Ottawa to create regulator to hold platforms accountable for harmful content | Hacker News Reader

Ottawa to create regulator to hold platforms accountable for harmful content

cbc.ca

68 pointssegasaturn127 comments

- Who decides what constitutes "harmful"? Some things will be able to be agreed upon by man, but some won't.

- So every platform needs serious moderation teams? I absolutely believe that major platforms should, but what if I have a blog and someone doxxes someone in the comments? Am I responsible now? So we're going to crush independent sites because they can't afford moderation from serious spam?

I don't know, this is a tricky subject but I can't see this working well.

>> Who decides what constitutes "harmful"?

Government. The same people who set speed limits, tell pilots they cannot drink while flying and decide which drugs are too dangerous to sell in vending machines. Don't like it? Vote in someone different.

In Canada, that will mean a committee which will take public and industry input, talk to victims and consult with law enforcement. They will set some rules, along with a complaints and appeals process probably headed by an ombudsman of sorts. If Canadians don't like it, they will either tell their government to change things or elect a new one that will. It is almost like someone had designed a system so that a few people could represent the will of the population without everyone having to break out the pitchforks.

So you agree with the widespread censorship in China, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, etc...?

Despite what Fox News says, Canada is not the Soviet Union. it is a functional liberal democracy full of checks and balances with a government subject to regular elections.

Actually Canada doesn't have that many checks and balances. Yes we have regular elections (not fixed dates tho). Currently we have a minority government acting like a majority government and in the Canadian system a majority government is as close to a dictatorship as a democracy allows for, in that the government is relied on to investigate itself, which of course yields nothing. There are no checks and balances except an election a few times a decade.

...What about the Senate?? It regularly rejects bills and sends them back.

My impression is the Senate doesn't actually regularly reject bills. They have, but its few and far between. The Senate also isn't really independent as they're appointed by party in power and vote in groups whipped by their leaders. Even recent development under Trudeau who "released" all liberal senators from being Liberal Senators such that now they sit as "independent" senators, but they all still vote in a one big block that votes exactly the same way as the liberal senator group, they just changed names. There are, however, a couple more splinter groups with specialized interests in the senate because of the shuffle, which is good to see, but by and large the Senate is very ineffective at being a check and balance. Mostly it's a rubber stamp process unless it's particularly egregious then it's a wrist slap asking for minor changes. Hence decades of debate on reforming or even abolishing the senate, which has been a mainstream debate for a long time and still ongoing.

https://lop.parl.ca/sites/ParlInfo/default/en_CA/legislation...

Here's the data. Seems like they're doing a fine job to me.

The data backs up what I was saying. Very few bills are rejected by the senate. Most of what you are seeing are bills that died in place because parliament was either prorogued by the liberal government or an election was called resulting in the dissolution of parliament, not because the Senate actually rejected those bills.

The role of the senate in Canada is not to pass or reject bills. Their role is to make sure the bills are written coherently and accord with previous legislation. Think of them more like copy editors.

I think you're right that's how the senate currently functions, but it was originally intended to be the chamber of "sober second thought", to quote John A MacDonald. I think the senate should have a purpose far greater than simply being copy editors

> functional liberal democracy full of checks and balances with a government subject to regular elections

It's more nuanced than that.

The current system can easily result in surprisingly disproportionate representation in the House of Commons.

Look at the results of the most recent federal election, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Canadian_federal_election

A party that received 32.62% of the popular vote got 160 seats in the House of Commons, while another party that received 33.74% of the vote got only 119 seats.

A party that received only 7.64% of the votes got 32 seats, while another party that received 17.82% of the vote got only 25 seats.

A party that received 2.33% of the votes got 2 seats, while another party that received 4.94% of the vote got no seats.

With a votes-to-seats situation like that, there are a lot of Canadians who don't have proper representation in the House of Commons, or in some cases, effectively none at all.

It's no surprise that the voter turnout wasn't even 63%; many Canadians are completely disillusioned with how the current system works, and don't feel that any of the parties can offer them meaningful representation.

