What Trudeau's censorship legislation means for Canadian content creators
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180.19337
Summary
Bill C-11, the bill that would regulate YouTube, and Bill C-14, which would force Canadian tech companies to pay journalism outlets for their content, are two of the bills that have been proposed by the Canadian government in response to the growing number of Canadian YouTubers who complain about government interference in their personal and professional lives.
Transcript
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Let's talk about the new bills. There's two of them that have been proposed so far. Bill C-11,
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which deals with algorithms and how private tech companies provide content to users, how
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searchable things are on platforms like YouTube and Facebook. And then the second one has more
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to do with the compensation. So tech companies paying journalism outlets for their content. I
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know you have had lots and lots of opinions on these, and both of these bills will impact the
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work that you do directly. So in a nutshell, what is your position on these bills?
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Well, I mean, I'm against both of them. I mean, I think that this is a classic sort of case of
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government sort of extending its grip into places where it just doesn't belong. I think, frankly,
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a lot of it is also just a kind of solution in search of a problem. To talk about Bill C-11,
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which is the bill that would regulate YouTube. I mean, I think what makes this sort of particularly
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pernicious is just that there's really no evidence that YouTube as a platform, that YouTube creators,
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that Canadian YouTube creators like myself, or like, you know, the over 400 YouTubers from Canada
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who are more successful than I am. I think there's really no evidence to suggest that these people
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need a helping hand. I mean, we've all been quite successful just in an unregulated YouTube. And I think
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that a lot of both creators and consumers of Canadian YouTube have enjoyed, frankly, that for
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the 16 years that it's existed, it has been a kind of unregulated place, it hasn't been subjected to
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the kind of heavy handed CRTC content quotas, and, you know, government putting its finger on the scale
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in terms of determining, you know, what kind of Canadian content you should be watching and sort of
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promoting certain kinds of Canadian content over others for largely sort of political ideological
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reasons. Because that's basically what the bill aims to do what Bill C-11 aims to do is it aims to
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basically bring the regulatory regime that I think a lot of Canadians have grown pretty irritated with
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as it regulates TV and radio, and sort of imposing that into a previously unregulated realm, which is
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things like YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and, you know, Netflix and Disney Plus, and who knows how many