The Candice Malcolm Show - April 19, 2022


How will Trudeau’s internet censorship bills impact True North？ (Ft. JJ McCullough)

Hosted by
Candice Malcolm
Guests
JJ McCullough
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Bill C-63 Justin Bieber Ryan Reynolds Viktor Orban Hunter Biden Celine Dion Paw Patrol Trump
Can Canada become a global power？ (ft. Irvin Studin) Canada’s top political journalist goes independent (ft. Paul Wells)

Episode Stats


Length

33 minutes

Words per minute

198.85

Word count

6,660

Sentence count

243

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

How will Prime Minister Justin Trudeau s online censorship affect outlets like True North? We ll speak to one of Canada s largest YouTube creators, JJ McCullough, to discuss how this bill will affect online creators. The Candice Malcolm Show is on all of the social medias, if you search for it, you'll find us.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 How will Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's online censorship bills affect outlets like True North?
00:00:04.900 We'll speak to one of Canada's largest YouTube creators to discuss how this bill will affect online creators.
00:00:10.600 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:24.520 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in.
00:00:26.300 So we are paying a lot of attention here at True North and at The Candice Malcolm Show to the new and improved, or new and worsely improved, online censorship bills being proposed by the Trudeau government.
00:00:36.960 And I'm very pleased today to be joined by JJ McCullough.
00:00:40.280 JJ is a Canadian commentator on YouTube.
00:00:42.600 He hosts one of the largest channels, political Canadian channels, on the platform.
00:00:46.840 JJ is also an opinion columnist over at The Washington Post, and he's been a guest several times here on The Candice Malcolm Show and on True North.
00:00:54.660 JJ, great to talk to you.
00:00:56.300 Thanks for having me.
00:00:57.820 So let's talk about the new bills.
00:01:00.640 There's two of them that have been proposed so far.
00:01:03.040 Bill C-11, which deals with algorithms and how private tech companies provide content to users,
00:01:10.560 how searchable things are on platforms like YouTube and Facebook.
00:01:14.780 And then the second one has more to do with the compensation, so tech companies paying journalism outlets for their content.
00:01:25.340 I know you have had lots and lots of opinions on these, and both of these bills will impact the work that you do directly.
00:01:31.340 So in a nutshell, what was your position on these bills?
00:01:36.160 Well, I mean, I'm against both of them.
00:01:38.160 I mean, I think that this is a classic sort of case of government sort of extending its grip into places where it just doesn't belong.
00:01:45.580 I think, frankly, a lot of it is also just a kind of solution in search of a problem.
00:01:50.180 So to talk about Bill C-11, which is the bill that would regulate YouTube, I mean,
00:01:55.780 I think what makes this sort of particularly pernicious is just that there's really no evidence that YouTube as a platform,
00:02:03.400 that YouTube creators, that Canadian YouTube creators like myself or like, you know,
00:02:07.100 the over 400 YouTubers from Canada who are more successful than I am.
00:02:11.860 I think there's really no evidence to suggest that these people need a helping hand.
00:02:15.380 I mean, we've all been quite successful just in an unregulated YouTube.
00:02:19.480 And I think that a lot of both creators and consumers of Canadian YouTube have enjoyed, frankly,
00:02:25.120 that for the 16 years that it's existed, it has been a kind of unregulated place.
00:02:29.620 It hasn't been subjected to the kind of heavy handed CRTC content quotas and, you know,
00:02:36.700 government putting its finger on the scale in terms of determining, you know,
00:02:40.160 what kind of Canadian content you should be watching and sort of promoting certain kinds of Canadian content over others
00:02:46.780 for largely sort of political ideological reasons, because that's basically what the bill aims to do,
00:02:52.660 what Bill C-11 aims to do is it aims to basically bring the regulatory regime that I think a lot of Canadians
00:02:58.040 have grown pretty irritated with as it regulates TV and radio and sort of imposing that into a previously unregulated realm,
00:03:05.480 which is things like YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and, you know, Netflix and Disney Plus
00:03:11.340 and who knows how many other sort of areas of online life.
00:03:15.400 It's sort of saying that we no longer trust the user or the creator to kind of enjoy the platform on their own terms.
00:03:22.500 Government is going to kind of like wedge itself in between and sort of assume a kind of hectoring position
00:03:27.760 in which they're going to sort of meddle with the algorithms and so forth and say,
00:03:31.860 you thought you wanted to watch this?