Canada's political system does exhibit some democratic traits, but there are still some pretty serious and fundamental flaws with the current approach that can't be ignored, either.

Well to be fair; China, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany all had governments that were not as restrictive(or restrictive in different ways) before those factions came into power.

Perhaps the current government of Canada feels that it is impossible for a more repressive party to come into power. I think that I heard the same thing about Trump before he was elected(as in no way could the USA elect someone that crazy).... I hope that when Canada does get an extremist, they are not the type to kill people in the streets.

Canada has already had some insanely regressive governments in the past and there was little in the way to stop the at the time. Religious, Christian, authoritarians were usually behind the oppression too.

One not often talk about example is unmarried pregnant women were forced to give up their babies for "morality" reasons. "Some 600,000 Canadian babies were labelled “illegitimate” between 1945 and 1971, and it is estimated that between 300,000 and 450,000 babies were given up for forced adoption during this period."*

Heck, if you were the wrong kind of Christian, you could be persecuted. Jehovah's Witnesses were banned during WW2 and afterwards, in Québec, distributing their literature was an offence because it attacked the Catholic Church.

* https://globalnews.ca/news/4342569/forced-adoption-unmarried...

The difference are that all of those are pre-determined, so you know what violates the rule. Holding platforms accountable for "harmful" content is much more subjective and case-by-case than a speed limit, drinking and driving and ingredient rules.

As opposed to all the other content rules out there? The limits on harmful pornography? Hate speech? Violence? Animal cruelty? Western governments already regulate/censor lots of content subject to interpretation. Balling those together under the banner of "harmful" for the purposes of regulating online platforms doesn't seem much of a stretch.

The implementation of those other regulations is a reason to be against this. Platforms are usually very heavy-handed with moderation of those. Look at how people are on their tiptoes on YouTube and TikTok. Content creators straight up refuse to use common words because it might trigger an algorithm. And that isn't even due to government regulation.

Hate speech, violence, and animal cruelty related internet content isn’t highly restricted though. CP is basically the only exception I think applies here. For the most part, viewing and putting heinous things online is perfectly legal.

What you are suggesting is only plausible under a system where every official, institution, and policy can be voted on, and with said entities having no significant sway over each other. That's not how Canada or America works, and perhaps no government in existence.

> It is almost like someone had designed a system so that a few people could represent the will of the population without everyone having to break out the pitchforks.

That hardly works in practice. Why would it? Government officials are not afraid of minuscule uprisings. The ability to actually rebel is not present in the average western human being today.

We absolutely have the tech to implement direct democracy in an efficient and effective manner. The fact that we haven't is pure evidence that Democracy (tm) doesn't actually do what it says on the label.

Democracy will ensure that democracy remains as the governing method.

Also, try building a bridge between two cities across from each other with direct democracy.

So I kind of know what you're getting at - and it's true that "everyone votes on everything" isn't feasible if that's all that you do. Here's one way it could work:

- everyone gets one vote on all the things

- all the things are complicated, so in order to streamline things, you can grant voting power to someone else. Let's call this a representative in this context. (I know this sounds a lot like what we have right now, but bear with me)

- anyone is able to choose their representative at any time. Representation is immediately revocable and unconstrained by parties, primaries, timing, or other concerns. You need only be a citizen and consent to being a rep to be a rep.

- representatives are paid based on the number of people they represent, let's say a dollar a head. This could scale by some factor in relation to how local a rep we're talking about.

- you can keep up with the voting of your chosen rep on the Democracy App (tm).

- If a vote is on something you particularly care about / have deep knowledge of, you can take the vote back and use it directly just for that vote, keeping your rep for all the other boring stuff

- When your rep casts a vote, there is a grace period (let's say a week for chuckles) wherein you can choose to revoke that vote and recast it, and additionally choose a new rep if the vote cast is particularly egregious to you.

