Bill C-11 user generated content: what the rules cover

What the meme-history record shows

For US readers tracing Canadian memes, Bill C-11 user generated content debates are part of platform history—not a creator-licensing system. The useful archival distinction is between a service's regulatory record and the clips, screenshots, and still-image memes people upload to it.

The statutory boundary in the platform record

The Online Streaming Act, formerly Bill C-11, received Royal Assent on April 27, 2023 and amended the Broadcasting Act. The regulator is the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, based in Gatineau, Quebec, with regional offices across the provinces.

The Act itself is short on detail. For the registration stage, Broadcasting Regulatory Policy CRTC 2023-329 sets out the framework, and Broadcasting Order CRTC 2023-330 sets out registration exemptions. In platform timeline research, keep those instruments separate from the statute: an enactment and an implementation decision are different events.

The statutory text is public and worth reading once, if only to see how often it defers to the Commission. You can read the full text of the Online Streaming Act and note how little it says directly about a single video upload.

What the Act does not do is license individual Canadians. There is no creator permit, no per-video approval, and no fee attached to posting. The obligations land on services, and only some of them reach the people who use those services.

Two provisions draw that line. The amended Broadcasting Act states in subsection 2(2.1) that a person who uses a social media service to upload programs, and who is not the provider of the service, its affiliate or their agent, does not by that use carry on a broadcasting undertaking. And section 4.1(1) provides that the Act does not apply in respect of a program uploaded to a social media service by a user for transmission over the Internet and reception by other users, with the exception, in the Act's own summary, of programs prescribed by regulation. That exception is the one the user-generated content debate was about: it leaves the door open for the CRTC to bring some commercial uploads into scope.

Bill C-11 user generated content is defined in the debate by what the Government said it would leave alone. In proposed directions to the CRTC, it committed that the Commission “would only regulate social media platforms insofar as they are acting like broadcasters and not the social media elements of their services, which include any content created and uploaded by everyday users (commonly known as user-generated content).” The proposed policy directions build on the Online Streaming Act.

The services at issue are the ones people upload to — TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and their peers — and the line is drawn at the upload, not at the service. Nothing in the registration framework prescribes a class of uploaded program; any prescription would have to come separately and satisfy the test in section 4.2.

For meme history, the passage from legislation to platform implementation is the point to track. A clip's upload history, a service's registration history and the public debate about user-generated content are related records, not interchangeable ones.

What registration records reveal

The registration and reporting duties are the visible part of the regime. A service in scope must file information with the CRTC and keep it current.

Under the CRTC's Online Undertakings Registration Regulations, made on September 27, 2023, an operator must register within 30 days after it begins to carry on the online undertaking; an operator already running before the Regulations came into force had 60 days. The registration return is submitted electronically in the format the Commission specifies, and it contains these five elements:

If the return looks incorrect or incomplete, the Commission can ask for the information needed to correct it.

Registration is not a one-time snapshot: the Regulations require operators to notify the CRTC of changes to the information in their registration return. For a timeline, distinguish the original filing from later updates.

For creators, the practical disclosure question is narrower. If you take money to feature a product, Canadian competition and advertising law expects that relationship to be clear to the audience. The federal broadcasting rules do not replace that duty.

Creator records and the commercial-upload debate

Even where the CRTC has no direct claim on you, the paper trail matters if a platform, a sponsor, or a provincial regulator asks questions later.

A reasonable retention period is two years, matching the general limitation periods used in most provinces. Check your own province rather than assuming.

This is a recordkeeping suggestion, not a retention duty imposed on individual uploaders by Bill C-11. In an archive, distinguish a creator's supporting records from a platform's regulatory filings.

For this history, the important boundary is the service–uploader distinction in subsection 2(2.1), alongside the upload exclusion in section 4.1. Commercial character alone does not establish that an upload is regulated; section 4.2 supplies the considerations for any prescribing regulation.

Section 4.2 of the amended Act sets the test the CRTC must use before it prescribes any uploaded program. The Commission has to consider three matters: the extent to which the program directly or indirectly generates revenues; whether it has been broadcast, in whole or in part, by a licensed broadcaster or by a registered undertaking that is not a social media service; and whether it has been assigned a unique identifier under an international standards system. The regulations cannot prescribe a program from which neither the uploader nor the copyright owner or licensee receives revenues, or a program that consists only of visual images. For recorded music, an International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) is an example of such an identifier, not a finding that the upload is regulated.

That last exclusion matters for internet culture. The image macro, the reaction screenshot and the still-image meme, the formats meme history is built on, sit outside any prescription by design. The open question is the monetized video clip, especially music that already carries an international identifier.

These are statutory categories, not a claim that any particular platform or clip is currently subject to a CRTC obligation. For an archive, record the artifact's format separately from the service's registration status.

What a filing can—and cannot—show

The registration return records the online undertaking and operator. It does not ask for a creator permit or a list of individually approved uploads; those are not among the five elements above.

Registration records identify the service, not every user whose work it hosts. For an archive, record the undertaking's name and the services listed before attaching a filing to the history of a meme or video.

The Act does not specify a required recommendation algorithm: subsection 9.1(8) bars an order under paragraph 9.1(1)(e) from requiring a specific computer algorithm or source code. That limits what a meme historian can infer from the law alone about how a feed worked.

For a platform history, distinguish documented rules from inferred causes of changing reach. The memes and virality platform comparison explains why a rule change upstream shows up as a reach change downstream.

Separate the legal layers in an archive

Canada is not one market for these purposes. Quebec applies its own language and privacy rules, including the privacy reforms known as Law 25, and the province's privacy regulator, the Commission d'accès à l'information, has taken an active line on data collected from minors. Elsewhere, private-sector privacy falls under the federal PIPEDA unless a province has its own substantially similar law, and paid endorsements answer to the Competition Act and the Competition Bureau. A creator in Montreal faces a different set of expectations than one in Winnipeg.

Federal broadcasting law sits alongside provincial consumer protection, and the two do not always point the same way. A disclosure that satisfies one may not satisfy the other. In an internet-culture archive, label the legal layer behind a disclosure rather than treating every Canadian compliance notice as a Bill C-11 artifact.

American platforms have long relied on a liability shield for third-party content, summarized in the Section 230 overview. The CRTC's role described here comes from the Broadcasting Act. In a US-facing internet-culture archive, treat liability rules and broadcasting rules as separate legal layers.

Age-related duties are another area where the provinces and Ottawa overlap. The FTC page on the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule is a useful contrast document, because it addresses children's online privacy rather than broadcasting regulation.

If your audience skews young, read the critiques of social media for people who want the details before you decide how much of your archive to keep public.

Common questions