Juno News - April 11, 2019


The government plans on policing the internet

Topics
regulating social media
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Andrew Scheer Karina Gould Randy Boissoneau Lavscam
Ethics investigator is Liberal cabinet minister's sister-in-law Trudeau government will consider handgun ban if re-elected

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

177.09

Word count

892

Sentence count

53


Summary

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

The Liberals are under fire for their handling of the Lavscam scandal, and now they want to regulate social media, but what exactly are they going to do about it? And what will that mean for freedom of speech on social media?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 Well, surprise, surprise, right as the Liberals are feeling the heat on Lavscam the most,
00:00:10.040 just happens to coincide with the time when they announce we have to regulate social media.
00:00:15.880 A number of months ago, Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould and others in the government
00:00:20.800 had said, look, we're not happy with what Facebook, Twitter, and other social media
00:00:25.000 outlets are doing to combat misinformation and political disinformation, online hatred,
00:00:31.360 and all these, quite frankly, vague terms that, yes, at first glance,
00:00:35.420 they don't sound like particularly positive things that anybody would endorse,
00:00:39.400 but it was unclear what specifically they were getting at.
00:00:44.220 Well, they said back then, we're going to give these platforms a number of months to clean up their act
00:00:48.820 in the lead up to the next election, or we're going to do it for them.
00:00:53.300 We're going to regulate them.
00:00:55.360 At the time, they never offered any pledges of what specifically they'll do,
00:00:59.020 and even now, they're not really giving any definition of exactly how they're going to approach this either,
00:01:04.520 but Karina Gould has said, looks like they've failed.
00:01:09.140 Facebook and the rest, they have not succeeded in self-regulating.
00:01:13.260 Big problem, though, what specifically were you hoping they would do?
00:01:18.280 There's a lot of times when people are posting some ill-mannered things, some rude things,
00:01:23.760 some conspiracy theories, and heck, we had the case in the New Zealand shooting
00:01:27.280 of a guy live-streaming that event, that despicable event.
00:01:31.300 I mean, what a horrible thing to do.
00:01:33.740 I'm just a little unclear how they prevent that from happening.
00:01:37.300 Do you have people monitoring these sorts of things all the time, 24-7, everybody's accounts?
00:01:43.400 I don't know, I have no clue, but do they?
00:01:47.080 And that's the question, and if they're going to regulate this, can they pinpoint how to actually do it?
00:01:52.820 When it comes to issues like what they call hate speech and misinformation, disinformation,
00:01:57.940 well, there are already laws on the books.
00:02:00.240 There are libel laws, there are defamation laws.
00:02:02.360 If someone is saying something that's just 100% not true and damaging to an individual,
00:02:07.700 you can enforce the laws that are already on the books.
00:02:10.220 Now, if someone is engaging in hate speech to the tune of threatening to harm people,
00:02:16.040 well, there are already laws against that.
00:02:17.860 Incitement to violence, death threats, threats of violence against people.
00:02:21.600 If you have someone threatening to kill you or anything like that,
00:02:24.260 whether they're doing it online or to your face in person,
00:02:26.880 you can call the police about that.
00:02:28.760 Those are very real things.
00:02:30.540 What is it right now that should not be considered free speech and shouldn't be allowed,
00:02:35.240 but is also not already covered by the current laws governing these issues?
00:02:39.380 So far, the liberals have failed to make the case for that.
00:02:43.440 Now, it gets extra worrisome when you look at how they've also bandied about these terms,
00:02:48.280 like misinformation and disinformation.
00:02:50.600 You remember when Lavscam first broke, Justin Trudeau said the story is false.
00:02:57.160 The allegations in the Globe story this morning are false.
00:03:01.360 Months later, he's pretty much all but admitted everything is true.
00:03:04.980 He just doesn't believe he broke the criminal code in doing it.
00:03:07.960 Meanwhile, he had proxies like Liberal MP Randy Bossineau,
00:03:11.060 who came forward and called Lavscam a witch hunt and a fishing expedition.
00:03:16.080 Kind of similar language that we've heard from other people wanting to discredit news stories out there.
00:03:21.300 They basically are calling Lavscam disinformation and misinformation.
00:03:26.040 And now they're threatening to sue Andrew Scheer for saying what a whole lot of Canadians already think,
00:03:30.680 that Justin Trudeau has pretty much interfered with the justice system.
00:03:34.900 Well, hold on a second. Would they like to block all sort of reporting and commentary on that?
00:03:40.120 I've read a whole lot of commentary where people do pretty much agree with what Andrew Scheer said.
00:03:45.100 Would they like social media to suppress that?
00:03:48.020 It's all rather frustrating that this is happening, of course, at the interesting timing of an election coming up.
00:03:53.960 Why do they necessarily need to do it now?
00:03:56.640 Does it have something to do with their own electoral prospects?
00:03:59.580 I mean, this stuff is stranger than fiction.
00:04:02.320 To use phrases like Orwellian and slippery slope and so forth, well, we're there.
00:04:07.560 Look, I think Canadians can have a reasonable conversation if there are some specific rules or laws or legislations that aren't on the books.
00:04:14.240 And there is a very compelling reason why they should be.
00:04:17.640 But so far, the Liberals haven't presented that.
00:04:19.920 And they also haven't specifically said what is the exact problem here.
00:04:24.800 People saying mean, rude, improper things on the Internet?
00:04:27.720 Yeah, it's the Internet. It's social media.
00:04:30.580 It's been that way forever.
00:04:31.920 I wish everybody was always polite to everybody all the time.
00:04:34.780 But we know that doesn't happen here or anywhere else in the world.
00:04:38.700 Quite frankly, the most troubling part of this is the vague way they're talking about it all.
00:04:44.320 Canadians don't want to see their social media regulated in this broad, amorphous way
00:04:48.980 because they're worried if these rules might end up clamping down on them
00:04:52.500 simply for doing things like disagreeing with the government.
00:04:55.660 It's certainly something Canadians need to be concerned about
00:04:59.100 and they need to get more specifics from the government.