This is a trivial system to set up from a technical standpoint, and it accomplishes the most important thing our current system does not - it forces representatives to care about the concerns of the people they nominally represent. It gets past superdelegates, party politics, special interest groups, and campaign finance breezily and ensures a government that's actually by and for the people.

Canadians are able to throw their governments out of office when they don't like their policies. Having 3 parties and minorities from time to time results in policies promoted by the NDP (the third party) benefiting Canadians getting passed from time to time (like public health care, and now programs like the national pharma care, dental care and day care programs). The dynamic is rather different than the gerrymandered mess south of the border where the options seem to be perpetually tweedle dum and tweedle dumber.

Generally there is a flip every 2-3 terms between the liberals and conservatives. It is also common for Ontario and the federal government to have opposing parties. If the conservatives win the federal election next year expect Ontario to elect a liberal government next.

In Canada a political appointee of the left will take the position. It will be used to whitewash opinions in favour of government positions and try to extract money from US companies.

Canadians won't like it but the media will push it so far as no one will be allowed to be elected without supporting it. More laws further limiting criticizing will be passed where the punishment is longer than murder.

The pitchforks are coming.

In America we tend to say open access to information is preferable to any meaningful government interference to avoid censorship. Your argument that “government does things” isn’t particularly interesting, since you aren’t making an argument they should do this particular thing.

There are differences in rules for speed and speech limits, even if it is just a few characters. To equate this here seem disingenuous and stupid. There is also no need to explain government organization as if that would justify any government action or just bad legislation.

The current government in Canada is the lowest in the polls they've been since they were almost relegated to 3rd-party status in the 2015 election. This move is nothing more than a cynical attempt to prevent criticism (they're notoriously image-conscious and thin-skinned) and control the narrative.

It's also interesting how they have moved on from "hateful" to now "harmful". That's as broad and vague as they come.

I hate the modern day we live in where every single person is obsessed with making sure people who think differently than they do should be silenced. This is not limited to one group, this is pervasive throughout all discourse everywhere, and it’s getting so exhausting.

It's for those who know that they don't have a valid argument to make in the marketplace of ideas, and so they try to censor anyone who dares to have an opposing viewpoint and label them as "harmful" or "spreading misinformation."

On the other hand, if censorship is a bad idea, why is it winning in the marketplace of ideas? It kinda seems like free speech is losing, so why keep rooting for a failing idea? The rational answer is to look a step forward and update your position to match the winner, as it's empirically winning.

Because its sidestepping this market and using force instead of argumentation.

It's realpolitik. If you think it's worth fight for then why choose a losing battleground?

"I think the people I disagree with should limit themselves to this arena," is a guaranteed way of losing. It's like saying, "I think we should all line up and fight in a big field," when your opponents bring in the guns and artillery you say, "Yes, you overpowered us and won, but you did it in the wrong way so we didn't actually lose."

Again, it seems that free speech is losing in the marketplace of ideas, why wouldn't that make you change your mind? Holding onto a losing idea is exactly how the marketplace of ideas is not supposed to work.

Nothing you say really makes any sense when you sit down and think about it.

People fight for a position because they believe in it.

It's like asking someone 'why don't you just support the football team that's most likely to win'

People don't ask that question because they know it's a stupid question, yet here we are...

The point of the marketplace metaphor is that good ideas will outcompete bad ideas. That's only possible if people are willing to change their minds.

How do you think the marketplace of ideas works if people don't do that?

Also, it's a perfectly valid option to support a team that you think is going to win. Why would someone put themselves through losing? I think that's the position that requires more justification.

> The point of the marketplace metaphor

The marketplace metaphor implies there are buyers and sellers. The sellers are the ones fighting to make their case for the ideas they are 'selling.' The 'buyers' are the audience, those as yet undecided. Once a buyer has 'bought' an idea he either becomes a seller or leaves the market.

Generally the sellers aren't the ones changing their mind - you only care enough to 'sell' an idea if you believe in it strongly.

