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Notes -
Bill C-63 (Online Harms Act)
For those who aren't following, Canada's Liberal government last month tabled a sweeping new bill targeted at regulating speech on social media. The bill lays out seven regulated categories of speech:
To enforce these restrictions, the bill establishes a set of new appointed government entities in order to enforce compliance with these rules by social media companies, with penalties running up to 6% of global revenue. In addition, it empowers Human Rights Tribunals to investigate complaints by individuals against other individuals and levee fines of up to $20,000.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the public discourse around this bill has been... the lack of public discourse around this bill. What the hell has happened to us?
Maybe this is the inevitable end game of the gradually hollowing out of the Fifth Estate that has been happening all these years, including by the government itself who has been gradually buying themselves a loyal Ministry of Information through their steady funding increases to the CBC all these years. Maybe it's the disastrous result of a generation entering the body politic that has been steadily brainwashed by the ideologues running our school system, no longer able to form thoughts on their own or engage with the world for more than six seconds owing to a constant addiction to digital stimulation, building the world in their own small-minded safetyist self-image.
Or is it that despite what we promised ourselves never to do, we have finally let 9/11 age out of our collective memory? I for one remember a time not so long ago when the word "government" in Western countries conjured up associations with shady business interests, massive dragnet surveillance, imperialist wars for oil and geopolitical hegemony, extrajudicial black sites, and general suspicion and persecution of Muslims. It was the Big Bad Neocons who were trying to take over the world and police your thoughts. If our government at the time had tried to police online speech and set up a system of kangaroo courts in order to prevent "harms", our media would have been up in arms and many of us would have taken to the streets to protest. Yes, it was cool and righteous to be anti-government.
Now our government says only "extreme" online hate speech would be subject to the rules, and that despite the powers that the legislation grants in theory, they will behave with restraint. And are we really going to believe this, this time around? This is the same government and the same PM who labeled the entire trucker protest movement as Nazis, for the reason that someone used a swastika flag in order to call him a Nazi, and who subsequently imposed emergency powers to crush them.
And what about when the worm turns, and the next moral panic and/or government comes around? Will they persecute Trudeau in the courts for perpetuating hate through his use of blackface? From a cosmic justice perspective this is surely a satisfying outcome, but it's a lamentable world where our political process has degenerated into a saga of political gangsterism where the ingroup and outgroup each take turns exacting revenge on each other. This is definitely the direction we're headed in.
Of course, if you wanted the ridiculousness of the whole thing to be self-evident, you would be hard pressed to pick a better time to introduce the bill than right now. 25 years for "inciting genocide"? In a time when the word genocide is being thrown about wantonly by both Israel and Palestine supporters as the accusation du jour, no one knows exactly what inciting genocide means, except that you can get 25 years for doing it on social media when Albert Speer got only 20 years for his role in architecting a system of literal concentration camp slave labour.
I've got to hand it to the government though, because when you look at who will bear the burden of actually policing social media day-to-day, they have sidestepped the real responsibility. No, it's the social media companies themselves that will determine what does and doesn't constitute hate speech, inciting genocide, bullying a child, whatever. Failure to comply is not an option, because they can be fined up to 6% of their global revenue. Assuming they decide to continue operating in Canada, I have no doubt that given the choice between trying to toe the line and interpret the rules reasonably, and dialing up their content filters to 11, they will choose to play it safe and do the latter. As the late Charlie Munger advised us: never underestimate the power of incentives, which of course we will because we're a nation that seems to do so repeatedly and pathologically at every turn.
Now all that being said, I have avoided the seemingly mandatory disclosure by commenters on this particular issue that there are parts of this law that I'm in favour of (less anyone accuse me of being against protecting children from sexual victimization). I am generally in favour of criminalizing suicide encouragement towards a child, and revenge porn, as long as these trangressions are held to the same level of scrutiny as say, uttering death threats, and are tried to high standards in a criminal court. As I've explored a bit, hate speech, inciting violence, and inciting violent extremism or terrorism are all going to be far too open to interpretation and used to suppress political debate and dissent. As for "content used to bully a child", I don't even think I have to go into just how vague that is or how likely it is to lead to an overwhelming flood of investigations and complaints, and I don't believe that we even should reasonably attempt to protect other people's children from most forms of bullying. So there's the nuance of my position.
