This reminds me of the Star Trek episode "The Cage": the Talosians, a dying and physically diminished race yet in control due to their telepathic powers, admonish human Captain Pike "Right thinking will be rewarded. Wrong thinking will be punished!" It doesn't occur to the Talosians that their mental powers aren't sufficient to maintain domination over humans, nor that they will be utterly at the humans' mercy once Pike and crew figure out how to overcome them.
The Liberals have brought in this legislation in an effort to squelch out the "wrong thinking" of their opponents, and seem to be working from the assumption that only they will be able to make use of the powers provided by the online harms act. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that these powers could soon be at the disposal of their political opponents, and they could soon be the people condemned for "wrong thinking." In the more robust free speech rights of the US, this act would be quickly struck down by the courts. It could potentially face a similar fate in Canada, but unfortunately I suspect many of the current Supreme Court justices will be susceptible to the progressive idea that some speech must be banned because it's inherently harmful, stretching current provisions aimed at neo-Nazis to progressive bugbears.
The thought of some appointed, beholden federal bureaucrats deciding what constitutes "misinformation" frightens me. Hell, this article could be considered misinformation if the head of right-speech decides it misrepresents the risk of the legislation.
This seemingly international impulse falls under the heading "Bureaucrats out of control," and the hidden major premise is evidently "Bureaucrats speak for the nation-state." I thought the people spoke for the nation-state, or at the very least for themselves in supposedly democratic nation-states. But hats off to Kafka, who foresaw with preternatural clarity in the 1920s just what a world run by bureaucrats would be like. Remember that Himmler, the Holocaust's principal architect, wasn't a philosopher or even a minor-league thinker, simply an out-of-control bureaucrat with social engineering fantasies.
You have always had the right to say whatever you want and you still have that right. But rights have responsibilities, something we all forget.
We have lots of sites that do not let you comment at all, take 𝙏𝒉𝙚 𝘼𝒕𝙡𝒂𝙣𝒕𝙞𝒄 for example. The 𝙉𝒆𝙬 𝙔𝒐𝙧𝒌 𝑻𝙞𝒎𝙚𝒔 strictly moderates as does the 𝙏𝒐𝙧𝒐𝙣𝒕𝙤 𝙎𝒕𝙖𝒓. The 𝙂𝒍𝙤𝒃𝙚 𝙖𝒏𝙙 𝙈𝒂𝙞𝒍 says they do but you can put just about anything there and it only gets moderated if someone complains. The toilet paper rag called the 𝑵𝙖𝒕𝙞𝒐𝙣𝒂𝙡 𝙋𝒐𝙨𝒕 just lets anything go.
There is way to much abuse, way to much misinformation and way to much intolerance done by anonymous posters to let it continue like it is. Perhaps if we made everyone post under their real name it could be better but then the black sites would not enforce this. The Donald Trumps will always tell lies.
I am not too worried about censorship, I am much more worried about people like the proud boys and our very own convoy people.
So - where does the CPC fall on this? We've seen how states will shape the definition of misinformation to favour themselves in the past. That is my biggest concern - if truth-telling is then labeled as misinformation, it is truly an Orwellian world we would be looking at.
Great article Mr. Menzies. Allegations of mis/disinformation have been weaponized by liberals to demonize their opponents and suppress opinions they disagree with. The end game is to increase government regulations and restrict speech to their political advantage.
I am in favor of freedom of expression. Limits already exist in the Criminal Code, e.g. child pornography, fraud, incitement to violence, or in other legislation, e.g. copyright infringement. If we need more limits, they should be very narrowly tailored and they must be justified.
"Misinformation" is not an adequate justification. It is much too broad a concept. Does it extend to anything that turns out to be false? Then a lot of government pronouncements would be misinformation. (For examples, take many of former Minister Mendicino's pronouncements.) How about things that are true but taken out of context? Again the government would be a major offender. (Think of the way the PMO cherrypicks economic indicators.)
What about the things politicians say during election campaigns? There is a Supreme Court Decision that these are not to be taken seriously -- there is no remedy at law if the government reneges. What about promises more generally?
In any case, centuries of censorship have shown that it does not eliminate unwanted views, it merely drives them underground. There, they spread without anyone challenging them, or being able to. We need to hear these views which we find hateful, so that we can counter them, or at least know how widespread they are.
