Artificial intelligence is transforming the landscape for all of us, and you could say pretty much the same thing about social media platforms. But the impact of these technologies has been particularly potent for younger generations.
So, maybe decisionmakers should make more of an effort to understand how the technologies are affecting the lives of young Canadians before they create new laws about AI or social media.
“Young people tend to be viewed as a group that you can consult after [legislation] has already been drafted and not as a group that you should be speaking to in advance,” says Helen Hayes, MA’20.
Hayes played a major role in a couple of recent initiatives organized by McGill’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy that shone a spotlight on young people and their concerns about AI and online harms. And both initiatives have received plenty of attention.
GenZ(AI), an ambitious seven-month project that involved 100 young Canadians from across the country, wrapped up last month in Ottawa with the release of a final report that included several policy recommendations for AI and online harms governance. The GenZ(AI) participants had the opportunity to present their findings to dozens of MPs and other policymakers in Ottawa – including Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon, BA’90, MA’92, and Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture Marc Miller, BA’93, MA’96.
Left to Their Own Devices, a podcast that examines some of the troubling ways in which social media is reshaping the world for young people, was recently a finalist for a Peabody Award, one of the most coveted prizes for TV shows, documentaries, podcasts and other forms of electronic media (some of this year’s Peabody recipients included Heated Rivalry, The Pitt and the Oscar-winning Mr. Nobody Against Putin). Left to Their Own Devices, which released a final bonus episode of its first season last month, was also named one of the best podcasts of 2025 by Apple Canada.
“One participant actually [said] that this restored her faith in humanity, because she didn’t think that people coming from across the country, from different backgrounds, with different perspectives, would actually be able to agree to anything.”
Helen Hayes, co-lead for GenZ(AI)
“Young people are on the front lines of another societal experiment with a new technology,” says Taylor Owen, McGill’s Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications, and the director of the centre.
“A generation that grew up on unregulated social media is now going through university and entering the workforce in a world mediated by AI. They both acutely see the harms and will be the ones to embrace and shape our AI futures. Gen(Z)AI and Left to Their Own Devices exist because that experience is critical to us getting the governance of these technologies right.”
Hayes, who is pursuing a PhD in communication studies at McGill, isn’t that much older than many of the young people whose perspectives have been the focus of both GenZ(AI) and Left to Their Own Devices. Earlier this year, she was named to the annual Forbes 30 Under 30 list for education. She recently completed a six-year run at the centre, most recently as its associate director, policy.
Giving young people a voice
GenZ(AI) and Left to Their Own Devices have their roots in another project that Hayes led for the centre in 2023.
“I had the idea to do the Youth Assembly on Digital Rights and Safety. It was, basically, the first youth consultation process that Canada had seen for social media regulation.” Thirty-five young Canadians from different parts of the country listened to presentations by policymakers and academic experts, before working together to fashion 21 recommendations for making the internet a less noxious place.
“We quickly realized there was an immense amount of knowledge and expertise in a room full of, in this case, 18-year-olds,” says Hayes.
GenZ(AI) was, in some respects, the Youth Assembly on steroids. It used many of the same techniques and organizing principles, but on a bigger scale.
Seven hundred Canadians between the ages of 18 and 23 applied to take part in GenZ(AI). The 100 who were selected as participants were chosen through a lottery process that carefully “reflect[ed] Canada’s geographic, linguistic, and demographic diversity,” according to the final GenZ(AI) report.
GenZ(AI) participants took part in four regional forums that each focused on different key issues related to AI: Toronto (chatbots), Montreal (information integrity), Vancouver (data privacy) and Halifax (age assurance). Twenty-five of the GenZ(AI) participants took part in each forum in-person, with the rest contributing online.
Before they began their deliberations on the issues at hand, they listened to presentations from experts from across Canada, including Sara Grimes, McGill’s Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technology Literacy, and Aengus Bridgman, PhD’25, an assistant professor (research) at the centre and the director of its Media Ecosystem Observatory.