The metaphor involves people entering the market undecided and being convinced of one idea or another. Generally people who've already made up their mind don't enter the market - unless they're motivated enough to become sellers.

That's how the metaphor works.

As to your 2nd - what's the point here? Both of us know why people support the football teams they support. What's the dumb act about?

Sorry, but being unable or unwilling to change your mind is act of bad faith. Thanks for your time.

Testosterone is positively correlated with openness to differing opinions and average testosterone levels have dropped by one standard deviation from 2000 to 2017.

T is also correlated to parochial altruism, so I don't think it's as clear cut as your argument suggests.

It is because what you view as normal is backwards.

Free speech is the far from equilibrium state. The normal state is that when you talk shit about the rulers, the rulers put you in a cage.

We are just returning to equilibrium.

The marketplace of ideas is obviously a nonsense concept if you are assuming the best ideas have the most value. That is so obviously not true.

"Binary crisis".

How ironic that most of these people identify as “liberals”

Grass is greener and so forth but as a Canadian I find our current government paternalistic, pandering, reactive, and stifling. Not every problem should be solved by the sledgehammer of our public service, regulation, and bureaucracy, all of which are highly inefficient and wasteful. It's tax season - I pay nearly half my wages to the government in income tax - all so they can redistribute it to those who they deem worthy and unworthy (similar how to they might deem some content harmful and other content unharmful). Let me make my own decisions!

Even the opposition party is for this nonsense.

From what I can tell, the opposition party is paradoxically for the also questionable proposal to hold porn sites accountable for minors accessing them, but not the Online Harms one.

The leader of the opposition party stated yesterday that they are against id for porn:

https://twitter.com/Golden_Pup/status/1762178506102858157

At least seems to be listening to criticism.

That was a surprisingly clear walk back.

To their credit, Canadian regulators have in the past gotten stuff done in this area. Back in 2010 Canada was instrumental in getting Facebook to implement basic privacy protections. More often than not, the big online platforms internally know that regulation has to happen. Whichever country first comes up with a standard for "reasonable" in an area tends to see that standard mirrored by other countries struggling with the same issue. The online platforms would love to say that they are already in compliance with the Canadian standard when they inevitably have to negotiate new standards for the US and Europe.

That sounds like a very bad idea. Why does it need to be implemented when there are already existing mechanisms in place to hold criminals accountable for their actions?

Because a whole generation doesn't care about their financial well-being, affording kids, retirement, or any kind of future plans. They are happy, as long as they have a petty emotion-driven control over what others will be allowed to say or think. And the government is happy to deliver...

While this is true. It's also true that all above and manufacture and conditioned for awhile.

I'm surprised you're being downvoted when almost all the lack of infrastructure for the future of Canadian youth doesn't just hint at what you're expressing, but instead screams it. Almost all politicians in Canada are landlords, multiple property holders, and have decided that what's best for Canada is increasing immigration, where young-born Canadians are having their wages suppressed because of it. Additionally, they are locked into living with their parents because rent has skyrocketed to absurd levels for just a small studio apartment. All for the benefit of the existing established boomer generation.

I'm confused, are you arguing the constraints on their finances and upward mobility due to everything outside their control hints that their circumstances are due to their own vacuity (or whatever parent was on about)?

I'd argue it's not worth trying to acquire the things boomers, and subsequently gen-xers and older millennials sought, but it's worth finding a way to secure some other kind of financial security in whatever way that's feasible.

It's not worth listening to politicians of any sort who say they'll be able to bring that down to earth in the next 5 years.

> It's not clear whether the regulator will have power only over online platforms hosted in Canada or over all websites accessible by Canadians.

Canada is irrelevant, it cannot enforce anything beyond its borders. This regulation will be used as a pretext later to create a digital identity and violate users’ privacy even more. The children’s safety argument is the responsibility of their parents/guardians, not the government. If the government really cares about children, it should start by tackling the drug problem.

Or the homelessness problem. Or the food bank queues problem.

These are much more serious and more pressing threats to child welfare in Canada than PornHub is.

