International comparisons

The estimates presented in this paper are consistent with, and in several respects conservative relative to, the emerging international literature on the economic burden of platform-facilitated harm to children and youth.

The most methodologically comparable study is a 2023 analysis by Sense Partners for Netsafe,1 which estimated the societal cost of cyberbullying alone in New Zealand at NZD $1.07 billion annually — up from NZD $444 million in 2018 — using a harm-reduction framework that captures costs to individuals, community, and public interventions across all age groups.

New Zealand's population is approximately 5.4 million; scaled proportionally to Canada's population of 41.4 million, the New Zealand cyberbullying-only figure implies an annual burden in the range of approximately $6.8 billion CAD before any youth-specific adjustment, substantially exceeding the total multi-category estimate presented in this paper.

For the United Kingdom, Giles et al. (2024)2 estimated the lifetime economic burden attributable to online-only child sexual abuse offenders at between £59.6 million and £1.4 billion depending on whether undetected offending is included, with over 75% of costs borne by victims as non-financial welfare losses — a finding consistent with this paper's treatment of QALY-based harm as the dominant cost component across most categories.

No equivalent national multi-category estimate exists for the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, or the European Union. Each of those jurisdictions has proceeded to legislate or regulate on the basis of documented harm prevalence rather than quantified economic cost. This paper is therefore unique and also conservative in the bottom up approach we have used to try and estimate at least a general order of magnitude of the harms involved.