Does the Canadian Government Censor Social Media?
Does the Canadian Government Censor Social Media?
There is compelling evidence that it does. A #TwitterFiles release is required.
Matt Taibbi’s Racket substack has documented numerous occurrences of censorship at the request of U.S. police and intelligence agencies, and recently at the request of the Australian government. There is convincing evidence that the Canadian government does the same.
Extensively redacted Canadian government documents released to the Rouleau Inquiry (the Public Order Emergency Commission) into the Freedom Convoy and the Emergencies Act state that the Privy Council Office (PCO) — in other words, the Prime Minister’s executive office — was in touch with social media companies about “enforcement and actions to remove harmful content.”1 The language makes it clear that far from being exploratory, tentative, or mere information-gathering, these contacts had advanced to the point of “enforcement”, in other words of policing content. We are not told which social media companies were contacted, but other Rouleau Inquiry documents routinely mention tweets, so it is likely that Twitter was one of them.
The following screen shot is from National Security and Intelligence Advisor Jody Thomas’ briefing for 8 February 2022.
The language of “harmful content” displays a disturbing confidence that the officials of the Privy Council Office can say what is harmful. It also implies that speech should be regulated according to apprehended “harm,” which is to say according to its effects, rather than its truth. As so often, ideas and facts become “content,” and “content” is helpful or harmful, rather than true or false. The bureaucrats’ language opens the door to Taibbi’s definition of “mal-information”: true but off-narrative.
Along the way, one gathers that the Privy Council Office has a department called “Democratic Institutions.” Bureaucracies do not do irony, so apparently they censor in the name of democracy. The arrogance is as obvious as the problem: the necessary premise is that you are too stupid to sort out truth from falsehood, information from misinformation, so your superiors must do it for you. It is a view in some tension, to put it no more strongly, with any robust belief in democracy, let alone the judgement of the citizen.
There are other documented cases of Canadian government attempts to manipulate or to censor social media. The Canadian press documents 214 such requests, here.2 It gives three specific examples. One is a request to Facebook and Twitter to suppress a Toronto Sun news story unflattering to the Immigration and Refugee Board. Another is a request to remove personal details improperly posted by a Canada Revenue Agency (tax department) employee, and the third is a request to remove an account pretending to be the RCMP commissioner. These last two sound like valid and defensible attempts to protect private information and to prevent identity theft. It is the first that is problematic, suggesting that government agencies have the contacts and processes to make take-down requests, and that they do so with some regularity. It shows the government trying to censor social media, though not succeeding.
Blacklock’s Reporter has also reported on the Toronto Sun incident. In this case, the offending article was not removed.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau often refers, with a certain tight-throated anger, to the malign effects of “disinformation and misinformation.” It is obvious that he and his government believe that falsehoods on the social media played a large part in the Freedom Convoy. It is equally obvious that his soi-disant progressive government was genuinely surprised, indeed panicked, at the size and popular character of the protests, and is determined that they not recur. Bills C-11 was passed recently, allowing the government to regulate social media algorithms, which effectively means to censor disliked “content.” Other bills regulating social media have been proposed. This is a government that sees social media as a danger to itself.
All of the above is compelling evidence that the Canadian government, like the American and the Australian, has tried to censor the internet. The evidence is persuasive, and in the case of the NSIA document, unambiguous. We must ask when, or if, there will be a Canadian #TwitterFiles release, in particular concerning the Canadian government’s authoritarian reaction to the Freedom Convoy.
The evidence indicates that such a release would show numerous attempts to control and censor speech on social media.