In the end, what we will end up with if this bill passes will be a bland, claustrophobic version of the internet where political discussion is restricted to the point that we can barely talk about the weather, and so we just spend all our time online shopping and looking at pictures of food. And for all our political apathy in this county, it might be exactly what we deserve.
It should be emphasized that Humans Rights Tribunals are not normal courts. For example, they don't have to follow any particular set of rules. It's up to the judges. The standard of proof is a balance of probabilities, not beyond all reasonable doubt. Defendants don't have the right to know who their accuser is. Anyone (not just the alleged victim) can file a complaint, get their legal fees paid for, and get a portion of the award if the defendant is found guilty.
See this article. Note that this article is about section 13 of the Human Rights Act, which was repealed in 2013, but which this bill would bring back. The best part of the short article is the sample of cases at the end.
One example:
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Is there any safety to be had? If I'm the person tasked with dialing up the content filters, I have a hard time imagining what level of filtering would make me confident we were successfully toeing the line. And even if you think you have identified the line, you never know where the next line is until someone accuses someone else of crossing it. Better hope it's not one of your users that reveals the latest in offensive language/imagery/facts. Six months ago, who would ever have thought to be concerned about images of watermelons?
This could be a "no need to outrun the bear, only need to outrun my friend" situation. There's no true safety from the censors, but if you're more censorious than the other guy, perhaps you can escape notice while the other guy is getting metaphorically mauled.
Sure, but that would still lead to runaway censoriousness, wouldn't it?
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I mean, they do have a majority right now (and it's not like the opposition is any different in this regard). Canada isn't the US; in fact, the entire point of the Westminster system was to make representation more indirect because it makes literally zero difference as to who your local representative is- if political activism is pointless, why waste your time?
This is progressive-speak for "misgendering", interpreted as such by every court and tribunal, and you know that. Progressive causes such as the usual misandry will get a pass, of course; the entire point of this is to enable progressives to bully your children and criminalize their response even in the event they're ejected from the legislature (and also to make sure it's pan-Canadian, since every other province has been drifting towards the center on that).
It is probably worth noting that we haven't yet seen what a reaction to policy starvation against a Western Canada-based government looks like yet.
I don't know that. Can you please elaborate?
I have been deliberately avoiding discussing this bill from a strict culture war perspective and instead trying to steelman it a bit from a "is this good for democracy" perspective. Of course, every one of these provisions is open to being interpreted from a leftist political slant and yes, we all know that's exactly what this current government intends to do.
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The Liberals don't have a majority.
What they have is not meaningfully distinct from one.
Or course it is. They need the support of either the NDP or the Conservatives to pass any legislation. There is also legislation only they oppose, and they're powerless to stop it.
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The same thing is happening in the UK. In fact, the only complaint the opposition Labour Party (which will certainly win the next election) had about the “Online Safety Bill” was that the government didn’t consider banning VPNs which could be used to get around the content restrictions.
The problem is that the majority of voters are over 40 and don’t care for or want internet freedoms. They don’t like that other people have them. The majority of the public has always been in favor of content restrictions for the same reason they’re in favor of the police and the same reason they were in favor of the death penalty for 50 years after it was ended.
It’s important to understand the brief age of social liberalism that happened between 1965 and the 2000s as an aberration brought about by a small bohemian elite class that went into politics and essentially implemented unpopular policies above the will of the public.
None of this is to suggest that some ridiculous authleft censorship law is in any way a good thing. But time and time again, polls show a huge majority of the public backs heavy-handed online censorship.
The only thing that changed is that the state started getting scared of an open internet, and so allowed the natural hostility toward liberalism as expressed by common people a little fresh air to support this new effort. Of course, reinstating the death penalty and ending mass immigration will never happen, but the plebs can have a little censorship to stop “online bullying” now that it aligns with government policy to control the internet.