00:03:33.660 Well, we think you should be watching this.
00:03:35.520 And so we're going to emphasize this and try to promote this and artificially inflate the success of this.
00:03:40.860 And, you know, it hasn't worked with TV or radio.
00:03:43.960 I think it has just merely made a lot of Canadians pretty frustrated with what they see as, you know,
00:03:48.880 often subpar, heavily government subsidized, heavily government favored CanCon being sort of shoved down their throats.
00:03:54.820 And I think it's not going to be much of a success on YouTube either,
00:04:00.100 but it is going to cause a lot of annoyance and possibly, you know,
00:04:03.100 disrupt the livelihoods of a lot of Canadian creators.
00:04:06.920 Well, it's interesting that you say it's a solution in search of a problem,
00:04:10.800 because to me, I see it as sort of like trying to validate their whole existence,
00:04:16.120 because, you know, the CRTC, they sit there and they regulate, like you alluded to, with Canadian content.
00:04:21.660 And they tell us what portion of songs on the radio that we listen to must be Canadian,
00:04:26.800 what portion of television shows on CTV or even CBC.
00:04:31.280 You know, we have a government funded news channel in the CBC and a whole news agency.
00:04:36.760 And half the time they're just showing American reruns of old, you know, episodes of The Simpsons or whatever.
00:04:42.020 So, you know, the whole purpose of this document begs the question of like,
00:04:48.160 what is the purpose of the CRTC? Because now so many people are getting their content online.
00:04:54.000 Most people, I would say, probably under the age of 40 exclusively get their content online,
00:04:58.940 whether it be music or entertainment or political news, what have you.
00:05:03.100 And so you kind of have a situation, JJ, where like half of the world is regulated by them,
00:05:08.040 that people who, you know, people and outlets still operate in the traditional forms.
00:05:12.500 And then the other half isn't.
00:05:13.780 And so it's kind of like if they don't regulate the Internet, then they kind of lose their authority
00:05:18.500 to justifiably say that they have a purpose.
00:05:22.280 And so I sort of see this as them just like asserting their power to say,
00:05:25.920 we're still relevant, we're still useful, don't forget about us.
00:05:28.680 And if they didn't do this, sooner or later, we would probably have to just get rid of the entire regulatory body.
00:05:37.600 Which one do you think is better?
00:05:38.720 Do you think that they should just sort of cease to exist?
00:05:41.000 Because I know your answer to this, but maybe you can comment a little bit on the purposes of TRTC,
00:05:46.500 why it's there and whether they've been at all successful.
00:05:49.460 Yeah, I mean, I think you're I think you're sort of exactly right in your analysis.
00:05:52.800 I mean, I think that there's basically sort of two motives or sort of factors that are sort of animating this initiative.
00:06:01.760 You know, one of them is, I think, just a kind of if I can sort of use a generational slur,
00:06:06.640 a kind of boomer ignorance of what the Internet actually is.
00:06:09.980 And, you know, I think a lot of these people writing this legislation don't really understand
00:06:13.880 the degree to which Canadians have been perfectly successful on YouTube without any government help.
00:06:19.160 I think the degree to which, you know, on YouTube and other social media sites,
00:06:22.900 there's many Canadians who have become some of the biggest celebrities in the world,
00:06:25.840 particularly in the eyes of the of the youth without any government help.
00:06:29.300 So when you read sort of the government's sort of official justifications,
00:06:32.400 when you read their press releases for why we need to pass Bill C-11,
00:06:36.480 it's all based on a kind of, you know, condescending premise that Canadian creators are really struggling
00:06:41.820 and the Canadian voices are not being heard.
00:06:44.140 And and there's just there's just no evidence for that.
00:06:46.480 And it sort of suggests to me that really no creators except for kind of like the usual heavily subsidized creators
00:06:52.920 who are producing really sort of sub-tier content and sort of dominate the sort of arts lobby groups in this country.
00:06:58.920 But there's really like no demand for this service.
00:07:01.840 And then the other thing is, I think, exactly what you sort of said is that I think that in old guard media,
00:07:08.840 the television stations and the radio producers and so on,
00:07:13.300 I think that there's a lot of jealousy of the unregulated Internet entertainment sphere.
00:07:18.820 You know, I think that there is a legitimate complaint to be made if you're a TV,
00:07:23.680 if you run a television network or something like that to sort of say like, hey, wait a second, 0.91
00:07:28.120 I have to jump through all these dumb hoops.
