Juno News - September 26, 2020


Will Trudeau regulate how you use the internet？


Episode Stats

Length

8 minutes

Words per Minute

212.62148

Word Count

1,743

Sentence Count

1


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 so the government through the governor general is going to be putting out it seems some legislation
00:00:12.840 aimed at regulating social media companies but along with that is going to be tackling online
00:00:17.800 hate now as someone who worked in the field of combating racism and discrimination and therefore
00:00:23.180 tackling online hate i thought i would maybe bring up some of the statements that they said
00:00:27.480 and look at some of the legislation and see if we can figure out what that might look like if it were
00:00:31.620 actually to come into play so as always let's just jump right in and here we have the actual story
00:00:37.240 itself the key line here is that the section addressing systemic racism liberals made reference
00:00:43.500 to taking action on online hate so what does that mean that's obviously part of a package with
00:00:49.660 regulating social media companies there is going to be a requirement for some additional legislation
00:00:54.840 you can't just have ones about online hate speech because we already do have laws about hate speech
00:00:59.840 in this country now many people tend to be stuck on the sort of american idea of free speech but here
00:01:04.660 we actually do have hate speech laws and hate propaganda laws in canada and so you're maybe
00:01:10.020 going to need some other legislative items if you're going to want to actually regulate what social media
00:01:14.440 companies do you know there might be certain factors is the server in canada are all the people
00:01:18.660 canadian what legal leverage do they have or what jurisdiction do they have over these companies
00:01:23.500 so there's a lot really there that the government might need to do to implement whatever is that
00:01:27.800 they actually want to do now importantly here is going to be the actual criminal code which covers
00:01:33.920 the hate crimes and the hate propaganda that these people would be charged with and so i thought it
00:01:39.640 would be important to pull that up now the relevant sections here are sections 318 and 319 the thing to
00:01:46.900 know about these sections though is that attorneys general are very very reluctant to bring forward
00:01:51.540 charges with either these two sections and you'll see why in a second that's often because it's very
00:01:56.000 difficult to get a conviction and so they don't want to necessarily bring charges which would then
00:02:00.520 get tossed out or or result in not getting a conviction because that would set the wrong
00:02:04.800 precedent so in a certain way the fact that these lines exist doesn't mean that they're always used
00:02:10.120 or always going to be used now i want to start with the first one here it's hate propaganda advocating
00:02:15.840 genocide and this one the only real difference is the uh genocide it can be in whole or in part you
00:02:21.580 see right here in whole or in part so it's not the maybe colloquial genocide it's um you can for
00:02:27.880 example you know if you killed one or two people of an identifiable group and you said you know i want
00:02:31.680 to kill all the members of this group you could still be charged with advocating that um or or you
00:02:36.680 know actually engaging in it but but definitely if you talk about it you can be charged with advocating
00:02:40.220 that even though if you even though you might have only killed one or two people um so i think that's
00:02:44.380 maybe a little bit of a definition in the legalese to maybe the colloquial usage of of genocide you
00:02:50.300 know if someone killed um one or two people of an identifiable minority group or or an identifiable
00:02:55.140 group generally you might just say that's uh you know a hate crime that's a racist hate crime that's
00:02:58.920 murder you wouldn't necessarily think of it as genocide but legally again advocating that could
00:03:03.240 definitely fall here under genocide uh identifiable group um you know there's pretty much anything
00:03:09.280 these are all the uh criterions which which someone could be identified with and i think pretty much
00:03:14.400 everyone in in canada would fall into it the very least one if not numerous of these categories um it
00:03:20.260 would be very hard to to say there is no uh no way that some person can be an identifiable group
00:03:25.000 which begs a lot of question about advocating for um you know the destruction of certain groups and
00:03:31.500 you know why is nobody charging anyone with this so again a lot a lot of questions there to unpack
00:03:35.340 um 319 is more about the actual speech and this is the commuting statements communicating statements
00:03:42.660 in a public place now if we're talking about social media then you might say okay well the
00:03:47.780 public place is going to be maybe my facebook wall it's going to be your twitter profile so if i make a
00:03:52.560 tweet about these type of things is that you know is that now a public place according to what these
00:03:57.380 new laws and regulations might have in mind i mean these are definitely uh public and you could