The centre partnered with Simon Fraser University’s Dialogue on Technology Project in organizing GenZ(AI), and Hayes served as one of the project co-leads (along with Simon Fraser’s Fergus Linley-Mota) as well as the principal author of the final GenZ(AI) report.
The centre also recruited a team of youth fellows – Maddie Case, Alexander Martin, Julian Lam, and Nonso Morah – to work as facilitators for the regional forums. They did “the on-the-ground work,” says Hayes, in assembling the experts and guiding the GenZ(AI) participants. In the words of the final report, “They brought warmth to spaces that might otherwise have felt procedural, and rigour to conversations that might otherwise have remained vague.”
Reaching agreement
Hayes says the GenZ(AI) participants reached a consensus fairly quickly on the major issues they considered. “We had one participant actually say that this restored her faith in humanity, because she didn’t think that people coming from across the country, from different backgrounds, with different perspectives, would actually be able to agree to anything.
“Overwhelmingly, what we heard from the participants was that they’re all nervous about the impacts that AI will have on the environment, on their labor prospects, on the way that their minds function – their critical thinking capacity,” says Hayes. “And that was pretty standard across all our participants. It wasn’t that [the participants] said, ‘I don’t want to use AI. I think AI is a problem.’ They were saying, ‘We think that AI could be used better and developed better, but it can’t actually do that until it is regulated.’”
Hayes says she was impressed by the participants’ nuanced approach to some issues.
“One thing that I thought was incredibly thoughtful, and also not an idea I’d heard from policymakers, was this idea to ban younger users from generative AI systems like chatbots, but not from social media platforms.
“They made that distinction very clearly, in part because they viewed social media and the community that social media gives to a lot of its young users as an important way to develop ties. Whereas with generative AI systems, and particularly with chatbots, they viewed the relationship that a user has to a chatbot system as isolating. It doesn’t bolster community [or] civic engagement in any way. So, it might make sense to [have] some type of age verification mechanism on those types of systems rather than on social platforms.”
A podcast about social media with a unique focus
The Youth Assembly on Digital Rights and Safety that the centre organized in 2023 also provided the spark for the Left to Their Own Devices podcast.
“It was kind of the discovery phase for what has now become Left to Their Own Devices,” says Hayes. Impressed by what the young participants had to say “about social media regulation and what they want for the future of social media,” Hayes and her colleagues at the centre decided to explore the topic further in a podcast.
While there have been plenty of documentaries and articles about the impact of social media on children and teens, they tend to “center on adults, the parents and the teachers and the policymakers and politicians, and not on the young people themselves,” says Hayes. “We do interview experts and academics and policymakers on our show, but we start from the premise that we want to hear directly about what’s happening from young people before we go to the experts.”
Ava Smithing, a youth fellow at the centre and a founding partner of the Attention Studio, a consultancy for responsible tech, hosted the show. Smithing has been lobbying for provisions to protect young people from online harms and she has her own story to tell – an eating disorder she developed at the age of 12 and the role that she believes Instagram played in causing it.
Michell Stuart, a podcast producer whose credits include Machines Like Us, a podcast hosted by Owen, was another important member of the Left to Their Own Devices team. “He did all of the interviews with Ava. He travelled around North America with her,” says Hayes.
Left to Their Own Devices tackled a range of topics including the influencer boom, technology addiction, and online porn. The centre, which is working towards a second season of the podcast, partnered with Paradigms and The Toronto Star in producing the first season.
Hayes attributes much of the show’s success to the young people whose experiences it focused on. “I think we worked really hard to make the stories and the protagonists feel heard. And in doing that, they were able to exhibit a level of vulnerability and clarity that I think is very compelling to the narrative arc of the show.”
You can find the final GenZ(AI) report here. For more information on Left to Their Own Devices, visit this page.