00:07:30.000 Government makes me run, you know, like 60 percent of Canadian content during primetime hours 0.59
00:07:35.920 and, you know, makes me have to sort of sign off on all these criteria to determine
00:07:40.080 whether or not a show is Canadian enough to sort of meet the content quotas.
00:07:43.660 You know, I have to jump through all of these hoops.
00:07:45.860 Why should YouTube be able to get away with just running whatever they want and not being punished?
00:07:51.020 I mean, whether you're watching a video on TV or a video on a computer screen, a video is a video.
00:07:55.580 And if this legislation, if the existence of the CRTC is justified on the basis that government
00:08:01.340 has a right to sort of like control the, as they say in the press release, the cultural sovereignty of the nation,
00:08:07.660 this kind of very nationalistic idea that sort of the character of the Canadian public is is harmed.
00:08:13.300 And if we consume too much foreign media or too much media without identifiably Canadian themes,
00:08:19.860 if that is government sort of stated pressing press, then I think it is fair for the old media,
00:08:25.360 old guard media to sort of say, you know, why does YouTube get a break?
00:08:28.900 But my response to that would be sort of as you perceived would be to just sort of give the kibosh to the CRTC in general,
00:08:36.180 you know, that this is a regulatory agency that I think was always flawed in its conception of what Canadians needed from their media.
00:08:42.720 And I think that now we just live in a, you know, a brave new world of the Internet,
00:08:48.580 which is much more consumer focused, much more democratic, I think, in a very good way.
00:08:52.900 And I think that what you're sort of seeing is that this legislation is is just so authoritarian and in so many ways and so regressive.
00:09:00.680 It's really without precedent anywhere in the world.
00:09:03.180 And I think that, you know, it's worth asking the question if Canada, you know,
00:09:07.200 wants to go down the path of being the country with the most regulated Internet,
00:09:11.120 of being the country with the most regulated YouTube as it relates to things like entertainment and cultural consumption.
00:09:18.160 And I would hope that that is not the kind of country that we want to be.
00:09:20.920 I would hope that Canada is does not become a model of Internet regulation that then sort of serves as an inspiration to,
00:09:27.720 you know, China or Russia or any other country that has all of these deep seated anxieties about their public,
00:09:32.940 you know, consuming dangerous foreign ideas or ideas that are perhaps not patriotic enough as the government defines them.
00:09:40.020 Well, and it's not even just as Canadian as possible, because we know that there's another bill forthcoming,
00:09:45.360 the one that will replace Bill C-36, which had to do with hate speech online.
00:09:49.960 And so it's not just about, you know, promoting Canadian content.
00:09:53.620 It's also the Trudeau government trying to essentially silence views that they disagree with or or silence dissent,
00:09:59.680 which when that when that bill does come, we'll have to do another dive into it,
00:10:03.700 because obviously that that that creates its own set of problems.
00:10:07.680 But JJ, maybe you can walk us through what this bill will do to individual content creators like you.
00:10:14.140 I know you said on on Twitter that that it would probably benefit you because your channel and your content is so Canadian.
00:10:20.540 Everything about it is Canadian.
00:10:22.180 I mean, I can look at your backdrop and see, you know, you have all kinds of Canadiana stuff.
00:10:27.780 I think that's a little half Canadian, half American flag, which I know some viewers will hate to see that and others will agree and cheer.
00:10:35.020 But, you know, you put out Canadian content.
00:10:37.420 We here at True North are exclusively Canadian news channel.
00:10:40.300 I sometimes laugh because, again, just to pick on the CBC a little bit, you know, there's there this government funded media behemoth designed.
00:10:47.560 And, of course, the purpose of it is to tell Canadian stories, protect our culture, as you mentioned.
00:10:52.800 And sometimes you turn on CTV and like the top five stories will all be foreign news.
00:10:57.280 Even, you know, even this morning, it's like, you know, the budget just came out in Canada and they're still telling us about, you know,
00:11:03.940 the top top five stories are all to do with Ukraine and Russia during the Trump era.
00:11:08.040 This was a phenomenon where it didn't matter what kind of scandal Trudeau was up to.
00:11:11.800 They would always focus on the Trump scandals on CBC.
00:11:14.540 So they don't even really prioritize Canadian content, even though that's, you know, presumably what they're there for.
00:11:21.260 So so so in theory, couldn't channels like yours channel like ours here at True North benefit from this kind of legislation?