Unfortunately, solutions to these problems don’t require implementing digital ID for Canadians, so these are non-starters.

You know governments work on multiple things simultaneously? They announce new measures to combat the housing problems about once a week. This week it was giving BC $2B to build new homes. Unfortunately it takes years for measures like that to move the needle.

> You know governments work on multiple things simultaneously?

If only someone told them that 8 years ago, maybe they could have moved the needle by now ;) woops

For the last 40 or so years Canadian governments have been trying to have their cake and eat it too. Home prices going up was a good thing, because home owners were far more reliable voters then renters. So we saw lots of programs like the RRSP first time home buyer program, which made it easier for new buyers to buy and by increasing demand, made prices go up.

Remember that people thought the 2008 crash in the States was caused by too many houses. Voters and governments concentrate on preventing the last crisis from happening again. The next crisis is a lot harder to focus on until it actually happens.

> home owners were far more reliable voters then renters

As far as I can tell, while this may be the assumption that politicians have been using, it doesn't seem necessarily accurate beyond a correlation with age and wealth. It may or may not be, but I'm not aware of public data that reliably makes such a direct association in Canada, and I wonder if the numbers would look similar to likelihood of having developed heart disease.

But I agree with the rest of the sentiment

THANK OF THE CHILLLLDORNS

The thin end of the wedge. The epistemic supply-chain needs grooming to achieve information purity.

If you support this idiocy, let me assure you that eventually it will be used against you when the Wrong sort of people are in power.

Not all speech in Canada is protected, and never has been. Even in the US, there are (albeit far more narrow) carve-outs for "harmful" speech (best not yell "fire" in a movie theatre or "bomb" in an airport).

Nobody has been or ever will be jailed for talking about the FLQ crisis and internet searches for pictures of tanks on Canadian streets aren't banned from search engines, but I guess people can go off on their China and USSR comparisons.

The problem of holding platforms accountable for enforcing this is a chilling effect: speech that wouldn't be restricted even by the government gets taken down by the platforms as a proactive measure, to err on staying on the right side of the law. This is especially true of speech with nuance. (See GPT & Gemini's heavy-handed self-censorship as an example).

Nobody will be jailed, their posts will just be hidden or removed for non-compliance with the restrictive terms of the private platform.

It's a great reason to leave these platforms for more intentional ones with moderation teams you trust.

Community run Mastodon and Bluesky servers are a dime a dozen. Forums are seeing a bit of a resurgence.

If this makes the big corpo social networks less fun and cool to be on, then bring it on!

It is, and it would be nice if it worked out that way, but the dynamics of two-sided markets are really sticky. You need more than a strong incentive, because your audience needs to come along too. And even federated platforms might find they don't want to hold the hot potato of legal accountability, and block Canadian IPs rather than try to ensure their moderation meets the Canadian government's standards.

And that's why you have community instances that are geographically tied. That's already happening (I mod at CoSocial.ca for instance).

You're right about networks being sticky, but Fedi is flourishing despite it, and if regulation further accelerates enshitification, I've no doubt we'll have a viable alternative to jump to.

I do hope so! (Just as I'd hoped that the government's earlier blunderous and heavy-handed fines for news links from Google and Facebook might move Canadians to looking into other sites like DDG, but it didn't seem like that really happened).

What would CoSocial.ca do about the risk of being held legally accountable for "harmful" content on your platform? The incentive to censor such content with a broad brush may be, if anything, stronger for you than for big companies like Facebook which have legal teams. Some content (like hate speech) might be pretty obvious, but there might also be reasonable content that your platform could still risk a legal battle over. What if -- say, it's early 2020 -- and someone writes a post arguing that Health Canada's official advice about masks is incorrect? Now it's your responsibility to decide if the government is going to deem that post "harmful".

> but there might also be reasonable content that your platform could still risk a legal battle over

Yah that's totally fair, and like Michael Geist was quoted in the article as saying, the devil is in the details of this bill. I don't know what the letter of the law is here.

