Peter Menzies: ‘Online Harms’ Bill Is Far More Dangerous for Democracy Than So-Called ’Misinformation’

Minister of Canadian Heritage Pablo Rodriguez rises during question period in the House of Commons in Ottawa on Oct. 20, 2022. The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick

Commentary

Ever go on the internet and have your feelings hurt? Ever run into the cold, hard facts of life online and want to curl up in the fetal position, suck your thumb, and whimper?

Well then, Canada might just be the country for you because Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez is getting ready to introduce legislation (and probably a whole new regulator) to protect you from the brutalities of social media interaction through his “online harms” bill.

Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of things about the internet that need to be regulated. Those include privacy protection, data collection, swarming, data storage and trafficking, algorithm manipulation, tracking, abuse of market power, and other such matters. Some of those will hopefully be discussed at events such as the “How to Regulate the Internet” forum being held next week at the University of British Columbia.

But I fear those important matters will continue to be ignored by Rodriguez (why the head of a cultural department is Canada’s de facto Minister of the Internet remains a conundrum for the ages). He seems obsessed only with controlling what you can say and how you can say it. Like his boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and his cabinet colleagues, Rodriguez talks incessantly about “misinformation” and “disinformation” even while liberally fertilizing public discourse with the same.

A lot of media people share his instincts. CBC President Catherine Tait, for instance, recently blamed social media for declining levels of trust in her organization’s journalism.

The solution, from Tait’s point of view, is for her people to continue doing exactly what they have been doing while hoping the government will handle those who think the CBC is just not good enough (and share that sentiment online). It just doesn’t seem to cross her mind that substituting reportage with ideological evangelism isn’t working.

For sure, there is a lot of ridiculously misinformed nonsense online. But in my mind the greatest dangers to democracy aren’t the fairly easily recognizable ramblings of tinfoil hatters: it’s the establishment crowd that insists Russian bots on Facebook won the presidency for Donald Trump, the Freedom Convoy was a heavily armed and seditious white supremacy coup attempt, and masks should still be mandatory.

In other words, the lies that stem from the powerful and influential are a lot more dangerous than the mistruths shouted from the fringes.

And while widespread belief in things that just aren’t true is indeed a social order hazard, the bigger threat will always come from those who—in the name of protecting us from harm—would suppress our freedom of speech.

We haven’t seen Rodriguez’s handiwork yet, but the results of his department’s recent consultations are worrisome. Apparently dissatisfied that their 2021 consultations resulted in a lot of skepticism and concerns about the preservation of civil liberties, Heritage staff went back into the field last year to gather more, ahem, controlled input.

So while the 2021 consultations resulted in this:

“Respondents identified a number of overarching concerns including concerns related to the freedom of expression, privacy rights, the impact of the proposal on certain marginalized groups, and compliance with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms more generally.”

Last year’s roundtables—now here’s a surprise—were able to get this:

“There was overall agreement and consensus over the need for government action in addressing online safety. Participants recognized that the harms were mostly occurring on social media platforms, where Canadians are the most connected. Most participants acknowledged the need for future legislation to entail strong enforcement measures to change how online services operate and hold them accountable for the harms occurring on their platforms.”

The structure of the forums is instructive. A cursory glance indicates there were a few libraries and groups like OpenMedia that have been known to defend freedom of speech and expression, but mostly it appeared to be groups likely to be aligned with the government’s desires. You can find the list here and decide for yourself.

Last year, seeing where the government was going with this, Konrad von Finckenstein and I authored a Macdonald-Laurier institute policy paper. One of its primary objectives was to ensure that social media companies were consistently applying their standards and not abusing their positions of power by preferring one political perspective over another or otherwise distorting reality.

As we have seen through Elon Musk’s Twitter Files revelations via Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and others, it isn’t what we see online that is necessarily the greatest threat to democracy: it’s censorship imposed by large corporate, political, and institutional interests that poses the greatest menace.

Canada seems to disagree. All signs indicate it will be going well beyond suppressing already illegal and blocked material like child pornography and terrorism to ban content that makes people feel unsafe or otherwise causes offence and hurt feelings.

Trouble is, the one thing you can’t speak without causing offence is the truth. A lot of people can’t handle it.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.