Juno News - May 22, 2019


The Liberal Plan To Regulate Social Media

Topics
regulating social media
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Jacinda Ardern
Bill Blair might subvert Parliament to ban certain guns Liberals invite anti-Conservative Unifor to journalism panel

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

177.75

Word count

611

Sentence count

24

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

It looks like we're getting closer and closer to Justin Trudeau and the Liberals finally acting on their threats to somewhat regulate or restrict social media. We ve been hearing for months now that the government has been saying to social media giants, you act now, you self-police, or we will bring in regulations upon you. Well, it now seems that they are opting for the latter.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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 It looks like we're getting closer and closer to Justin Trudeau and the Liberals finally acting
00:00:13.620 on their threats to somewhat regulate or restrict social media. We've been hearing for months now
00:00:19.420 that the government has been saying to social media giants, you act now, you self-police,
00:00:24.280 you self-regulate, or we will bring in regulations upon you. Well, it now seems that they are
00:00:29.920 opting for the latter. You know, I was particularly struck by a line in a Toronto Star story from a
00:00:35.380 few months ago where they quoted an Insight source saying the Liberals have been seized by this issue
00:00:40.100 for quite some time now, meaning they've been obsessed with the idea of regulating social media.
00:00:46.160 Well, it looks like Justin Trudeau's latest opportunity to go on about this came last week
00:00:51.180 in a meeting in France where a lot of leaders of government got together to talk about restricting
00:00:56.080 hate speech. Now, this was being led by Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand,
00:01:00.700 who has been calling for a lot of measures to hopefully prevent things like the mosque shooting
00:01:06.080 from recurring. The problem is, whatever you think about that and however much you would want to
00:01:11.040 prevent those attacks, and hopefully most reasonable people would want to say, yeah,
00:01:15.220 we don't want stuff like that happening. Let's see what we can do to decrease the odds of these mass 0.57
00:01:20.560 shootings from happening in the future. The problem is, all that they've been discussing so far
00:01:25.940 has been very vague. And also, Justin Trudeau has not just been talking about hate speech. He said he'd
00:01:33.000 be implementing a digital charter while he was in France, and that digital charter includes provisions
00:01:38.260 to tackle, yes, hate speech, political misinformation, and electoral interference. Now, from a bird's eye view,
00:01:46.100 you can stand back and go, oh, those things, they all sound very bad. We don't want those at all.
00:01:50.220 Yes, let's ban them, let's restrict them, or what have you. But all three of them are actually
00:01:54.720 pretty vague notions. I mean, each person might have a specific idea of what they think all of
00:01:59.520 that means, but ask them to write down in a paragraph or to say in 30 seconds exactly, precisely
00:02:06.160 what those phrases mean in a legally precise or a technically precise way. I'm not seeing too many
00:02:13.100 definitions floating around. And if we want to talk about actually restricting these things and
00:02:18.680 regulating them, the details matter. We have to talk about what we mean here. What do we mean by
00:02:24.540 hate speech? Now, there are already laws on the books in most Western countries that do limit certain
00:02:29.980 speech, like making threats against people, incitements to violence, calling people up in
00:02:34.680 the middle of the night and harassing them and threatening to bring violence upon them.
00:02:38.300 So if you're talking about that, but brought into the digital world, outright threatening to kill
00:02:42.520 people, well, that's actually already illegal. So what things are they talking about doing? Are they
00:02:48.440 just talking about banning and limiting opinions that they particularly don't like? I mean, what's
00:02:53.920 the definition of hate speech that Justin Trudeau is using? And when you're talking about bringing in
00:02:59.340 laws to restrict these forms of speech, well, those definitions matter. And I think Canadians all across
00:03:06.540 the political spectrum, whatever their views on, they should be really concerned when they hear a
00:03:11.060 partisan politician in the lead up to an election talking about regulating ill-defined areas of
00:03:17.760 speech. Ask for the specifics, ask for the details, because if we don't get them, we should absolutely
00:03:24.340 not accept any of this.