00:11:28.880 And even with the benefit, why is it that that people like us still criticize this kind of bill?
00:11:35.360 Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, it's a it's a plausible argument.
00:11:38.900 I mean, I was making it somewhat tongue in cheek.
00:11:40.440 But, you know, the if you read the government's own rhetoric, they're trying to sort of buy off people like us by saying like, oh, you're going to do you're going to do great.
00:11:47.120 You're going to make even more money.
00:11:48.460 Like, don't don't sort of bite the hand that feeds you.
00:11:50.740 You know, I mean, to me, that's a kind of sort of somewhat ideologically compromised cynical argument.
00:11:56.280 But I mean, the bigger problem, though, is that we don't really know what the government's criteria of Canadian will be.
00:12:03.480 And what makes your content Canadian enough to be boosted by a sort of rigged algorithm?
00:12:09.640 Right. And I know that this is sort of something that the YouTube people themselves are sort of concerned about.
00:12:13.800 Right. Because when you when I go to submit a video on YouTube right now, I have to check all of these boxes that say, you know, it's not full of nudity or violence or hate speech or whatever.
00:12:23.560 And that's sort of how YouTube determines whether or not my content is is family friendly for their purposes.
00:12:29.640 And I think what's obviously going to happen is that at some point, YouTube, in order to sort of be compliant with this law and not face the millions and millions of dollars of fines that the legislation threatens, noncompliant streaming outlets,
00:12:42.460 is that they're probably going to have to sort of subject the content to some sort of test as well.
00:12:46.640 Whether or not that's a sort of self self-administered test like the current one is or if there's some sort of bureaucrat behind the scenes that YouTube is going to have to employ to sort of like look through a checklist that the CRTC has given them and go through the list.
00:13:00.740 You know, we know that the legislation or the government has stated a lot of like quite ideological objectives justifying the legislation in terms of a desire to emphasize the prominence of marginalized communities,
00:13:13.540 you know, communities of color, the bilingual realities of Canada, you know, you can sort of traditional, I think, identity politics sort of type of hangups that the Trudeau government is sort of known for.
00:13:25.460 So it with those sort of concerns being the case and the sort of the ongoing ambiguity of like exactly how good patriotic Canadian content is going to be defined,
00:13:35.400 it can't necessarily be taken for granted that people like you or me will necessarily benefit from it.
00:13:40.320 You know, it's depending on how ideological and how narrow and how specific the goal is, you know, there could be a lot of people that are creating Canadian content, but the content is not Canadian enough, right?
00:13:52.240 This is what I think is quite pernicious as well is that I said, for example, I have 700,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel.
00:13:59.120 There are over 400 YouTubers who are from Canada who are more successful than me.
00:14:03.080 So we're talking about a very large community, but, you know, a lot of the people that are successful don't have channels that are as ostentatiously Canadian as mine, perhaps, you know, they might be cooking channels, they might be, you know, video game streamers, you know, they might be handymen or people offering, you know, tips on how to clean your apartment or care for your dog or do any of these kinds of things.
00:14:23.680 Or, yeah, science experiments. There's so much on YouTube. It's like you could find something for anyone.
00:14:28.860 And it's all relevant to Canadian lives, right? Like, I mean, Canadians need to, you know, learn how to cook and walk their dogs and they like hearing movie reviews and tech reviews and all sorts of stuff like that.
00:14:41.260 So the problem, though, is that those people, you know, could be harmed by this, you know, like maybe somebody like me who's so ostentatiously Canadian will benefit, but there's a lot of Canadian creators who are being successful as Canadian creators.
00:14:54.220 They're creating content that is relevant and interesting to Canadians, but perhaps because it's not like ideologically Canadian enough, it's not political enough, it's not kind of like overtly nationalistic enough, then maybe they're going to be harmed by it.
00:15:07.720 So it's just, you know, I really would like to see the press kind of emphasize this a little bit more and like ask the minister and ask the government, like, what is Canadian enough?
00:15:16.080 Like, who gets to decide that? And who is going to be coming up with the definitions?
00:15:20.500 Because I think when we've seen, and, you know, people have had a lot of fun with this, talking about, like, say, movies and TV shows in the past that might seem Canadian or might seem very un-Canadian, and yet they pass the CRTC's kind of bureaucratic rules just because these rules are so, you know, convoluted and esoteric.
