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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.
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.
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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