Or we could go back to the Quebec of my youth, where the Catholic Church maintained an Index of prohibited works, where we could not watch a movie on the life of Emile Zola, and where some of my classmates made money smuggling in copies of Playboy from Ontario, that libertine province!!!
"... the conflict at hand is between the right to freedom of expression and the “right” not to be misinformed — even though the latter right doesn’t actually exist."
I could be wrong, but I'm going to presume that Menzies isn't advocating for the unrestricted right to say whatever one wants to say, wherever and by whatever medium one desires, and to force the sole burden of discernment onto the ill-equipped listener at home (especially in social media, where the listener often has little to no right of refusal if "The Algorithm" has deemed them to be an appropriate receptor of a given message). But he comes close in describing this ""right" to not be misinformed" as he does.
I may not have a positive right to not be misinformed, but surely I can ask of those to whom the right of public expression is given to exercise a positive responsibility to me, the potential listener. Rights do not exist in a vacuum: they exist in a paired relationship with responsibilities. It's the juvenile expectations from the Meta/Google/X's of the world, paired with the truly juvenile desires of those on the far ends of the spectrum to blather whatever they want without adult supervision, that ignore that fundamental moral philosophical relationship.
Based on Menzies' article, I'm actually looking forward to the Online Harms Act. Given that it establishes new responsibilities, I'm now looking forward to watching the SCC and others as they finally have the tools to clarify how the rights of self-expression in the hottest age of media yet devised should be tempered by appropriate and legal, civil codes of self-restraint.
"But then along came the bots and the algorithms. Lots of Ross’s free individuals — little Che’s, if you will — voted for Brexit and started electing the likes of Boris Johnson, Giogia Meloni and Donald Trump. The fault for this was laid squarely at the door of social media and its ability to spread “#fakenews” faster than an Okanagan wildfire. Faced with declining societal trust indices and baskets of deplorables making unsupervised decisions, the Nation State started to fight back."
This is an interesting paragraph. How free are people who have been conned? A significant portion of Brexit and Trump voters were gamed by sophisticated campaigns to harvest their votes by playing on their very real discontent. Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon (in the UK and the US) found new ways for people to vote against their own interests. How do we protect people from scammers who couldn't care less about them and not lose crucial freedoms? The demons who run social media companies care about money and power...democracy and teen suicide? Not so much. This is a tough problem.
God spare me from the bureaucratic and political “ zealots “ and the “woke” activists who hang on every word with Orwellian glee. Am I allowed to say “ God” or did I just offend somebody?
So the government is more or less putting a law into play that lets them decide what truth your allowed to see/hear ?? Just how far are things like this going to go before there is a backlash ?
Best piece you have posted in ages. Concise and to the point. Nice work. Will we see you at the Conservative Party convention in Quebec City this weekend? Love to buy you guys a beverage. Phil O'Dell
Respectfully put and appreciated - and you're right, I had to backpedal my words due to poor wording. What I meant was that no new personal responsibilities are created: given that the moral responsibility was always there, establishing them in civil code is just belts and braces, nothing new. But point taken, and I'm always happy to be held to what I wrote.
Sounds like you're built of the same stuff, but you fear the state more than you fear the kinds of folks who currently hold the crayons and are writing the garbage on both sides of the spectrum. (Left? See recent The Line piece from Jen on how the trans folks are jumping the shark; Right? See the response of any red state US governor; Lunatic? The Donald.) I'm actually at the point where I think the tide has turned, and I'm willing to take my chances with the known incompetence of the federal government versus the consequences of letting the trucker convoys and First Nations hijackers run the table on what is and must be reported on any given day (and I'll join you in wondering whether I've now breached the correctness line).
Definitely appreciate your perspective - mine is, essentially, that government at least has some control points (elections, auditors), and has proven over time it can almost never pull off a decent information conspiracy - whereas the private sector of right, left, and sideways horror stories don't have any equivalent control points whatsoever. The new law creates some - and while, pace Hobbes, it naturally will be an extension of the Leviathan - it feels in 2023 like the right thing at the right time.
So, you are inferring that the contents of draft legislation you have never seen will be similar to that passed in a number of countries that don't have a Charter? This is fact based opinion weiting? Pardon me if I wait for confirmation before clutching at my pearls.