00:15:36.900 Well, and it's so interesting because when you look, when you take a step back and look at, like, all of culture, all of Canadian, all of the Canadians who are successful in the cultural realm, a lot of them started out being successful in the Canadian cultural realm.
00:15:49.880 Like, someone like, you know, Justin Bieber or Ryan Reynolds or someone who was, like, you know, early in their career, they were based in Canada, and then once they become popular, Celine Dion, you know, any Canadian person that's really famous, it's because they're famous in the U.S., right?
00:16:05.780 So they kind of start out in Canada, and you could argue, like, if you were trying to steel man the CRTC, you could say, like, you know, the CRTC creates an environment where Canadians get the opportunity to, like, test out their product in the Canadian market,
00:16:18.940 or they get to build up an audience here before, like, going for a broader audience abroad, you know, the purpose of all this, all this legislation is to protect a Canadian identity from, like, a larger cultural influence to the South.
00:16:32.600 And, you know, you could have a reasonable argument about whether or not that is necessary, whether that's something that's desirable, but it doesn't seem like we've had that conversation at any point in my lifetime anyway.
00:16:43.920 These rules have just sort of always been there, and now the Trudeau government is kind of, like, doubling down on that again to try to get the next, you know, the next domain that they don't have regulated under their thumb, which is the Internet.
00:16:57.480 How would we go about having a broader conversation, national conversation, if you will, about whether or not it's the government's role to be trying to regulate culture, trying to protect culture, trying to foster culture?
00:17:12.420 Well, just to go back to the point I was making about the people like Justin Bieber or Ryan Reynolds or whoever's latest big Canadian star, once you hit a certain point of success in Canada, it seems inevitable that any field, whether it's sports, music, entertainment, they go to the bigger market where they finish out their career,
00:17:31.120 which is why a lot of the content that starts out being Canadian content is no longer Canadian after a certain point, because it gets, you know, even something like my kids love Paw Patrol, the show, and I know it was Canadian to begin with.
00:17:42.580 I don't really know if you could call it Canadian anymore, because I think it was bought out by Nickelodeon and it's produced in a Hollywood studio now.
00:17:49.400 But anyway, how do we get this conversation going about whether this is actually something that Canadians want or need?
00:17:55.400 Yeah, I mean, it's a very good question. And I think on some respects, it's an interesting sort of blind spot on both the left and the right in this country.
00:18:03.440 You know, I think that the left, for its part, doesn't, you know, the left is in, I think, a little bit of cognitive dissonance, right?
00:18:15.260 In the sort of sense that, like, they are in the left wing in this country is very sort of like nationalistic in many ways, right?
00:18:21.520 Like that they push this kind of like heavy handed idea that government should control the culture, that government should control the cultural sovereignty of the nation,
00:18:29.480 that there's sort of like a cultural purity that government has a right to kind of enforce and sort of carry through in a way that like would seem really,
00:18:38.000 I think, abhorrent or distasteful if, say, like Viktor Orban's government in Hungary was making those same sorts of arguments.
00:18:44.720 So like the left in this country, I think, are quite hypocritical, like they don't quite understand to what degree that they are on the side of making like quite paternalistic,
00:18:54.100 quite nationalistic, quite sort of regressive, authoritarian, chauvinistic arguments, which I don't think like, like they basically inherited rather uncritically. 0.54
00:19:03.840 And even now, like when you sort of ask a kind of like mainstream center left person about this, they're just kind of like, oh, yeah, well, I guess it's good for government to sort of control our sovereignty.
00:19:12.520 And, you know, you can always our cultural sovereignty and you can always sort of like make appeals to kind of like anti-Americanism, which will get sort of people's blood boiling.
00:19:19.480 But then the other problem, too, is that on the right, I think that there is such a strong narrative that like the Trudeau government, you know, is unpatriotic and hates this country.
00:19:30.260 And, you know, says things like, you know, what we're like the first post national nation and has no core identity and that kind of stuff, you know, which they do say rhetorically.
00:19:39.780 But on the other hand, they're also pushing this very heavy handed cultural nationalistic kind of agenda, which I think is a bit of cognitive dissonance for the right as well.
00:19:48.960 Like it's kind of hard and it is hard to square those two things.
00:19:52.080 And it is just complete hypocrisy on the part of the Trudeau government that it can say, on the one hand, Canada has no core identity.