Obviously policy is elite driven not public driven. And the public's attitutes have changed in relation to the influence of the elites and censorship laws. The British electorate is pretty liberal and rising authoritarianism has been done by social liberals in the name of social liberalism. Including by people who were liberals as part of conservative party and pushed things to a liberal direction on all sorts of issues that are part of social liberal agenda. Like gay marriage, hate speech laws, affirmative action type of policies, including in political party leadership like torries. And such attitutes didn't just come yesterday as mana from the heaven, but have a root and a history.
This idea that one can separate liberalism with authoritarianism we have seen is definitely distorting history. Especially when you do it in favor of a tribe of social liberals as the champions of freedom. It's people like Tony Blair, Cameron, continuing on trajectory of previous people who pushed attitutes and even hate speech laws in a certain direction who were key protagonists in bringing things in current direction. Prior to them, the new left and in Britain Fabian types always had their influence and being wolf in sheep clothing selves. Something extreme. They just couldn't push their more extreme policies through immediately. Or some of the elites were less extreme but had attitudes willing to compromise and allow more extreme of the liberal faction get their agenda through. Including allowing the influence of particular lobbies and activists to expand.
The reality is that authoritarian social liberalism is a very real ideology, and more representative of what social liberals, and therefore the liberal tribe and elites have been historically and especially even more so now than any association of them with freedom. And a part of what is taken to be part of social liberalism package includes the protected groups idea. To an extend, authoritarianism for cultural progressivism has been an aspect of even the USSR, especially before Stalin.
Maximalist freedom seekers are also not going to be satisfied by the age prior to social liberalism of course. When this tribe dismantled the conservative order, they weren't doing it to erect a free society, but to erect their order. At such, any advantages of "freedom tm" relating to dismantling restrictions of the old order, were always going to be temporary.
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I don't think it is about age like that.
Many <30 year olds, also many under 40, are comfortable and happy with the idea of censoring people who say anything they don't like. That is the online experience they grew up into. They expect that any forum with "free speech" is unpleasant, nasty, brutal, without any pretense of civilized community norms, and that the overall experience will make them angry. They expect that any good, nice public discussion place has effective mod team, that the spammers and obvious trolls are removed, and preferably is not public in the first place. And when you have got into habit of banning and censoring trolls, it is just so convenient to remove people of wrong political opinions or speaking in the wrong emotional register or who otherwise make for an unpleasant experience. Every form of communication they have lived and breathed has been like this, and when it is not, they will complain.
(The perception is not helped by the fact that after the meek and agreeable people have adapted to the perceived consensus, only the disagreeable odd ones out remain to rebel against it. After all, you need a pretty weird personality to be willing to tolerate the social censure or be oblivious of it until the banhammer hits. And today the disagreeable rebel scoundrels seldom have the wit, elegance or strong moral character.)
I hazard a guess the proportionally largest number of classical "I disagree with what you say, I respect / defend until death your right to say it" free speech idealist is to be found among those who remember the time before internet or got the early internet of 00's and its optimism never left them. Today, it is 2024. Those people are old and rare. Stress on the word 'rare'.
The first part was is that the youngsters like censorship. The second part, anti-censorship was never too popular in the first place. Turns out, among their own generation, principled free speech idealists were in the minority. Vast majority of people in every generation nod along. Free speech and free press used to be part of the package of approved ideas. Today it is much more contentious.
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...when the nominal aim thereof is protecting minors from online threats, that is. It's important to add that qualifier. With that in mind, I kind of wonder what those over-40 voters imagine how such threat prevention is actually supposed to work. Do they realize, for example, that such a system, if implemented unironically, would also protect minors that aren't a bit sympathetic to them?
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The reason the public is in favor of the death penalty 50 years after it's ended is that the public is in favor of the death penalty but anti-death-penalty laws are pushed through by activists that don't represent the public.
The situation in the UK makes more sense if you think of the "abolition" of the death penalty as an unpopular privatization. Non-state actors still have rules, such as "snitches get stitches", and a willingness to get very stabby if you cause them too much trouble.
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Isn't that basically what the post you are responding to said already?
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The Conservatives are leading the Liberals 42 - 24 in national polls. Keep in mind that the Liberals generally poll better between elections.
So a big chunk of the Liberal voter base has given up on Trudeau. However this puts the press in a bad spot.