> What if -- say, it's early 2020 -- and someone writes a post arguing that Health Canada's official advice about masks is incorrect?

I understand where you are coming from, but I am personally (can't speak for the team) not worried about the legal liability here. If the law simply requires that platforms enforce the current letter of the law re: speech, then we will be just fine. I'll concede again that the devil is in the details of the legislation. If it's a bad law, bad things will happen.

Furthermore, there's usually carve outs for not-huge organisations (this is true of the link tax as well).

FWIW, we've already deleted or limited posts that have been COVID-denialism related when they are disruptive and/or harmful.

(that's why I chose a specific example of when Health Canada was in the wrong, and they later turned around and admitted masks do protect people, which was already clear to many people early on).

Carve-outs for small organizations would be great here, though!

> carve-outs for "harmful" speech (best not yell "fire" in a movie theatre or "bomb" in an airport)

Just a reminder that the US Constitution does not explicitly have a carve-out. This argument originated from a Supreme Court justice who wanted to establish a legal basis for censoring anti-war speech. The slippery slope does not even need to be speculated about; it was purposefully baked into the "harmful" speech classification from the beginning.

The Ministry of Truth.

A bit hyperbolic, but the West really has fallen.

Absolute freedom of speech is solely an American tradition. Speech regulation has always been the norm in the west.

That's what Russian Government says all the time. According to them, speech is free in Russia, they just have some reasonable limitations.

Canada in fact has quite deep restrictions on speech:

https://ccla.org/our-work/fundamental-freedoms/freedom-of-ex...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_expression_in_Canad...

It's one thing I think we do particularly poorly compared to our friends down South. The Americans' absolute freedom of speech is... quite freeing.

> an American tradition

So also is silencing speech it doesn't like. Easy examples like the book banning taking place in states like florida and the ag-gag laws.

Just curious because I've heard the 'book banning in Florida' ad nauseum. I've got a Miami server I can proxy through. Can you send me an Amazon link of a book I can buy in Texas but cannot buy in Florida? I'd like to test this out.

"Book Banning" is always to be taken with a grain of salt. What typically happens is that a school library is not permitted to have copies of books considered inappropriate for children of a certain age.

Ok, try going to this florida school library and check out an encyclopedia or Anne Frank's diary. You can't because they were banned by a government law.

You may counter with, this isn't a book ban because you can still buy it on amazon and that the government is supposed to moderate content in schools. But when 'moderation' becomes this absurdly broad, its a ban.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/11/florida-scho...

Looking at the press release it appears to me that this is a form of 'Malicious Compliance' it only makes sense in that context. If you are an administrator or librarian and disagree with the law, you would want to 'ban' the most absurd list of books. You do this for two reasons: 1. So they can print the headline in the article you linked 2. So that when the case challenging this law inevitably goes to trial the lawyers can cite the absurd examples on your 'banned book' list.

It often times helps to think critically about who benefits from an action when you see something as blatantly ridiculous as a dictionary being 'banned'.

Ironically I think this is the point. The government deliberately made the law very general so they could cast a broad net and remove all of the bad-think books through the magic of selected enforcement. The malicious compliance was used to highlight this and the difference between 'protecting the children' and the policing of thoughts and ideas (always the root of censorship).

Trust, I don't think limiting books available to people is a good thing. However, I understand the intent of the law even if it was written terribly. I don't think government should dictate sexuality to children. However, in this instance the law is terrible.

I'm at the middle school library you mentioned, and it's even worse than you made it sound. They aren't letting me check out ANY books at all; something about "not being a student here"? They said I could try the public library, which is open to everyone and not controlled by the school district.

Freedom of speech is not the norm in most countries and not the norm historically. It does strongly correlates with democracies in contrast with feudal or monarchic societies where the elites needed to suppress diverging voices.

I am not from the US, but the US is just plainly more advanced here. Maybe it is even a reason why it is the most successful nation.

