Letters, April 29

On a social media ban

The idea of banning social media for youth might sound like a quick fix. Social media does have real harms, and those concerns shouldn’t be dismissed.

But taking social media away from young people isn’t going to suddenly send them outside to play with their friends, because there’s really nowhere for them to go.

Not that long ago, young people could spend evenings in school fields hanging out, ride their bikes after dark, and just exist in public without much interference. As a millennial, these experiences defined much of my adolescence. Now, between CCTV, neighbourhood camera systems (subsidized by the government) and location sharing, kids can’t be out in public without the risk of being tracked, reported, confronted, or labelled suspicious simply for existing in public.

We’ve disinvested in the very spaces that once made public offline life possible. Community centres, youth programming, and shared spaces have taken a back seat to spending on roads, cars, policing, and private development. The amount of time kids spend on their phones is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.

A social media ban for youth would also hit some young people harder than others. Queer and disabled youth, in particular, often rely on online spaces to find connection, support, and community. These connections are essential to their well-being.

It is unfortunately not uncommon for youth, of all walks of life, to lack safe and supportive people in their offline lives. Online spaces are often the only place where they can access information, find understanding, and feel less alone. Limiting youth access to social media is, in practice, limiting their access to information and to ways of understanding the world around them.

A blanket ban shifts the burden onto young people without changing the conditions that pushed them online in the first place. If we actually want young people to spend less time online, we must invest in the conditions that make offline life safe, accessible, and worth showing up for.

Jenn Allen

Winnipeg

It’s one thing to protect our youth from social media and chatbots, and another thing to provide what AI is offering them. The horror stories of young people attempting and committing suicide, committing crimes and behaving in other inappropriate and dangerous ways are frightening. AI appears to be providing unconditional support, encouragement and approval for these behaviours.

Is this a wake-up call that we, as a society, are failing to fulfil the emotional needs of our youth who are turning to other sources to boost their self-esteem, acknowledge their mental health issues and meet their social needs?

Yes, we need to protect our young people, but we also need to care for them so they do not need to turn to social media and chatbots as replacement for real people in their lives.

Ellen Karr

Winnipeg

Keeping it positive

Re: ‘What a stupid situation’: woman falls into hole (April 28)

The world needs more positive-minded people like Christine Keilback.

Where others might consider legal action against the city, Ms. Keilback found humour in a freak accident and had only praise for emergency workers, whom she described as “brilliant, professional, calm and kind.”

She is a shining example of a citizen who cares more for the common good than personal gain, a quality often lacking in this era of polarization and self-entitlement.

Linda Mlodzinski

Winnipeg

A call to the province

I am writing as a concerned citizen of Manitoba and as a cybersecurity professional. Premier Wab Kinew has announced the intention to ban social media and AI chatbots for youth. As someone familiar with the risks of data collection and impacts of security breaches, I wanted to share my concerns about this proposal.

This proposal is a security and privacy nightmare that will affect not just every Manitoban, but their family members abroad as well. In recent years, age and ID verification has been lobbied for across the globe. The main groups lobbying for this, under the guise of concerned parents and online safety, are Meta and other tech giants. They are spending millions worldwide to push governments to make these laws in order to push the onus of content moderation onto users to minimize risks to their companies.

Additionally, they are also pushing for device-level ID and age verification at the operating system or even kernel level, which is a massive risk as the information could be exposed to any software requesting it.

While the intention of protecting youth is good, I believe this approach is tremendously risky and will cause more harm than good, and other avenues for protecting youth are available and more effective. In this letter, I will provide evidence of Meta’s involvement and examples of security breaches that have affected millions of people.

My concerns are thus: a concentration of high-value personal data, including biometrics and government ID. Providers of ID and age verification are an extremely high-value target. If one is breached, anyone that has used that service will be vulnerable to identity theft, scams, fraud, and more.

Then there are operational risks and fraud affecting businesses. Rapid scaling to meet legal demands can lead to rushed verification services with cut corners and inadequate security testing, as well as fraud from criminals pretending to be a trustworthy service provider.

There are supply chain risks. Relying on private third parties and subcontractors, each following different security practices and controls plus minimizing costs for profit, leads to vulnerabilities through inadequate security controls, cut corners, and a lesser desire to invest in proper security testing.

Then there is policy capture. These policies are penned and pushed for by Meta and other tech giants not because they want to protect their users, but because they want to shift responsibility to users to minimize the companies’ legal and operational risks.

Data may be improperly stored, kept by employees, or a company upgrades its infrastructure or goes bankrupt and does not properly destroy data while decommissioning servers and devices containing sensitive user information.

It’s not a question of if a security breach occurs, but when.

On April 15, threat actors known as breach3d and ExtaseHunters breached the French government platform for secure identity documents called France Titres (ANTS). The method used by the threat actors is presently unknown, and France Titres confirmed the breach, which contains more than 18 million records including passport, national ID, and driver’s licence data.

This follows a similar undisclosed data breach affecting France Titres in September 2025.

On Nov. 11, 2025, a freelance cybersecurity researcher discovered an exposed database belonging to an identity verification vendor IDMerit. The researcher discovered roughly one billion records containing personally identifiable information including addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, and more. The records include users from across the world.

I urge the province to carefully rethink any proposals that would mandate digital age or identity verification. These proposals are a massive risk for the public and a serious security challenge for businesses. The overwhelming privacy issues with such legislation cannot be understated.

Device manufacturers and operating systems already have robust parental control features. One potential alternative to ID verification could be requiring social media and AI providers to treat the parental control settings on the device as a point of authority before permitting access.

I also personally believe that all devices and software in Manitoba should be required to disable all AI and social media integrations by default out of the box, requiring users to manually opt in to such features without being pressured or using ambiguous language in the settings. This issue is not only important to me but also to many others in our province who may not have the means or opportunity to voice their concerns directly.

Matthew Smith

Winnipeg