The Trudeau government introduces subsidies of Canadian newsrooms. It's now up to $85,000 per reporter for qualifying news organizations. The Conservatives are likely to scrap it.
So Canadian news media is in a spot where if they do their job they are likely to go bankrupt after the next election.
Pierre Pollievre's only objection so far seems to be that it creates too much "bureaucracy". I would guess that the average Tory voter is still easily swayed by moral panic "it's for the children's safety" type arguments. But this is already his solid base, and I think there's a failure of imagination going on in terms of what could be gained by taking a stand here.
A cynical interpretation of course is that they are doing this for the same reason they are funding the CBC so well. Also a bit of cronyism perhaps given that our Deputy PM made her bones in the newsroom at the Globe and Mail.
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If I were the Conservatives I would swear that if this law gets adopted, when they get the majority they are likely to get, they will immediately abrogate it and replace it with one that only applies to a list of named persons consisting of all MPs who have voted for it, with a provision that it should be prosecuted by law enforcement to the fullest extent it can be.
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We found out what other people really think and talk about, and the conclusion is intolerable. The internet's leveling effect meant that random nobodies could be signalboosted into the consciousness of the body politic.
Once undesirables were allowed an audience and became clearly visible, those who weren't undesirables wanted them destroyed, silenced, and removed from their public spaces.
Don't worry, there is an easy workaround for this mess. Just never be an undesirable in the eyes of those with power.
I spent a while asking my well-educated peers why they were supporting censorship and politicization while also claiming to loathe our local conservative government, warning that the shoe could easily be on the other foot someday. My leading hypothesis is that they (unconsciously) are following a strategy of "endorse whatever social movement is clearly ascendant" in a way that's almost completely blind to the content of the movement, even being blind to self-interest to a large extent. So they legitimately don't expect to suffer from censorship in that setting - they'll simply switch sides, and maybe push for an exception to the new ideology for themselves. It makes sense, and seems close to the optimal strategy if you can't actually control social movements.
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We have altered who is (and has always been) an undesirable in our eyes, pray we do not alter it any further.
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You make a really good arguement in most of your post except for the parts about "this bill will be used against progressives", where the best argument against this bill will sound more partisan and conservative than your take and be more correct. Trying to sound neutral ends up producing something not neutral.
In practice these bills have enabled far leftist authoritarianism and hate speech, by censoring valid opposition.
Another problem with that worry is that I believe an enormous part of the problem has been the unwillingness to apply the laws even handedly against progressive identity groups and progressives themselves. This applies with the entire antiracism issue but it is especially an enormous problem with hate speech regulations. That they are incredibly one sided and enable hateful speech of far left direction and censor legitimate valid opposition to it.
There seem to be some guilible conservatives who have internalized it as principle and support such laws. While others who are against conservatives find it strategically useful to claim to be such. And machiavelian leftists use this as an argument to promote double standards.
Double standards in application of the law feeds the ideology now backed by legal status quo, of treating so called protected groups including speech critical of them, differently. And people actually buying into the superiority of such groups. It feeds authoritarianism where if you applied the law with going after protected groups including leftists for offending right wing ethnic groups with racism, you would have a system where more parties are incentivized to have something less tyranical, because they too will be affected.
Of course powerful left wing organizations and ethnic organizations behind such laws are never going to be convinced of trying to do anything but control things, so they can apply them against the groups they disfavor and in favor the groups they favor. So you need to exclude from influence the hardcore ideologues, and unfortunately you got to work with some of the people who might had been willing to go along with parts of their agenda due to it being easier. I doubt everyone willing to vote for such laws necessarilly understands what they are doing.
But at this point there are no excuses. Such laws are simply not even handed in the least and that must be taken in consideration by people who discuss them and argue in favor of such laws.
I mean, if we are to consider a view to be hate speech, saying you support hate speech laws is hate speech. Considering the hate speech laws end up following the philosophy of treating minority groups as superior, not taking seriously or even punishing advocacy for the rights of their right wing groups, operating in line with the logic that you can't be racis against X. Protected group supremacy is a hateful racist agenda. At such the first people that ought to be punished for extremism on such issues, are the people behind such laws.
