Hunain Fatima Khan shows that a balance is needed between regulating misinformation online for the benefit of young people, and facilitating their autonomy

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The internet is not going anywhere. It grows each day with billions of new posts, articles, and videos. Yet as the digital landscape expands, so do concerns about safety, regulation, and truth. Are the safeguards in place keeping up, are we going too far, or not far enough?

Canadians are encountering immense amounts of health misinformation, a trend which is having direct negative implications on our health outcomes, a concern particularly visible among youth. The Canadian Foundation for Innovation (2023), examined misinformation among adolescents, finding that 40% of respondents reported using social media for four or more hours a day, in addition to 73% following at least one influencer who expressed some sort of anti-science views.

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With so much information being so accessible, it’s important to be able to distinguish between fact and fiction. Yet, 52% of youth said that they have a hard time deciphering if they can trust online information.

As misinformation continually blurs the lines between truth and falsehood, its consequences raise important questions about the respective moral responsibilities of governments, technology platforms, and society to address its harms. When does regulation become an ethical necessity, and when does it risk undermining the autonomy of young people? The exercise of autonomy on the internet includes a person’s ability to freely express themselves, connect with others they relate to, and overall, explore and form their own identities. However, misinformation complicates this. Meaningful autonomy depends on having access to accurate and reliable information. When young people encounter misinformation, their beliefs, values, and decisions may be shaped by false or misleading claims rather than evidence, limiting their ability to make informed and independent decisions. Further, repeated encounters with misleading content can distort young people’s understanding of health, encouraging risky behaviours like rejecting evidence-based treatments, undermine trust in healthcare professionals, and even delay necessary care.

In February of 2024, Canada introduced Bill C-63 (Online Harms Act), which sought to address certain harms that people face through various public platforms. It would have established Canada’s first federal online content-moderation regime; however, Bill C-63 died on the order paper with the dissolution of Parliament in 2025.

Although the Bill didn’t directly address misinformation, it was misinformation-adjacent, aiming to establish safeguards around harmful online content. The primary goals were to protect children’s physical and mental health, hold online platforms accountable, and render certain egregious forms of harmful content inaccessible. Specifically, the bill sought to reduce children’s exposure to material such as child sexual exploitation, violent content, and content promoting self-harm or other behaviours that could negatively affect their safety and psychological well-being. It also proposed shifting greater responsibility to online platforms by requiring them to implement measures to identify, assess, and mitigate risks, remove harmful content in a timely manner, and operate with greater transparency regarding their moderation practices. By establishing regulatory obligations and enforcement mechanisms, the bill aimed to create a safer digital environment while limiting public access to particularly harmful forms of online content.

As a society, we have a natural desire to protect our kids from harm. From the perspective of the ethical principle of beneficence, we have a duty of care, obligating us to promote children’s well-being and prevent reasonably foreseeable psychological harm. In this case, should the obligation to prevent harm take precedence over one’s autonomy to freely access the internet? It is natural to want to protect vulnerable people from avoidable harm. However, it is essential to recognize the point at which protection becomes excessive; shifting from care to paternalism. Too little protection risks harm; too much risks control.

Although Bill C-63 may not have been the exact solution we needed, it did start a much needed conversation about putting up safeguards to protect youth from misinformation. What we learned from Bill C-63, particularly, is that future solutions need to do a better job at balancing our duty of care with our freedom and autonomy.

Reframing is key to implementing a solution, we need to better balance care and independence, so they are not competing but rather they coexist. In doing so, we foster safe, supportive environments where protecting youth from misinformation enables autonomy rather than restricting it.

We can support this by better incorporating digital literacy and trust-building through education. Digital literacy embedded in our education equips individuals with the skills to build a critical foundation, improving their autonomy by shifting them from passive consumers to critical thinkers. By doing so, they have the tools to question who created the content, why it was created, and how it makes them feel, from which they can make informed and reasoned decisions rather than being swayed by marketing or misinformation. Giving young people the ability to understand algorithms and engagement-driven platforms allows them to consciously choose when, how, and why they use technology. They can reclaim control over what they are consuming and how much time they are spending in these digital environments.

Protecting youth from harm online isn’t about control—it’s about taking a compassionate, justice-based approach to ensuring every young person is educated and has the tools to make choices grounded in truth.

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Hunain Fatima Khan is a Master of Health Ethics student at Memorial University. This commentary was originally written in the context of a graduate seminar on health misinformation and lies.