00:19:58.740 But on the other hand, we need something like the CRTC to maintain our cultural integrity in the face of, you know, evil foreign corruption and so on and so forth. 1.00
00:20:06.320 So I kind of do think that like both sides just kind of need to open their eyes a little bit and kind of have a clear eyed understanding of what the status quo is and why that status quo purports to exist.
00:20:17.680 And whether or not any of us really sort of buy those arguments anymore, because I think it's true.
00:20:22.500 Like, I think that, you know, Canada is a big, diverse country.
00:20:26.400 And I think Canadians have are elaborate and diverse people.
00:20:30.640 And we've got a lot of distinct interests.
00:20:32.600 And we also have a very individualistic culture.
00:20:34.420 And I think that's the thing that's really important to emphasize is that we're all our own tastemakers.
00:20:39.800 We all have our own preferences in terms of what kind of culture we want to consume, what we are interested in,
00:20:46.480 whether that's cooking videos, pet videos, gaming videos, whatever.
00:20:50.460 We all have this.
00:20:51.640 We all have a right to our own tastes.
00:20:53.520 And we live in a remarkable time in which it's never been easier to curate an online entertainment cultural experience on your own terms.
00:21:01.120 And I think that the government really has to, you know, should face a much higher standard in justifying why that is bad.
00:21:09.820 You know, I would like to ask, like, you know, ask the Minister of Heritage, why is it bad that when I log on to YouTube, I get to see videos that I want to watch?
00:21:18.380 Why is my freedom of choice to consume the kind of online content that I want to watch?
00:21:22.860 Why is that a problem to be solved?
00:21:25.780 And I think that, you know, can you answer that question without sounding like Viktor Orban?
00:21:30.880 Can you answer that question without sounding like a terribly sort of regressive authoritarian sort of type of leader who thinks that, you know,
00:21:37.100 the cultural integrity of the country is sort of like under threat and needs to be sort of cured by a sort of wise, all-knowing paternalistic political class?
00:21:45.680 Like, is that really what the Trudeau government wants to go down in history as being?
00:21:49.640 Right. And I mean, I think I would hope not.
00:21:53.260 And I hope that that this is as a result, that this is perhaps an issue where the Trudeau government could be shamed a little bit more than it is.
00:22:00.820 Although it is difficult because I do think that, again, like a lot of conservatives don't really want to admit that this government is in many ways as nationalistic as it is,
00:22:09.100 because they're very invested in a sort of counter narrative that this government actually, you know, has no respect for the culture of the country at all.
00:22:16.260 Well, it's definitely hypocrisy on the end of liberal government, but certainly to your point,
00:22:22.300 if it was a conservative government that was proposing all these sort of nationalistic barriers and promoting certain pro-Canada,
00:22:32.280 pro-patriotic, pro-nationalistic measures, I'm sure the tone in the media and the critics would be calling it right wing and far right and all that kind of stuff.
00:22:41.880 So it's super, it's super interesting on that point. I want to ask a question about the sort of the power of these big tech companies,
00:22:48.860 because it's kind of interesting where, you know, you have this algorithm that nobody knows, right?
00:22:53.460 It's secret. We don't know what it is that when I go onto YouTube, a JJ McCullough video is the first thing to pop up.
00:22:59.140 You know, why is that? What is it about YouTube's studying of my habits of video watching that it knows that I want to watch the latest JJ video?
00:23:06.620 So you could say, is that power in the hands of tech companies who are secretive, who have their own political agendas, who are, you know, not Canadian at all?
00:23:16.420 None of the profits that come from the YouTube ads that I watched before watching your video go to anything.
00:23:23.620 I mean, I'm sure you get paid for your channel, but the major profits go to Google, which is based in San Francisco.
00:23:29.840 So you have these really powerful tech companies, and you don't necessarily know what's driving them, what's motivating them,
00:23:37.400 why some political discussion is suppressed and others is promoted.
00:23:41.720 We know that they meddle in the political process.
00:23:44.120 We know that, for instance, during the 2020 U.S. election, the Hunter Biden story was buried.
00:23:50.120 It was written off as disinformation.
00:23:52.140 You weren't allowed to share or discuss it throughout COVID.
00:23:54.900 We've seen a lot of issues with YouTube censoring and demonetizing and sort of disappearing channels that take critical positions when it comes to, you know, the efficacy of the vaccines and stuff like that.
00:24:08.540 So it's not like these tech companies are benevolent.
00:24:12.300 And you hear increasing calls in the U.S. for more government intervention, more, you know, making sure that free speech is protected.
