Protect the Web — Reform Canada’s censorship plan!

Canada is building a dangerously overreaching censorship plan — and RIGHT NOW is our best chance to reform it!

New Heritage Minister Rodriguez is busy revising last year’s heavily-criticized harmful online content proposal. What happens next will decide whether our Internet becomes one of the most censored and surveilled in the democratic world.

Let’s make Canada a leader in Internet rights and freedoms, NOT censorship and surveillance! Tell Minister Rodriguez: thoroughly overhaul the harmful content proposal to reflect Canadians’ feedback!

Department of

Canadian Heritage

Government of Canada

Dear Minister Rodriguez,

As a concerned person in Canada, I urge you to thoroughly rework Heritage’s 2021 proposal for addressing harmful content online before proposing any legislation.

Online spaces are now the primary place for Canadians’ public expression and debate. Any legislation that affects our ability to express ourselves online must be carefully limited to make sure it will not have serious unintended impacts on our freedom of expression.

You must act on the Prime Minister’s instruction to fully incorporate critical feedback received from Canadians during last year’s public consultation on harmful online content.

Any legislation you propose this year must: 
1. Make online platforms more transparent, accountable and responsive to us, their users; 
2. Avoid short content takedown windows and proactive content detection obligations, as these force platforms to take down far more lawful content than illegal content;
3. Not include any mandatory reporting requirement of our content by platforms to law enforcement, short of clear and immediate danger to someone; 
4. Treat different types of harmful illegal content differently. Solutions for dealing with content like child sexual abuse material are very different than what’s appropriate for potential hate speech, and applying the same rules for both will lead to disaster;
5. Be complemented by work with ISED Minister Champagne on developing effective user privacy legislation. By placing limits on platforms’ ability to collect user data and to algorithmically target harmful content, strong privacy reform will help address harmful content;
6. Include the public in your drafting process.This must start with responding publicly to the feedback you received in last year’s consultation, and continue via open and honest discussion with experts and the public about the trade-offs of different proposed solutions you are considering adopting.

If you embrace this feedback, Canada may yet be a global leader in addressing harmful illegal online content — without subjecting us to unprecedented censorship and surveillance.

Sincerely,

{user_data~First Name} {user_data~Last Name}

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Our government is promising to pass sweeping legislation on ‘harmful content’ on the Internet soon — but if they pass their current proposal, it will be an absolute disaster for our freedom of expression and human rights.¹

Under their current proposal, vast numbers of our lawful online posts could be scrubbed from the Internet, including those encouraging participation in protests, raising the alarm about graphic human rights abuses, humour and satire, consensual sexual expression, and more.

Why? Because our government’s current 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. What’s even worse, the government has proposed reporting all these posts directly to CSIS and the RCMP - creating an unprecedented surveillance database of lawful user speech in Canada.

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 proposed system will be far from fair.²

But right now, we have a once in a generation opportunity to reform this proposal. Stung by global condemnation of previous Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault’s harmful content proposal, Prime Minister Trudeau’s new mandate letter for Heritage instructs Minister Rodriguez to develop and introduce legislation that “reflects the feedback” received during recent consultations.^3,4

How much will the disastrous proposal we saw last year improve? Only as much as continued pressure from ordinary people in Canada like YOU forces it to!

If you haven’t already, tell Minister Rodriguez that Canada’s harmful content proposal MUST be thoroughly revised BEFORE he proposes draft legislation.

Sources

A First Look at Canada’s Harmful Content proposal - OpenMedia
See 1
Minister of Canadian Heritage Mandate Letter - Office of the Prime Minister
The (Still Secret) Online Harms Consultation: What the Government Heard, Part One - Michael Geist

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Press: Matt Hatfield | Phone: +1 (888) 441-2640 ext. 0 | [email protected]