The Canadian government introduced the Online Harms Act on 7 August 2024, establishing a Digital Safety Commission and Digital Safety Ombudsperson and imposing new duties on platforms to identify and report child sexual abuse material and non-consensual intimate images within 24 hours of becoming aware of them. The legislation also requires platforms to conduct risk assessments for child-safety harms including sextortion, make moderation processes transparent, and provide users with tools to control who can contact them. Penalties for non-compliance include administrative monetary penalties and, in the case of wilful CSAM distribution, criminal liability.
Real-time detection of sextortion and child sexual abuse material at the point of contact satisfies the duty to become aware and report within the statutory window, and generates the structured evidence required for regulatory and criminal proceedings. Guardii's anti-sextortion and anti-CSAM detection modules operate across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox, flagging coercion tactics and abuse imagery in direct messages before they reach the target, and surfacing the incident to parents, schools or safeguarding professionals with the context needed for rapid escalation to law enforcement. By embedding within the communication layer rather than relying on retrospective user reports, the platform closes the gap between occurrence and awareness that the Act's 24-hour clock presumes.