00:24:19.680 So we're kind of having the opposite conversation that our American friends are having, that, you know, in the U.S., a lot of conservatives want YouTube and want Facebook and Twitter to be regulated to promote free speech.
00:24:31.400 Whereas in Canada, we have the prime minister's office threatening to take over the algorithms and conservatives are like screaming like, no, no, no, that's a terrible idea.
00:24:38.380 So I'm just wondering, how do you balance the power of these huge tech companies with the need to sort of protect everybody's basic rights to free speech and free information?
00:24:49.680 Yeah, I mean, it's I guess I sort of have a kind of somewhat old fashioned, stereotypically conservative view about this and which is just that these are private companies and private companies have a right to basically do what they want.
00:25:02.580 I mean, I agree that it is it can be very frustrating and, you know, there's no one that complains about these sorts of things more than YouTubers themselves, the unpredictability of the algorithm and, you know, frustrations, particularly like with smaller channels as well, like the difficulty in getting the video to be, you know, to be widely seen or to be monetized.
00:25:22.080 And sometimes, you know, videos get demonetized and it seems very opaque, the reasoning for why it is and people sort of go nuts about this.
00:25:28.520 And, you know, I think I can relate to those those those sorts of frustrations.
00:25:32.040 But at the same time, like I am pretty I am pretty, I suppose, rigid in my defense of private industry to have a right to sort of practice, you know, what they want to do on their own terms.
00:25:44.860 And if they if they if the consumer base gets irritated enough and if the creator base gets irritated enough, in theory, we could move on to some other platform.
00:25:52.720 And there are there are always sort of efforts in the background sort of percolating, you know, attempts to sort of create rival platforms.
00:25:58.800 But the reason why these rival platforms have not taken off is that because for all of the difficulties in dealing with YouTube, it is still the best user experience and the best creator experience out there.
00:26:07.660 It's not to say it always will be. But, you know, for the time being, I think it legitimately can make that argument.
00:26:13.500 But, you know, you do get at a good point, which is that at the very least, you know, in America, the argument is that, you know, that these platforms should be even freer, that they should err more on the side of of of kind of a user centric, creator centric sort of experience.
00:26:29.220 Whereas in Canada, the understanding is that, like, you know, that these things should exist on the terms of the of the government for explicitly content driven agendas.
00:26:39.340 Right. So the government of Canada feels it has a right to dictate the content more than like very specifically the type of content that they believe the viewers should be consuming.
00:26:49.140 Whereas in the sort of the American discourse, it's like, you know, YouTube shouldn't have any regulation over content at all, you know, which in my my opinion, that's going a little bit far.
00:26:59.600 But basically that we should just sort of like trust the audience to curate their own experience and, you know, just kind of like let the chips fall where they may there.
00:27:06.680 I mean, it does it does get to another sort of effort is or another kind of reality in the difference between Canada and the U.S. as well, is that Canada really tries.
00:27:15.480 I think the Canadian government really wants to sort of like co-opt large influential institutions and make them cooperate with the state as actively as possible.
00:27:25.540 Right. So like you kind of have this kind of society where the line between government and private entity becomes blurred when that private entity becomes big enough.
00:27:35.520 And I think that's already, you know, what you see with the mainstream press in this country, which is now so regulated and so subsidized that, you know, it can be a little bit difficult to tell where the CRTC ends and, you know, it begins.
00:27:48.420 Right. And I think that that seems to be the goal of this regulatory bill over YouTube is to make YouTube into a partner, as they would call it, like a partner with the federal government that doesn't really make any substantial decisions without sort of consulting with their sort of masters in Ottawa and just having this very creating a new consensus.
00:28:07.260 You know, we always talk about the Laurentian consensus. And I guess this is a sort of an effort to sort of bring, you know, the big tech companies into that consensus.
00:28:14.580 And I think people are right to be worried about that.
00:28:17.340 I get your point that they're private companies and they can run in any way they want, but it seems to me that YouTube, maybe to a lesser extent, although I know they still do de-platform people and channels disappear, comments disappear, even, you know, disabling the dislike sign so that the sort of democratic feedback is unavailable.
00:28:37.100 But so many of these tech companies, JJ, they just take unbelievable steps in curbing free speech.
00:28:42.520 And it's not uniform. It's not it's not based on clearly set rules.
00:28:47.080 I hear a lot of people on the right say, you know, they kind of shrug and they say, oh, well, you know, the First Amendment in the United States is only applicable to governments.
