The experts appointed by the Trudeau government to define the limits of its plan to fight online hate agree that action must be taken against disinformation on the Internet, but disagree on how to do so. to arrive at.
Disinformation can incite hatred and violence, undermine democracy, reduce trust between citizens and threaten national security, decides the group of twelve experts set up this spring to advise Ottawa on the design of a law promised to counter harmful content online.
” [Les experts] also expressed extreme caution about defining disinformation in legislation for a number of reasons, including that it would put the government in a position to tell right from wrong, which it simply cannot not do”, however, qualifies the summary of their meetings published on Friday.
For example, it is suggested to tackle the “harmful effects of misinformation or [à] certain behaviors associated with misinformation”, such as the manipulation of social networks by robot-trolls.
We can read there that the experts did not agree among themselves on the services which should be regulated by law, either to be limited to the large platforms or to include all services up to web hosting. Some have suggested including even private communications, to limit the spread of harmful content to children, for example.
Online Hate Act Take Two
The previous version of Ottawa’s plan to regulate online hate was rejected by some members of the expert panel. Last year, Minister Steven Guilbeault, then responsible for Canadian Heritage, presented his plan to force platforms to remove all illegal content within 24 hours, in five categories: hate speech, sexual exploitation of children, non-consensual sharing of intimate images, incitement to violence and terrorist content. There was no question then of prohibiting misinformation.
A bill, C-36, was introduced in Parliament on its last sitting day before the summer of 2021. It died on the order paper when the general election was called.
Minister Guilbeault’s successor, Pablo Rodriguez, was to present such a bill in the first 100 days of his mandate, i.e. at the beginning of 2022, to complete his triptych of laws already including the reform of the Broadcasting Act. and a law on revenue sharing between platforms and media.
Mr. Rodriguez quickly abandoned the planned timeline to return to the drawing board. He has assembled a group of experts to help him find another approach to limiting harmful content online.
They had to take into account the “fundamental concerns” of this project, such as issues of freedom of expression, the right to privacy, “the impact of the proposal on certain marginalized groups” and respect for the Canadian Charter of rights and freedoms more generally.
” [Certains] Experts have considered the five categories to be deeply problematic, arguing that they are seen to perpetuate the biases present in the corresponding Criminal Code provisions. For example, they expressed that the definition of terrorism is problematic, as it deals almost exclusively with Islamic terror and omits other forms of terrorism,” reads the summary of the deliberations.
Planned tour
The government will ultimately have to determine whether or not its future law will be able to force the removal of content from websites, an aspect that has not achieved consensus among experts. The only exception is child sexual abuse images, which everyone agrees should be eliminated.
Some experts believe it is better to “err on the side of caution” and risk having more content removed than strictly necessary, while others believe that such a requirement would risk disproportionately affecting marginalized groups. Forcing platforms to “manage their risks” would provide a wider range of options than removing content. The word “censorship” is not used anywhere in the report.
Pablo Rodriguez begins next week round tables with groups of citizens to decide on the details still pending. He will first travel to the Atlantic regions, and is expected to visit Quebec later this month.