National Post (National Edition)
Ottawa's new guide to internet control
The new Broadcasting Act, Bill C-10, may have been stymied in the Senate, but the actual content of its policy objectives has just been released, in the form of Heritage Canada's “Guiding Principles on Diversity of Content Online.” For a government intent on control, the Guiding Principles have several advantages: they are not legislated; they can be revised and adapted according to how technology or society evolves; and they have no legally binding force. They have only the force of the large platforms to back them — if they sign on, as they are enjoined to do.
The basic idea of the Guiding Principles is to achieve diversity, equity and inclusion. The private-sector companies to which the principles are to apply include “services operating online, whose primary purpose is to broadcast or distribute content or share user-generated content online.” Governments, media sector representatives, regulators and civil society organizations are likewise to be included as signatories.
The goal is to promote diversity online, with diversity understood to be: creation, access and discoverability of diverse content online; fair remuneration and economic viability of content creators; promotion of diverse, pluralistic sources of news and information, as well as resilience against disinformation and misinformation; and transparency of the impacts of algorithmic treatments of online content. Signatories are to agree to implement these goals within the scope of their responsibilities and to develop specific commitments by December 2022 at the latest, “to show concrete actions they will take to implement these guiding objectives”.
The principles assume, as a matter of fact, that there are “equity deserving groups” whose online access is limited and that hate, racial prejudice, disinformation and misinformation “can disproportionately affect Indigenous people and equity deserving groups.” As in those cartoons of kids of various heights standing on boxes of various heights to see the baseball game over a wooden fence, “equity” may reasonably be interpreted to mean active measures to overcome the consequences of inequalities, natural or artificial. In modern parlance, “equity” implies ongoing governmental interference to achieve goals that might not otherwise be achieved in the absence of such action.
Regarding algorithms, the guidelines say that “content recommendation algorithms and their developers should minimize potential systemic biases and discrimination in outcome, related to such things as race, sexual orientation, gender identity and ability.”
One wonders how. At the moment, content recommendation algorithms seek to interest me in things related to what I have previously expressed an interest in. If I have watched videos of Andrew Camarata fixing bulldozers, the algorithm is likely to recommend other machine-oriented males fixing tractors and chainsaws and building log cabins. Inevitably, the algorithms will direct me to items of interest to males such as myself. I imagine the same happens with videos on golf, music, physics, flower gardens, cooking, Japanese art or any taste whatever. How then will an algorithm correct for systemic bias in male-oriented videos if I am a male or female-oriented videos if I were female? The Guiding Principles do not say, though they expect content recommendation systems to “respect freedom of expression in a way that allows for safe and diverse content.” In other words, safety and diversity, as defined by governments or the platforms, are to constrain freedom of expression.
The Guiding Principles are a Broadcasting Act for the Internet, a set of objectives the platforms are expected to implement. The approach envisaged is systemic, organized, comprehensive, global (as far as Canadians will see) and subject to government regulation. A great advantage for the government is that the principles utterly bypass legislation, need no parliamentary approval, require the cooperation of the platforms but not of society, and subject large areas of private taste to algorithmic manipulation.
The Guiding Principles are creepily totalitarian, and yet one imagines the authors of this document think of themselves as being great public benefactors. Conceived as a whole, the document says that speech carried across the internet is to serve particular purposes — all speech, everywhere on the internet. Agreement or disagreement with the guiding principles as stated is less important than the whole purpose of the document. Take out the language about diversity, equity and inclusion (the new modern woke credo) and replace it, in a thought experiment, with any other set of goals to be achieved. They could be the divinity of Christ, the supremacy of the Aryan race, the sanctity of the Roman Church, the triumph of scientific socialism, the grandeur of the Aztec Sky God Huitzilopochtli, the preservation of the British Empire, or the values of the Enlightenment.
My point is not the “diversity, equity and inclusion” principles themselves, though they are creepy enough. It is the idea that everything online should be aimed at any guiding principle at all. Would you think it normal that the publishing industry in Canada be enjoined to publish books that exclusively promote a certain political agenda? Would you think it right that speech across various telephone and voice applications be organized to conduce to the achievement of diversity, equity and inclusion?
I once knew a Canadian diplomat who served in the Soviet Union, as it then was, in the Brezhnev era. I asked whether there was freedom of speech in the Soviet Union. He said “yes, there was, absolute freedom of speech.” I was startled. He went on: “If you are out on the ice fishing in winter, and in your shelter, and out of range of prying microphones, and talking with people you have known since high school or earlier, and you have developed trust over decades, you can talk about anything. And they do. They talk about stuff no one talks about here, like whether Hitler was right to invade Stalin's U.S.S.R., or whether Communism is a pile of crap, or whether the U.S.A. is actually imperialist. There is complete freedom of discussion. You just have to be careful with whom and where you share your ideas.”
People need to look at the Guiding Principles from this perspective. Canada will have complete freedom of speech. Just not anything like the kind we have been used to.