Nobody should be proud about the intention to curb freedom of speech because of "hate speech" or comments on the internet. It is just majorly short sighted.

Freedom of speech works as a mechanism to maintain decentralized power. If there are multiple sources of power interested in preserving their own shares of power, they end up agreeing on fair mechanisms of resolving conflicts. Like arguing your case in a court vs. sending an assassin, or discussing different viewpoints in a civilized manner rather than waiting than the party-chosen one goes into the extreme, and evokes an equally extreme counteraction.

Power in the West has been centralizing for decades now. Information society and low interest rates have been catalyzing this even more. It is inevitable than hard-fought-for freedoms will fall, followed by an economic collapse, splintering, and a slow crystallization of new sources of power over the courses of centuries. Empires fall. History repeats. Humans are humans...

What I didn't see mentioned in this article is what "harm" means in this context. My pessimistic view is that the govt will define harm as they see fit.

Harmful speech has been fought and settled over a long period of time in Canada, and there is a lot of case law around in it, it's governed by Canada's criminal code.

https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/section-319.ht...

It's expected the new bill will be based on this, we won't really know the implications till case law is settled.

Hate speech has a lot of case law around it.

The fact they're inventing a new term "harmful speech" makes me think they're trying to avoid that case law.

It does sound like a weasel word, like "assault weapon".

His plan to me doesn't read as narrowly focused on hate speech.

Unfortunately this is extremely dangerous as this opens the door to mis-labeling attacks by politicians pushing agendas and looking to censor talk against them.

Sounds to me like Trudeau is promising somebody who will vaguely do something because the opposition politicians are all pushing a bill to do mandatory identification for porn sites to allow for age gating.

I don't really see how expanding the administrative state will help matters, especially with such a vague and exploitable mission like "preventing harm". What is harm? Is speaking against the presiding government harm?

mandatory ID laws are the dream of every single ad funded publisher on the internet.

Can you imagine someone in 1970 being asked to show ID to get a copy of the daily print version of their local newspaper?

not just showing ID, but making damn sure the vendor checked it, and potentially can prove they checked it.

At least the leader of the opposition stated yesterday that they oppose id for porn:

https://twitter.com/Golden_Pup/status/1762178506102858157

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

It's funny how resistant humans are to learning from history.

This article is jumping the gun; there is no text yet, and it's entirely unclear what "accountable for harmful content" means exactly. How exactly that is defined makes a huge difference. And all of this is based on "sources" so it may not even be accurate in the first place.

Right now all anyone can respond with is guesses and assumptions. This should be discussed in a few days, when there is actually something concrete to discuss.

All of this is typical of "the news cycle". Imagine delaying publication for a few days until there's something to actually discuss...

When I first heard that the gov't is trying to protect children from online harm, for some reason I thought it meant we were going to regulate their access to the highly addictive forms of social media that have been destroying their experience of childhood and setting them up to be a failed generation. But I guess they decided instead to go after the politically low-hanging fruit of hate speech, bullying, and sexual exploitation, as if the heavy hand of government speech regulation is somehow going to solve these problems this time around in history at no major cost to free societal norms.

What a joke. This is how the US has solved this problem.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1761567080988676256.html

Some things ring a Bell: meta oversight board, disinformation governance board, fact checking sites, counter disinformation unit.

It always work with funding from powerful. Always people at top are nominated by the powerful. The last thing is these boards have to listen to powerful people. Therefore it is a puppet show.

Rather than creating social media moderation tools for the community they establish boards.

I'm trying to learn more about what disinformation is, could you please post your thoughts under the following Ask HN post?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39554369

Goddamn my government is absolutely pathetic.

That commission looks harmful.

This is a terrible idea, but as long as it only applies to incorporated persons it's fine. By incorporating and creating a legal person that has very limited legal liability an entity gives up most human rights.

But if this is applied to non-incorporated human persons it will be very frightening and do much damage.

This is Canada. It will be applied to whomever the Government wants and then a few years down the line, if you survive, you'll get $10.5M worth of taxpayer funded hush money.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

(Latin: who watches the watchers?)

