Canadian government introduces Online Harms Act with child exploitation provisions

The Canadian government on 6 September introduced the Online Harms Act, which would establish a duty of care requiring social media platforms to remove child sexual exploitation content within 24 hours of notification and to report such material to the National Child Exploitation Crime Centre and the United States National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The legislation creates a new Digital Safety Commission with authority to impose administrative penalties of up to six percent of global revenue for non-compliance, and designates seven categories of harmful content including child sexual exploitation, intimate images shared non-consensually, and content that induces self-harm in minors. Platforms would be required to offer users tools to flag harmful content and to publish annual transparency reports detailing volumes of flagged and removed material.

Mandatory removal within a fixed window addresses content already produced and distributed but does not prevent the conversation in which a child is coerced into creating that content. Interception before imagery is generated or shared eliminates the harm at its source. Guardii's anti-sextortion and anti-grooming detection operates in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox, recognising patterns of coercion, escalation and solicitation in direct messages and blocking or flagging hostile contact before it reaches a child. The platform surfaces a child in crisis to a parent or professional and enables rapid escalation to law enforcement when a conversation meets the threshold for intervention, addressing the gap between the moment exploitation begins and the moment material becomes reportable, and detecting threat without requiring human review of private exchanges.