Free speech is free, even on social media

The Liberal government has been adamant for some time that it intends to deviate from Canada's firmly established approach to free speech in the name of protecting us from “online hate.” Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault's mandate letter lays it out plainly: it proposes that a new regulator be empowered to demand internet platforms scrub “illegal content, including hate speech, within 24 hours or face significant penalties.”

It always seemed rather improbable. Currently, the determination of “hate speech” is a matter for judges. Any attempt to grant some new authority immediate censorship powers is going to be challenged in the courts. That would be a popular fight for the Liberals, as fights against basic civil liberties often are, but I was never sure they had the stomach for it.

I'm still not sure. Legislation very often fails to live up to its advance billing. But no flies seem to have landed on Guilbeault.

Legislation is on its way “in the next three weeks,” Martin Patriquin reported in Tuesday's National Post.

A key question: Just what do the Liberals have in mind when they say hate speech? It is almost certainly far broader than what's set out in Canadian law. Very few people have ever been charged with hate speech, and fewer still convicted. The most famous, Ernst Zundel, saw his conviction overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1992, and the law against “spreading false news” — in Zundel's case, denying the Holocaust — along with it.

The few include Léon Mugesera, the Hutu Rwandan leader whose infamous 1992 speech is viewed as a key precursor to the 1994 genocide. You see a lot of disturbing things on social media, but you don't often see users branding entire tribes of human beings as “cockroaches,” as Mugesera did the Tutsis, and warning “anyone whose neck you do not cut is the one who will cut your neck.”

But it seems the Liberals have smaller fish to fry, and they think they're on the side of the angels.

The justification, as it so often is when liberties hang in the balance, is that we live in unprecedented and dangerous times requiring unprecedented action. Social media, and the internet in general, give extremists and conspiracists of all kinds unprecedented reach and networking opportunities. Potentially violent people are clearly gathering inspiration online: the Quebec City mosque shooter and the North Toronto van attacker, to name two prominent recent Canadian examples.

There was no shortage of violent extremists informed and inspired by racists, conspiracists, fabulists and grievance-mongers before social media, of course. Mark Zuckerberg was 10 years old when a white-supremacist terrorist blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City. Zuckerberg was five years old when a pathetic misogynist murdered 14 women at École Polytechnique in Montreal. Today we would call that murderer an “incel,” as we do the North York murderer.

The most inclined and susceptible to radicalization will likely find their way to violence, if society — parents, teachers, counsellors, security officials — don't catch it first. But if social media are expanding the potential pool of violent radicals, it certainly doesn't follow automatically that government regulation and censorship will improve the situation.

Social media platforms may be “horrible at moderating the content on their sites,” as Patriquin argued, but there's no reason to believe any government would be better at it. Ironically, it wasn't any government that forced the far-right Twitter competitor Parler off-line after the fatal storming of the U.S. Capitol, but Apple and Google, which delisted the app, and Amazon Web Services, which terminated its hosting contract.

That might be a win against extremism, or it might not. One of the main effects of censorship is often to embolden the censored. It's almost unthinkable the U.S. government would follow Canada and like-minded governments down a regulatory path, on account of the First Amendment, and where there's a VPN, there's usually a way — and potentially more protection from security agencies' detection, what's more. It is a major frustration that so many violent attackers prove to have been “known to authorities.” But it also offers a lot more hope for improved prevention than if they were unknown.

Guilbeault's stated plans may wind up encroaching even further onto Canadians' free-speech rights than what he considers “hate speech.” The words of his mandate letter, “online harms such as radicalization, incitement to violence, exploitation of children, or creation or distribution of terrorist propaganda,” potentially contain multitudes. Last year his government adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's “definition of anti-Semitism” — which includes, inter alia, “applying double standards by requiring of (Israel) a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

Individuals and organizations can endorse any definition of bigotry they like. Governments nominally committed to free speech should not be endorsing ones that contemplate “double standards,” which Canadians are unambiguously free to indulge in.

It's a “non-binding definition,” but it needn't be forever, necessarily. There's always the notwithstanding clause. On free speech, it's best to leave the line in the sand where it is.

IT SEEMS THE LIBERALS HAVE SMALLER FISH TO FRY.