I might just not vote at the next elections. They're all a joke.

I can't wait to see what the definition of "harmful content" is. It's likely we'll never know the specific definition because it'll use subjective wording that is up to interpretation which will conveniently be used by the justice system in ways that favor the current sitting government rather than the individual.

Remember, it's "for the children" so we have to ram this legislation through as fast as possible - children in Canada, right now, are getting harmed as I type this comment!

I can't wait until "anti-vaccine sentiments", "anti-government messaging", "apolitical misinformation" etc. all get rolled up into "online harmful content" because "it could cause harm to somebody, somewhere in Canada at any time".

"Prime Minister Trudeau, show me on the doll where the harmful content hurt you."

I feel like Americans (HN in particular), distrustful of their government, will not like this.

I think it's great. People will look at Fox News and think 'thank god,' but as a Canadian, I'm glad we have more stringent restrictions on reckless forms of speech (hate/inciting genocide, fake news, etc). Further, I cannot recount a time when I've seen someone's speech restricted in a way I thought was improper.

Yes, it is possible for a power to be abused. I don't agree with not granting the power though. But I think it's fundamentally a 'trust in government' thing (which Americans sadly have little of).

What constitutes a reckless form of speech is entirely in the eye of the beholder, which is why this is a terrible idea.

As a Canadian, we are in dire straits because of government overreach. And reading history it looks like that has been the case for at least the last 4 decades.

Of course the Canadian rug under which everything is swept has become a tapestry of national Pride. Though that pride runs naked, like an emperor. Good thing MAID in Canada means something final.

How, exactly, are we in dire straits, in a way that is connected to the limits on free speech?

The COVID vaccines have saved many lives. They've also caused some adverse reactions in some folks.

Should people be allowed to discuss this? Is this reckless or responsible? Why? What happens if the science changes? Who ensures that the folks in charge stay current?

Point is that some Canadian provinces had a literal curfew and any discussion of it was absolutely shut down.

It depends what you mean by "discuss."

Do you mean, go on live TV news program and tell a bunch of half-truths such that people walk away with with the wrong impression? Do you mean, two people chatting in a forum?

Similarly, should Facebook be able to promote blatantly false information? Not pen it mind you, but "simply link?" -- at what point are Facebook's (and YouTube's, etc) algorithms responsible for curating and disseminating information, and why would I think that free speech laws should apply in that scenario?

So yeah, I can throw up a smoke screen of questions to ask, but I still think overall the vector is positive, not negative.

Yeah I understand the sentiment there. Now fast forward a few years to when a new government is elected that perhaps doesn't reflect your sensibilities.

Now they can use this apparatus to promote their version of the truth (might actually be false) and to suppress yours (which might actually be true).

What do you do now? How do you even mount a criticism of this entity? They'll likely work very hard to suppress your criticism and label you a misinformer.

Who decides what is fake news? Will you still hold the same view when the party you don't like is in power and defining what is fake news?

Well, generally the parties have flip-flopped provincially and nationally the current controls on broadcasters have not been an issue.

The CRTC is responsible for enforcing that provision of the broadcasting act AFAIK.

It's very funny to see the brains of all the Americans who are unaware of freedom of expression laws in other Western countries entirely melt whenever headlines like these show up.

I can assure you, this is not China or the USSR. Our press, elections, and democratic institutions are free. Nobody is getting or will be thrown in jail for expressing their political opinions, unless it's calling for the death of a group of people or bodily harm to a protected class.

People have veen jailed for less. Try giving out a free paper against [insert list of taboo subjects].

In many ways you have more freedom to speakout in those countries as long as it's not the government. In Canada you can speak out against the government in a limited way but are forbidden to for other topics and some topics they will allow only if it's politically correct but if that changes you are liable for those statements too.

You're going to need to cite some sources for claims like that to be taken seriously. I'd love to see some evidence of people jailed for nothing but political dissent in Canada.

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