Holocaust denial laws were introduced in Germany in the mid 90s. And we have seen UK transform into increasingly authoritarian state in a few years. I believe it is possible we get an increasingly idiotic tyranny ruining peoples lives over this. I don't see in the ideology and practice of people like Trudeau and their general faction something that would limit that.
I think you are too quick to declare this direction. The trajectory hasn't changed in the direction where different sides prosecute each other, and the one where we are in to with compromising/appeasing conservatives and far left tyranny, is itself quite lamentable enough.
Too much "bothsidesism" is not in itself an accurate assessment of reality. Maybe you are trying to appeal to progressives, but power being used by whoever, in a direction against current progressive excesses would be a good thing in my view, and necessary to fix things. Having a bias in seeing revenge against progressives where it doesn't exist could lead us into opposing things that aren't revenge but necessary reforms of balancing the system. Which requires power to be used against progressive excesses and extremists who abuse their power and influence, and have created networks whose agenda is to promote tyranny.
I genuinely think dismantling powerful far leftist and Ethnic chauvinist of left wing direction NGOs that have succeeded in infiltrating the state and private organizations and even collaborating with the cops is something that must be done if we are serious about protecting society from tyrannical totalitarian laws. Including when exercised by private mega corporations often used by governments as proxy in areas where the goverment is less able to get away with doing it, itself.
I totally agree. For example, it's bonkers (but not surprising) to me that the recent misleading residential school graves reporting (and subsequent exaggeration and demonization of the Catholic Church on social media) that led to scores of churches being burned down didn't even pattern-match as "hate speech" in the eyes of anyone in the establishment.
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Thanks, I don't really disagree. But as explained in reply to another commenter, I think it's important to steelman the issue a bit and try to argue from a politically neutral perspective to explore how this issue can be argued effectively with progressives as well as conservatives. The reality as we know is that this bill has partisan objectives and I think everyone reading my post here is capable of filling in the blanks with their own experience of the actual political reality in 2024.
I appreciate this. The issue is that appeal lacks teeth because most progressives do know that such laws will be used in a pro progressive direction. I think it is a better idea to undermine the idea that political neutrality is about ignoring the partisan direction of such laws.
But maybe it is useful for both you to be making the more general argument and someone like me to be making the kind of argument I have made. Like one playing the good cop and the other the bad cop.
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This line of reasoning never works. The whole reason that this legislation is on offer is because progressives have achieved total cultural victory in Canada.
If Trudeau thought this would ever be used against him, then it would never have been proposed.
Instead, they believe it will be a useful tool to further stifle dissent. They don't believe the worm will ever turn. Maybe they're right.
Trudeau is not known for being very bright though. I mean this seriously. I know people who know him and they've said this. It's not just based on the many dumb things he's said and done publicly.
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Seems like it would be much easier for companies to just pull out of Canada and let their users operate by proxy. Well, maybe that's the harder option by the managerial logic of firing employees and watching numbers in a spreadsheet go down. But if I were Elon Musk, or similar, I'd tell Canada to pound sand, pull out, and then strategically not say anything about all the Canadians continuing to access my servers.
Probably Facebook and Google et al. will be happy for the excuse for censorship (as we discovered here in America) -- but if they wanted to, they could easily refuse to play ball, as they're doing over the News Act. Hell, 15 years ago this is what any normal tech CEO and workforce would have done, and exactly what several did.
Google recently agreed to pay the "link tax" and play ball, despite my initial hope that they would fight it more. So it's looks more likely now that they will continue to play ball. Kind of unfortunate in my view, since I think that an abrupt end to social media services operating in Canada would be an unintentional and extremely positive outcome from this whole thing.
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This is already starting to happen on other issues. There was the famous link tax, where the Liberals passed a law requiring websites that link to news articles to pay for the privilege of doing so. Facebook just decided to block Canadian news articles from being posted.
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What are the actual requirements for tech companies? Entirely possible compliance costs will be prohibitive.
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Of course the tech companies can officially pull out of Canada, but then they can’t sell advertising to Canadian businesses, which is how Google and Meta make their money. Eg. Russian users who use Instagram now cost Meta money but don’t make any money, since Meta can’t sell advertising to Russians.
Not doubting this but do you have a source? Would be interested in reading more about the phenomenon.
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