Juno News - April 15, 2020


Liberals crack down on misinformation, after spreading misinformation

Mentioned
Patty Hadju Theresa Tam
Media bias๏ผš The media holds Scheer to account, not Trudeau Rules For Thee, Not For Me

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

195.62

Word count

462

Sentence count

22


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The federal government is considering legislation to combat misinformation and disinformation about the coronavirus. Is this a good idea, or is it a bad one? And why the flip-flop on what Dr. Teresa Tam and Health Minister Patty Hadju said a few months ago?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey, did you hear the news that the federal government is thinking of jailing Dr. Teresa
00:00:10.080 Tam and Health Minister Patty Hadju for spreading lies about the coronavirus? Really, Fury? Okay,
00:00:17.540 well, not really. Maybe not. Probably not. But I gotta say that possibility entered my mind when
00:00:23.400 I heard the news that the feds are indeed thinking of introducing legislation to tackle
00:00:27.900 misinformation, disinformation, and fake news about the coronavirus. Because, of course,
00:00:33.540 there are things that Tam and Patty Hadju said a few months ago that they have now done a total
00:00:37.600 180 on. Were they peddlers of misinformation at the time when they said that? And they have now
00:00:42.880 done a switcheroo. Should people be punished for saying now what they said back then? Certainly
00:00:48.300 begs a lot of questions. Now, to be fair, the federal government has said that this is a pretty
00:00:52.840 low priority on their order paper. It's not one of the top things they're going to be dealing with.
00:00:56.980 Well, I should hope so. In fact, I wonder why this even entered their headspace in the first place
00:01:02.080 when they are dealing with so many other issues of shoring up the healthcare system,
00:01:06.280 getting personal protective equipment, and all of these international issues that have surfaced,
00:01:10.600 particularly dealing with China and the World Health Organization. Why are they always so seized
00:01:16.480 on this misinformation matter? You'll remember they tried to do a similar thing back during the last
00:01:21.240 federal election, and it left a lot of people wondering, are they actually just going to punish
00:01:24.800 people who are kind of saying things they don't like? Look, there is a lot of stuff going out there
00:01:29.620 online, people talking about the virus. Inevitably, that's going to happen. Regular folks are going to
00:01:34.760 want to have their say on a whole array of different issues. Bioweapons, conspiracy theory, this and that.
00:01:40.380 Does this drug work? Does that drug not work? Some of these are actually legitimate avenues of
00:01:44.720 inquiry. I mean, some of them are going to be incorrect here and there, but people are allowed to
00:01:48.980 talk it out. When it comes to the patently wrong stuff, the people who are sending out emails doing
00:01:54.160 clear fraud, trying to sell you a miracle cure, trying to scam you, you know, there's already laws
00:01:59.080 in the books about all of that stuff. That is already illegal. So I wonder what is the government
00:02:04.240 doing, particularly now, when their information they have put out there, well, that is not being
00:02:09.680 considered trustworthy recently because of the flip-flops that we have seen from the various officials.
00:02:14.420 So of all the things for the feds to do right now, this tackling misinformation thing, it
00:02:20.100 just isn't one of them.