Juno News - July 31, 2021


Regulating Canadians' ＂incorrect＂ opinions

Topics
Digital Safety Commission regulations
Mentioned
Stephen Guibo Canadian Heritage Serena Flaites
Glass houses, Prime Minister Alberta's reasonable path forward

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

141.94

Word count

800

Sentence count

38

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The Liberal government wants to create a Digital Safety Commission of Canada to regulate harmful content on the internet, including pornography, child sexual exploitation, hate speech, and child sex trafficking. In this episode, Lindsay Shepard explains why this is a bad idea.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The Liberal government has released a technical paper and discussion guide that lays out how they
00:00:10.320 propose to address harmful content online, and that is by creating a Digital Safety Commission
00:00:16.880 of Canada. This proposed commission will be regulating five things on the internet.
00:00:22.080 Terrorist content, content that incites violence, child sexual exploitation content,
00:00:28.720 the non-consensual distribution of intimate images, and hate speech. Specifically, Canadian
00:00:35.440 Heritage says what they're calling online communication services, OCSs, will be regulated,
00:00:42.160 and OCSs are what you and I would refer to as major social media platforms. So if one of these major
00:00:48.400 social media platforms has content on their website flagged that falls under one of these five
00:00:54.080 categories, they will need to have a system in place to review and possibly remove that content
00:00:59.680 within 24 hours. If they do not, they can receive a financial penalty. And with this Digital Safety
00:01:06.400 Commission, there will also be a whole bureaucracy in place with monitoring, reporting, complaints,
00:01:12.160 tribunals, etc. According to the government, these are their examples of online communication service
00:01:18.640 providers. We've got Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and apparently Pornhub.
00:01:29.360 Now, when I think of social media, I think of somewhere where you connect with friends and
00:01:33.760 family, you participate in public discourse, you can create a page for your business, you can organize
00:01:40.400 and promote an activist or community group. Pornhub does not facilitate those things. I have my
00:01:48.000 judgments about individuals who visit pornographic websites, but those judgments are not within the
00:01:54.640 purview of this video. But we do know that the House of Commons Ethics Committee was studying MindGeek,
00:02:00.320 which is the parent company of Pornhub. And we know from investigative reporting and the Ethics
00:02:07.120 Committee hearings, that Pornhub does not have proper age verification checks on their website.
00:02:13.680 They profit off of child abuse and sex trafficking and child sex trafficking. And as a company, they
00:02:19.600 are flippant about having non-consensual recordings on their website, and they are happy to profit off of
00:02:26.720 non-consensual interactions, some of which involve minors. One of the testimonies given at the Ethics Committee
00:02:33.200 was by Serena Flaites, who had a sexual video of her non-consensually uploaded to Pornhub when she
00:02:39.840 was 14 years old. And Pornhub would repeatedly allow this video to be re-uploaded. So in light of all this,
00:02:47.520 Germany actually recently banned Pornhub. Now here's what I'm getting at though. Let's say you hold a
00:02:54.480 perspective or belief or opinion that doesn't fit in with the progressive leftist narrative. So let's say
00:03:01.040 you have a Twitter or a YouTube account where you talk about how trans women are not real women,
00:03:06.800 or how immigrants to Canada should be screened for their cultural values. Engaging in these kinds of
00:03:13.120 discussions is seen by many government officials and academics and other authoritative figures to be
00:03:19.840 hate speech. And so inevitably, you know, having these open conversations is going to be lumped into
00:03:28.400 the same government purview as child sexual exploitation and distributing non-consensual
00:03:35.120 images. So this is just so weird and it doesn't make sense. And frankly, when I look at the things
00:03:40.880 that the commission wants to crack down on, like child exploitation, I am in absolute agreement that
00:03:47.520 we need to crack down on this more than we already do. I actually personally just prefer Germany's 1.00
00:03:54.160 approach, which was to ban Pornhub because why try to regulate something that is so corrupt that it
00:04:00.720 just needs to be shut down. But going after potentially offensive opinions that are posted on Twitter
00:04:08.640 and Facebook, that is simply not something that needs a dedicated government commission. You know, let's not
00:04:16.160 pretend that free thought and open inquiry, which are seen as hate speech by the leftists and liberals,
00:04:21.600 have anything to do with the rest of the things that this Digital Safety Commission wants to cover.
00:04:28.880 Heritage Minister Stephen Guibo told CTV News that we need this because what we're seeing and what
00:04:34.720 we've been seeing over the last few years is that violence and hate speech have been on the increase
00:04:39.680 on social media platforms. Canadians have been asking us, the government, to intervene and that's
00:04:44.640 exactly what we're doing. However, according to Blacklock's reporter, Stephen Guibo's office,
00:04:52.240 when they were asked about how much correspondence they have gotten about, you know, from people asking
00:04:57.520 for more internet censorship or regulation, they haven't received any such correspondence. So don't
00:05:03.520 let Stephen Guibo fool you. This is not well thought out legislation and we most certainly do not need
00:05:10.160 free thought, critical thinking, open inquiry, and free discussion lumped in with criminal activity.
00:05:19.040 I'm Lindsay Shepard with True North. Thanks so much for watching. If you like our coverage and
00:05:23.600 commentary, please consider becoming a supporter at donate.tnc.news. Bye for now.