This reminds me of the Star Trek episode "The Cage": the Talosians, a dying and physically diminished race yet in control due to their telepathic powers, admonish human Captain Pike "Right thinking will be rewarded. Wrong thinking will be punished!" It doesn't occur to the Talosians that their mental powers aren't sufficient to maintain domination over humans, nor that they will be utterly at the humans' mercy once Pike and crew figure out how to overcome them.
The Liberals have brought in this legislation in an effort to squelch out the "wrong thinking" of their opponents, and seem to be working from the assumption that only they will be able to make use of the powers provided by the online harms act. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that these powers could soon be at the disposal of their political opponents, and they could soon be the people condemned for "wrong thinking." In the more robust free speech rights of the US, this act would be quickly struck down by the courts. It could potentially face a similar fate in Canada, but unfortunately I suspect many of the current Supreme Court justices will be susceptible to the progressive idea that some speech must be banned because it's inherently harmful, stretching current provisions aimed at neo-Nazis to progressive bugbears.
The thought of some appointed, beholden federal bureaucrats deciding what constitutes "misinformation" frightens me. Hell, this article could be considered misinformation if the head of right-speech decides it misrepresents the risk of the legislation.
This seemingly international impulse falls under the heading "Bureaucrats out of control," and the hidden major premise is evidently "Bureaucrats speak for the nation-state." I thought the people spoke for the nation-state, or at the very least for themselves in supposedly democratic nation-states. But hats off to Kafka, who foresaw with preternatural clarity in the 1920s just what a world run by bureaucrats would be like. Remember that Himmler, the Holocaust's principal architect, wasn't a philosopher or even a minor-league thinker, simply an out-of-control bureaucrat with social engineering fantasies.
You have always had the right to say whatever you want and you still have that right. But rights have responsibilities, something we all forget.
We have lots of sites that do not let you comment at all, take 𝙏𝒉𝙚 𝘼𝒕𝙡𝒂𝙣𝒕𝙞𝒄 for example. The 𝙉𝒆𝙬 𝙔𝒐𝙧𝒌 𝑻𝙞𝒎𝙚𝒔 strictly moderates as does the 𝙏𝒐𝙧𝒐𝙣𝒕𝙤 𝙎𝒕𝙖𝒓. The 𝙂𝒍𝙤𝒃𝙚 𝙖𝒏𝙙 𝙈𝒂𝙞𝒍 says they do but you can put just about anything there and it only gets moderated if someone complains. The toilet paper rag called the 𝑵𝙖𝒕𝙞𝒐𝙣𝒂𝙡 𝙋𝒐𝙨𝒕 just lets anything go.
There is way to much abuse, way to much misinformation and way to much intolerance done by anonymous posters to let it continue like it is. Perhaps if we made everyone post under their real name it could be better but then the black sites would not enforce this. The Donald Trumps will always tell lies.
I am not too worried about censorship, I am much more worried about people like the proud boys and our very own convoy people.
So - where does the CPC fall on this? We've seen how states will shape the definition of misinformation to favour themselves in the past. That is my biggest concern - if truth-telling is then labeled as misinformation, it is truly an Orwellian world we would be looking at.
Great article Mr. Menzies. Allegations of mis/disinformation have been weaponized by liberals to demonize their opponents and suppress opinions they disagree with. The end game is to increase government regulations and restrict speech to their political advantage.
And they are winning.
I am in favor of freedom of expression. Limits already exist in the Criminal Code, e.g. child pornography, fraud, incitement to violence, or in other legislation, e.g. copyright infringement. If we need more limits, they should be very narrowly tailored and they must be justified.
"Misinformation" is not an adequate justification. It is much too broad a concept. Does it extend to anything that turns out to be false? Then a lot of government pronouncements would be misinformation. (For examples, take many of former Minister Mendicino's pronouncements.) How about things that are true but taken out of context? Again the government would be a major offender. (Think of the way the PMO cherrypicks economic indicators.)
What about the things politicians say during election campaigns? There is a Supreme Court Decision that these are not to be taken seriously -- there is no remedy at law if the government reneges. What about promises more generally?
In any case, centuries of censorship have shown that it does not eliminate unwanted views, it merely drives them underground. There, they spread without anyone challenging them, or being able to. We need to hear these views which we find hateful, so that we can counter them, or at least know how widespread they are.
Or we could go back to the Quebec of my youth, where the Catholic Church maintained an Index of prohibited works, where we could not watch a movie on the life of Emile Zola, and where some of my classmates made money smuggling in copies of Playboy from Ontario, that libertine province!!!
