to bringing forward.
Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Minister Evan Solomon, who is developing his own privacy bill, also told National Post in an interview last month that he has been considering different measures to deal with issues surrounding “deepfakes,” including a possible “right to deletion.”
“One option is that you would say that you have the right to demand that that deep fake is deleted from social media,” Solomon said, adding that options could include looking to the federal privacy commissioner or seeing fines levied.
— National Post
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