Saskatchewan Surveys Residents on Age Verification Censorship

Is it time for the Saskatchewan government to implement mass government surveillance and censorship? Have your say!

Yesterday, while writing my article about how supporters of age verification are reduced down to denial at best, I noted how the environment in Canada was mercifully looking worse and worse for the concept of mass government surveillance and censorship at the federal level.

What I didn’t know at the time when I wrote that was that there is at least one provincial government looking at this style of so-called “age verification”. That just happens to be the province of Saskatchewan which is run by the right wing party, the Saskatchewan Party. In retrospect, it makes quite a lot of sense given that stamping out freedom of expression is part of the DNA of right wing politics for decades now. After all, free speech is just a bleeding heart liberal value and if liberals support it, then they are against it. So, it’s of little surprise that if a provincial government was going to move forward with mass government, it was going to be a province run by a right wing political party.

At the moment, the Saskatchewan government is merely surveying their residents on this human rights violating proposal to see how much residents absolutely hates having all these pesky human rights ruining their daily lives. From the CBC:

Premier Scott Moe says his government is planning to ask Saskatchewan residents their view on banning social media for children under 16.

“Prime Minister [Mark Carney] … had indicated it’s likely time for this debate. I very much agree with that,” Moe told reporters Monday.

“It’s time for us to have a conversation about social media use in our youth, in our students.”

The premier pointed to a poll by Angus Reid that suggested a majority of Canadians support a ban similar to the one in Australia.

Australia became the first country to prevent youth under 16 from setting up accounts on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and Threads.

The poll also suggests many who support a full ban also believe parents. not governments, should be primarily responsible for regulating teens’ social media use.

There is a certain degree of irony in the mentioned poll results. On the one hand, people agree that it’s up to parents to, you know, do parenting. So, in order to do that, the parenting should be taken away from parents and the government should take over that job while trampling on freedom of expression and the right to privacy because that makes total sense there.

All such a survey shows is how little is known about what so-called “age verification” actually does. If people actually understood that it was about big government monitoring your daily lives and storing that in databases already susceptible to hacking and leaking, almost no one who is rational would support it. Yet, here we are with a portion of society thinking it’s a great idea for a big government takeover of their daily lives without even knowing what they are saying.

The thing is, there is a practical side to all of this that makes little sense. An age verification law is typically something that the federal government would look into. After all, it makes more sense that this is a federal level jurisdiction issue, not a provincial one. If one province implements this incredibly stupid age verification law, then all that does is convince platforms that they can just cut off access to that province because, at best, a province like Saskatchewan would be, at best, a rounding error in their balance sheet (if that).

Hopefully, for the sake of Saskatchewan residents, this effort doesn’t get any further than the public consultation phase. Still, with the media actively cheerleading these efforts on, it’s more than possible that ignorance will win the day, leaving people much worse off.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.