00:28:54.700 It's not applicable to tech companies. I've also had an interesting argument about the fact that people like like Twitter is a place where we have most of our political discourse.
00:29:03.640 It's a place where most of the political conversation speech in both Canada and the U.S. happens.
00:29:09.880 And so to remove somebody to say you only have access to this public square, you no longer have access to the conversation on politics in this country and YouTube as well.
00:29:19.280 You know, losing your ability to have your free speech just because you don't agree with the latest consensus on vaccines or the latest consensus on whatever the popular issue of the day is leaving this power to companies to determine.
00:29:32.340 And it's not only a freedom of speech issue. It's also freedom of association.
00:29:36.440 You have the right to say what you want and to associate with whom you want.
00:29:41.000 And the reaction to just be to displatform people and sort of institutionalize, cancel culture. 0.59
00:29:47.600 I don't see this as a healthy environment for an underpinning of free speech and a healthy discourse in society.
00:29:56.600 I know this is beyond the realm of just Bill C-11 and C-18 here.
00:30:03.320 But do you think there is a role for government in ensuring free speech and freedom of association online?
00:30:10.460 I mean, I don't know. It's just I've never I mean, like in theory, like you can say these sorts of things.
00:30:17.300 And I like, you know, I'll sort of shrug and be like, yeah, that sounds good.
00:30:20.540 Like, obviously, more freedom of speech is better than less freedom of speech.
00:30:23.960 It's just I kind of wonder how that would manifest in practice as a matter of public policy.
00:30:29.840 Right. And whether or not a government that kind of has that sort of power to determine what YouTube has to allow could then in turn abuse that power in basically similar ways to what the government of this country wants to do.
00:30:43.900 Right. Sort of like once you sort of say on some level that, you know, that YouTube or whatever other platform has an obligation in practice to platform channel X, Y, Z or, you know, character X, Y or Z.
00:30:58.540 You know, how else will those powers be used when there's a government in power that perhaps we're less inclined to support?
00:31:04.760 I don't know. Like I'm I suppose it would really I feel like right now this matter exists mostly as a as a as a bit of conservative rhetoric.
00:31:18.100 Right. Like right now, I feel like there's a kind of like obviously there's a sort of populist upswell against the power of the big tech companies.
00:31:24.880 And I agree the power of the big tech companies can be can be frightening and does feel like quite unprecedented, like nothing else we've ever really experienced.
00:31:31.880 And I think you're you're not wrong when you sort of say, like when people are silenced on Twitter or, you know, YouTube, it can be remarkable, like how quickly they just sort of like disappear as a person from the public consciousness and public imagination.
00:31:43.560 But again, like I just don't really know what the legislative fix to that would look like and whether or not the cure would be, you know, better than the disease as opposed to being worse than it.
00:31:53.440 And I, you know, because actually this is one of the things that is in Bill C-11, is that the government can obligate the YouTube or any other platform to carry a channel, regardless of if it violates YouTube's own internal policies.
00:32:08.040 So, you know, for example, you know, RT was just recently banned.
00:32:12.800 Right. Like in theory, the government of Canada could obligate YouTube that they couldn't do that, that they have to pass.
00:32:19.260 They have to keep that channel in place, even if it violates YouTube's own internal guidelines, because they would sort of say that YouTube's YouTube's guidelines take a sort of second tier to government's priorities.
00:32:29.440 Right. And so I don't know, like this to me, this kind of meddling in a private business's ability to make money on their own terms and to do what they view as being right for their consumer base.
00:32:40.800 Maybe that that is not as persuasive an argument as it as it used to be in an era where we have much more sort of monopolistic power in the tech community.
00:32:49.000 And that sort of monopolistic power is being used to regulate more of the realms of sort of public discourse that is essential in any democracy.
00:32:56.200 But I just kind of feel like until I see a clear legislative agenda, as opposed to just rhetoric that I can judge, I'm inclined to sort of still side with the sovereignty of free enterprise.
00:33:08.880 It was certainly and I don't think I would trust the true government to draft any kind of legislation that I would feel comfortable with, as is the case with these ones.
00:33:16.560 Well, really interesting conversation, JJ.
00:33:18.240 We appreciate your insights and all of your very entertaining content over on your own YouTube channel.
00:33:23.200 So thank you so much for joining us.
00:33:24.980 Thanks for having me.
00:33:26.200 Hey, that's JJ McCullough.
00:33:27.800 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.