Say NO to Canada’s Censorship Plan!

Our government just unveiled a shocking plan to make Canada’s Internet one of the most censored and surveilled in the democratic world.

If implemented, their draft proposal will turn platforms like Facebook and Twitter into surveillance and censorship agents of the state, overzealously removing many of our lawful posts and reporting them directly to CSIS and the RCMP.

But if enough of us speak out, we can stop it. Tell our government: this drastic system must NEVER become the law in Canada!

Department of

Canadian Heritage

Government of Canada

As a concerned person in Canada, I urge you to abandon the draft proposals for our Internet outlined in your consultation paper on harmful content online. If implemented, these measures will lead directly to the removal of many lawful posts in Canada, including important forms of protest and personal expression.

In the offline world, restrictions on our freedom of expression are tightly limited, and surveillance by law enforcement requires approval of a court. By deputizing online platforms to proactively surveil, police, and remove our content, your proposal reverses this healthy offline balance. Online platforms afraid of your punitive legislation will not carefully weigh our posts, and many posts that would not be found illegal offline will certainly be removed by platforms and reported to law enforcement.

I strongly oppose the disproportionate and poorly conceived measures proposed in your consultation, including mandatory 24-hour takedown windows, reporting of removed posts to law enforcement, forcing platforms to proactively surveil their users’ posts, and any plans for blocking of websites in Canada.

These proposals are very likely to be used to police and harass already marginalized people on the Internet, not to protect and empower them.

I urge you to work with academic experts, civil society, and online platforms themselves on developing a more thoughtful, measured approach to addressing illegal and harmful content online.

Kind regards,
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It’s a classic bait and switch; using our real frustration with toxic online behaviour as the dangling carrot, the government’s so-called ‘harmful content’ consultation will force online platforms like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter to become an unprecedented surveillance and censorship arm of law enforcement in Canada.¹ The proposal reads like a wishlist of everything CSIS and the RCMP ever wanted to surveil our posts — and it puts the actual needs of victims of hate speech and harmful content online dead last.

If this proposal becomes law, vast numbers of our lawful online posts could be scrubbed from the Internet, including participation in protests, raising the alarm about graphic human rights abuses, humour and satire, consensual sexual expression, and more.

Why? Because our government’s proposed system harshly penalizes any online platform that fails to proactively detect and remove actually-illegal content within 24 hours — and all our legitimate posts will be so much collateral damage.

You can have fast content moderation, or you can have fair content moderation, but you can’t have both. And the aggressive removal algorithms and cursory human moderation the government is forcing on us in this system will be far from fair.²

Unfortunately, it gets even worse from there. The consultation proposes mandatory, automatic reporting of every single removed post directly to CSIS and the RCMP. Thinking about heading down to a controversial protest? Better not post about it — or the RCMP will know you’re on your way.³

This system isn’t fit for Canada, and our officials need to hear it. Tell our government to send this outrageous 'harmful content' proposal back to the drawing board!

Sources

Have your say: The Government’s proposed approach to address harmful content online - Canadian Heritage
A First Look at Canada’s Harmful Content Proposal - OpenMedia
See 2

Image source: Technology photo created by rawpixel.com - freepik.com and modified for this campaign by OpenMedia.

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Press: Matthew Hatfield | Phone: +1 (888) 441-2640 ext. 1 | [email protected]