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