Menzies plays his hand with the following:
"... the conflict at hand is between the right to freedom of expression and the “right” not to be misinformed — even though the latter right doesn’t actually exist."
I could be wrong, but I'm going to presume that Menzies isn't advocating for the unrestricted right to say whatever one wants to say, wherever and by whatever medium one desires, and to force the sole burden of discernment onto the ill-equipped listener at home (especially in social media, where the listener often has little to no right of refusal if "The Algorithm" has deemed them to be an appropriate receptor of a given message). But he comes close in describing this ""right" to not be misinformed" as he does.
I may not have a positive right to not be misinformed, but surely I can ask of those to whom the right of public expression is given to exercise a positive responsibility to me, the potential listener. Rights do not exist in a vacuum: they exist in a paired relationship with responsibilities. It's the juvenile expectations from the Meta/Google/X's of the world, paired with the truly juvenile desires of those on the far ends of the spectrum to blather whatever they want without adult supervision, that ignore that fundamental moral philosophical relationship.
Based on Menzies' article, I'm actually looking forward to the Online Harms Act. Given that it establishes new responsibilities, I'm now looking forward to watching the SCC and others as they finally have the tools to clarify how the rights of self-expression in the hottest age of media yet devised should be tempered by appropriate and legal, civil codes of self-restraint.
Judging from the many perceptive comments, Line readers aren’t yet ready to shut up. Good piece.
"But then along came the bots and the algorithms. Lots of Ross’s free individuals — little Che’s, if you will — voted for Brexit and started electing the likes of Boris Johnson, Giogia Meloni and Donald Trump. The fault for this was laid squarely at the door of social media and its ability to spread “#fakenews” faster than an Okanagan wildfire. Faced with declining societal trust indices and baskets of deplorables making unsupervised decisions, the Nation State started to fight back."
This is an interesting paragraph. How free are people who have been conned? A significant portion of Brexit and Trump voters were gamed by sophisticated campaigns to harvest their votes by playing on their very real discontent. Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon (in the UK and the US) found new ways for people to vote against their own interests. How do we protect people from scammers who couldn't care less about them and not lose crucial freedoms? The demons who run social media companies care about money and power...democracy and teen suicide? Not so much. This is a tough problem.
God spare me from the bureaucratic and political “ zealots “ and the “woke” activists who hang on every word with Orwellian glee. Am I allowed to say “ God” or did I just offend somebody?
Is Mr. Menzies in favour of any regulation I wonder? He treats misinformation like it’s some kind of urban myth.
So the government is more or less putting a law into play that lets them decide what truth your allowed to see/hear ?? Just how far are things like this going to go before there is a backlash ?
Best piece you have posted in ages. Concise and to the point. Nice work. Will we see you at the Conservative Party convention in Quebec City this weekend? Love to buy you guys a beverage. Phil O'Dell
Respectfully put and appreciated - and you're right, I had to backpedal my words due to poor wording. What I meant was that no new personal responsibilities are created: given that the moral responsibility was always there, establishing them in civil code is just belts and braces, nothing new. But point taken, and I'm always happy to be held to what I wrote.
Sounds like you're built of the same stuff, but you fear the state more than you fear the kinds of folks who currently hold the crayons and are writing the garbage on both sides of the spectrum. (Left? See recent The Line piece from Jen on how the trans folks are jumping the shark; Right? See the response of any red state US governor; Lunatic? The Donald.) I'm actually at the point where I think the tide has turned, and I'm willing to take my chances with the known incompetence of the federal government versus the consequences of letting the trucker convoys and First Nations hijackers run the table on what is and must be reported on any given day (and I'll join you in wondering whether I've now breached the correctness line).
Definitely appreciate your perspective - mine is, essentially, that government at least has some control points (elections, auditors), and has proven over time it can almost never pull off a decent information conspiracy - whereas the private sector of right, left, and sideways horror stories don't have any equivalent control points whatsoever. The new law creates some - and while, pace Hobbes, it naturally will be an extension of the Leviathan - it feels in 2023 like the right thing at the right time.
So, you are inferring that the contents of draft legislation you have never seen will be similar to that passed in a number of countries that don't have a Charter? This is fact based opinion weiting? Pardon me if I wait for confirmation before clutching at my pearls.