00:04:02.340 definitely argue that the internet is a public place of dialogue so you know it's definitely
00:04:06.840 easy there um i'm not quite sure what the case law is there might be some existing case law with
00:04:11.160 regards to this but but definitely it's easy to see where this type of thing would come from if there
00:04:15.300 was going to be some new legislation um the other one here willful promotion promotion of hatred so
00:04:20.980 um i guess that's different than maybe public incitement of hatred this is a willful promotion
00:04:25.960 um it's the same kind of thing but you're going to communicate statements
00:04:29.660 that promote hatred against an identifiable group um almost repetition here but i think this one is
00:04:37.500 really you're advocating something like i'm promoting hatred against a group and therefore
00:04:42.800 someone is going to go do something you know i'm promoting hatred against jews for example
00:04:46.080 and therefore someone is going to go do something vandalize the synagogue or you know beat up someone
00:04:50.800 who is jewish and and so that's maybe the um the breach of the peace here that's part one whereas
00:04:55.560 the willful promotion of hatred doesn't have to be the um that someone is actually going to go do
00:05:00.580 something now i think this is the one that maybe a lot of people are upset with because if you're
00:05:06.020 just willfully promoting hatred so i'm just saying i hate this group or that people should hate this
00:05:11.620 group um a lot of people who are really really diehard free speech advocates would say well you
00:05:16.280 know you can't have a law like this because i should be allowed to say whatever i want i should be
00:05:20.160 allowed to be as hateful as i want and so this is maybe that slippery slope that some of the people
00:05:25.320 um who are against this type of thing would be would be warning against or pointed to as a section
00:05:29.920 now there are obviously defenses for this section so for example if what you said was true um that's
00:05:37.580 again you know it's up for debate what what is true according to facts statistics um you know true
00:05:43.220 from a certain angle from a certain perspective you know a lot of stuff that could be muddied in
00:05:46.760 there um if you you know are trying to talk about religious texts it's also kind of weird you know
00:05:55.340 things open for interpretation here in this section b here um and attempting to establish but by an
00:06:02.580 argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on belief in a religious text
00:06:07.240 so a lot a lot of stuff there um if a statement's relevant to any subject of public interest
00:06:12.960 now all this stuff you know as i'm talking it really there's a lot of stuff to unpack here
00:06:19.080 but i think one thing is clear from looking at these things it's that the government on our
00:06:26.720 current legislation so in our current laws that are on the books there's a lot that they could do
00:06:31.640 the issue is really what is the case law so what is the history that shows um how people have been
00:06:38.740 charged what has happened to these people and what can the government do going forward and that
00:06:43.740 really depends how else they want to regulate it is entirely possible that some of the other
00:06:48.680 regulations might be backdoored through some of these hate speech things saying that the government
00:06:52.280 must crack down on speech because hate speech is such a broad subject open to interpretation maybe
00:06:58.800 that's one of the ways that they might get some of this some of this jurisdiction or put some of
00:07:03.760 these rules on social media companies and be able to regulate what type of content they put out
00:07:07.660 um i know that in the united states a lot of conservatives have been have been complaining
00:07:11.560 that they have been silenced in certain ways saying that they're um for example pro-trump things have
00:07:16.580 been flagged for hate speech um maybe some of the things that they're saying about the democrats have
00:07:20.740 also been flagged for hate speech so again a lot of this stuff is very very open a lot of this stuff
00:07:25.500 is uh very complicated but it does exist on the books and i think there's going to be a lot to talk
00:07:31.600 about so i hope that kind of provided a really really brief overview of the subject um i'm happy to
00:07:37.260 talk about this in further detail because there is definitely a lot to talk about but the main
00:07:41.060 takeaways again are that we do have hate speech laws in this country they do uh exist and cover
00:07:45.800 a lot of things so it's definitely interesting to take a look at but they are very rarely really used
00:07:50.400 because attorneys general do not want to go ahead with a charge if they're not uh very very sure that
00:07:55.260 they're going to get a conviction so a lot of interesting stuff to take away from and maybe a bit
00:07:59.140 of a different angle than you've heard about the throne speech so hope we found that very
00:08:02.360 interesting and entertaining so for true north i am sam ashkenazi i hope you very very much enjoyed
00:08:07.240 this video and have yourselves a great day and a great evening thanks
00:08:09.860 you