CBC Is Already Teeing Up Sales Pitch for Online Harms Legislation

The push for online harms legislation by Canada’s mainstream media may already be on. There may be reason to worry about that.

Online harms has long been hugely controversial for very good reasons. Not only has it long been a threat to basic civil rights while trying to pass itself off as just another bill going after bad actors, but it is also a piece of legislation that is being pushed by the Liberal government with a huge assist from Canada’s mainstream media in their quest to crack down on the internet in general.

First, Canada’s mainstream traditional media has long been at war with the internet, routinely publishing stories ranging from negative “trends” that either don’t exist at all or are experiencing so little engagement that virtually no one is even aware of them in the first place. Any dirt they can dig up painting the internet as this big bad scary place runs regardless of how desperate it actually is.

There is, of course, a very good reason why the mainstream media has long been at war with the internet. During the 70s and 80s, the internet wasn’t even really a thing in popular culture and it was the mainstream media that held a monopoly on people’s attention. That began to change in the 90’s, 2000’s, and 2010’s where the internet gradually went from a niche thing to where everyone turns to. As a result, the media had lost their monopoly on people’s attention and it became clear that the media outlets themselves were far from perfect for more and more people. While the mainstream media ignored the internets development, casting it aside as little more than a “fad” that will “go away on its own”, eventually, the media discovered that they were in a technological shift. Faced with a decision to embrace the power of the internet to continue their presence or fight in, many in the mainstream media chose to fight it be regularly demonizing technology in general.

As a result, stories about success stories online and media outlets supporting local businesses making a go at it with this new fangled internet thing evaporated and was quickly replaced with how the internet is destroying everything. This while basically lobbying the federal government to intervene and crack down on the broad open internet. It nicely explains why the mainstream media in general pushed bullshit lies at an unprecedented rate during the Online News Act debates with Big Lie 1.0 and Big Lie 2.0. In fact, some members took things a step further by directly hurling insults at anyone daring to criticize the legislation on top of it all. Journalistic integrity be damned.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that the Online News Act was far from the only legislation that the mainstream media lied about and actively lobbied for. Another piece of legislation they openly lobbied for was the Online Harms legislation. During the last government, the mainstream media was regularly lobbying for this legislation, arguing that racist attacks and people being mean on the internet requires massive government intervention. As a result, they argued, there needs to be an Online Harms bill passed to put a stop to all of it.

What they say they are wanting and what they are actually pushing for, of course, are two entirely different things. That came to fruition when the “consultation” (AKA an advisory notice) came out where the government laid out what they plan for with the Online Harms bill and asked the general public to agree with everything they said. The problem, of course, is that experts aren’t stupid and they know what the heck is going on. They saw through what the government was actually doing and responded with overwhelmingly negative feedback. I, of course, was one of those respondents, but it seemed like almost everyone else was weighing in as well with numerous ways in which they felt the government was taking the wrong approach.

Some of the key criticisms included the fact that the government was demanding all websites, big and small, take down content within 24 hours or face a multi-million dollar fine. The complaint can come from any anonymous user and it can be about anything they call “harmful” (which, in and of itself, was an ill-defined term from the legislation’s perspective). Regardless, it was a guilt upon accusation system that no reasonable website could abide by simply because the system would be overly burdensome. As someone who runs his own website, I can safely tell you that no Canadian website survives such a system. It’s a big reason why I called this legislation a nuclear bomb being detonated on the open internet.

You can see why the mainstream media is such a huge proponent of this. So, they ignored all the expert testimony and kept pushing the propaganda that this is only about removing all the hate speech and bad actors from the internet despite the reality that it threatened to take down all actors on the internet entirely in Canada. Hey, they get to have their attention monopoly back after the government destroys the internet, so what’s not to like about this legislation from their perspective?

At any rate, I, like so many other Canadian websites, was facing the prospect that I could soon be forced to shut down the website entirely thanks to this version of the bill. All of my work and my life long career in independent journalism was seemingly coming to an end soon and I can tell you just how anxiety inducing all of that was.

In an uncharacteristic move, the Canadian government seemingly listened to some of the concerns (they typically accuse critics of being part of some big conspiracy and go on to ignore everything they say) and when they finally tabled the legislation, a lot of the nasty provisions got rolled back. While many, including us, were relieved by the changes (not being forced to shut down your own website and end your career is always a plus), the legislation was still far from perfect as it contained, according to civil rights group, criminal provisions that still made it a threat to basic civil rights. Faced with numerous delays, the government, in a last ditch effort, finally did the right thing and split the massive bill into smaller bills. It was too little, too late since the election was eventually called and the bill died on the orderpaper.

Now that the election is over, it seems that Canada’s mainstream media is teeing up another attempt to pressure the government into passing an Online Harms bill. As usual, they try and cloak the issue and try and sell it as something that just goes after content that no one really wants. In this case, they decided to target deep fake porn as a reason to pass such legislation. From the CBC:

Sharing non-consensual deepfake porn is illegal in several countries, including South Korea, Australia and the U.K. It is also illegal in several U.S. states, and while there is no federal law yet, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill banning it in April.

However, it’s not a crime in Canada. Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged to pass a law criminalizing it during his federal election campaign, saying, “We will make producing and distributing non-consensual sexual deepfakes a criminal offence.”

That is basically the sales pitch right there. It was wrapped in this story about an investigation into a shady website selling deep fake porn content where the operators were taking imagery of people who did not consent and making pornography. Naturally, the website was shut down and one of person involved in the website just so happens to reside in Canada. I did find it ironic that the guy got exposed because of multiple data breaches elsewhere and hacked information was used to trace the site back to him through, among other things, credential stuffing. So, the lack of any real laws that protect people’s personal information ultimately led to the bust in the first place. This while the CBC was flipping out over how there are no laws protecting people.

Like so many other digital rights advocates out there, I’ll continue the line that says that I have no problem with laws going specifically after non-consensual imagery and video. That routinely gets lost in the debate and people like us get painted as some super villain in support of such content when we make no such argument. It’s basically an often used defamatory attack against people like us in an effort to discredit our actual arguments.

The reality is that what people like us are concerned about is the question of what gets couched along with such legislation. The earlier iteration of the Online Harms legislation during the consultation phase is a perfect illustration of that. It’s one thing to create a law making it illegal to produce such content without the consent of those being featured. It’s quite another to craft a law that makes it impossible for any website, regardless of content, to survive.

So, for example, if such a legislation is saddled with requirements for websites to buy into hugely expensive proprietary software just to continue to operate, that would be upsetting. Many websites operating in Canada operate on razor thin budgets. A number are hobby projects. If a website is being asked to buy into a $1,000 per month software when the website itself generates all of 15 cents per month, you’re basically condemning that website to death in the process. That is not fair to that website operator by any means and does give rise to asking whether such legislation is even constitutional. No amount of “but it’s for a good cause” is going to be any consolation for the operator that is forced to shut down their website about caring for plants.

This is why I get worried about whenever I see stories like that in the media. It’s not that I get worried for the creeps out there, but rather, the massive amount of potential collateral damage in this quest to rid the internet of all the “bad stuff”. While there was positive developments regarding this legislation towards the end, Prime Minister, Mark Carney, has already started repeating past mistakes when it comes to technology. The mainstream media doesn’t care because, for them, burning down the whole internet is a great idea to them because then we can go back to the bad old days of a handful of companies having a monopoly on people’s knowledge about the world around them. I’ve seen this play out before and I hope I’m not seeing the same story repeat itself again.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.