Online hate bill a case of overreach
It’s troubling how willingly some societies will forsake civil liberties in the name of a purportedly greater or more urgent cause.
Because there are very few, if any, really, in a liberal democracy which eclipse precious rights of freedom of speech, assembly and beliefs. Even what most of us might condemn as outrageous expression or heretical — hateful — ideologies.
Governments wade into the murky end of the suppressing pool at our peril. And they’re never more baleful than when cloaking themselves in virtue — by way of shielding us from what they’ve decreed to be harmful.
In Canada that debate has been sparked by the Liberal government’s tabling of the Online Harms Act, which seeks to regulate social media sites, or at least that’s ostensibly the crux of the thing. A thing that started out as protection of youngsters from exploitation and child pornography — for which there is broad agreement — then segued to scrubbing the internet (as if that’s actually possible) of such insidious practices as revenge porn, “deep fakes” and grooming of teenagers for self-harm.
But it has now metastasized into pre-criminalizing thought, rather than actions, and proposes Orwellian restrictions, invests enforcement to a Big Brother digital safety commission, threatens potential life sentences for committing extreme hate speech, such as advocating or promoting genocide. Which, yoo-hoo, is already an offence under the Criminal Code.
Look, it’s not easy to determine where to draw the line on hate speech and who decides. But surely we want the most minimal intervention possible to protect the public good. And this isn’t that.
Bill C-63 is a mess of a bill, a fatally flawed piece of overreaching legislation that has drawn scorn from, and made weird allies of, Margaret Atwood and Elon Musk. So maladroit that it can’t possibly be fixed — apart from the obvious correction of severing the child protection part from everything else — and portends decades of litigation before possibly being banged into reasonable shape by the Supreme Court of Canada.
Justice Minister Arif Virani defended the bill, which targets seven types of online content deemed harmful, by assuring the definition of free speech would not include content that’s “awful but lawful,” steering clear of “insults, offensive comments, or jokes that are not very polite.” And if you put your faith in the promises of politicians, you deserve what you get. Hearteningly, Canadians are dubious about this legislation, as indicated by a Leger poll that found half were wary of the government’s ability to protect free speech under the bill and fewer than half think government’s plan to regulate social media sites will make platforms safer.
Meanwhile, across the pond and from the opposite end of the political spectrum, the United Kingdom’s governing Tories (but likely not after the next general election) last week unveiled equally disturbing legislation aimed at strangling radicalism in its crib by adopting a new definition for extremism as “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance, that aims to: negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others; undermine, overturn or replace the U.K.’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights; or intentionally create a permissive environment for others to achieve (those) results.”
U.K. Communities Minister Michael Gove contended the updated, more precise definition, is necessary to counter a surge in antisemitic and anti-Muslim hate crimes since the Oct. 7 Hamas slaughter in Israel — a six-fold increase in antisemitic incidents, a four-fold increase in anti-Muslim hatred.
The reveal followed on the heels of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak delivering an allegedly impromptu speech outside 10 Downing Street wherein he claimed extremist groups in the U.K. are “trying to tear us apart,” while maintaining that democracy itself has become a target of pro-Palestinian protests that have been “hijacked” by extremists.
Sunak seemed to be reacting particularly to the resurfacing of despicable long-time Hamas-hugger George Galloway, coming hours after he won a byelection as an MP representing the Workers Party of Great Britain (Galloway was expelled from the Labour party in 2003).
In any event, the extremist designation doesn’t actually create any new powers and has no criminal impact — pro-Palestine demonstrations aren’t banned or anything — but any group thus categorized will be forbidden from receiving government funding or any other government support. The government hopes that labelling a group as an extremist would render them radioactive, lead to shunning by the public and other bodies. In effect, cancelling them. There’s no appeals process either.
It won’t affect, said Gove, “gendercritical campaigners, those with conservative religious beliefs, trans activists, environmental protest groups or those exercising their proper right to free speech.”
But of the five groups thus far named by Gove, three are prominent Muslim organizations, including the Muslim Association of Britain, the biggest Muslim advocacy organization in the nation. Gove told MPs that the Association is the British affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood and, together with the two others identified, “give rise to concern for their Islamist orientation and beliefs.”
Gove also fingered the far-right British National Socialist Movement and Patriotic Alternative as groups that promote neo-Nazi ideology.
Why, countered critics, is a “list” even necessary? How can it be transparent and fair? What’s the evidential threshold? Three former Tory home secretaries have warned the government against “politicizing anti-extremism.”
“It is really important that we do not malign the wrong people through the wrong definitions,” Priti Patel told the Guardian, before Gove presented the extremism package. “It is easy, as we have seen historically, to hide behind labels or definitions which sometimes end up being counterproductive. None of this should ever be political. It has to strike the right balance between free speech and how we bring communities together.”
The government’s own independent reviewer of state threat legislation described the undertaking as labelling of people as extremists by “ministerial decree,” concerned by the lack of safeguards and appealsproof framing of the overhauled definition. “The definition focus on ideas, on ideology, not action … Moving the focus from ideology or ideas is an important one because I think people will be entitled to say: ‘What business is it of the government what people think, unless they do something with that?’ ” Jonathan Hall told the Guardian.
It’s expected that more groups will be named in the coming weeks.
Leading counterterror and extremism experts have expressed deep concerns as well and upwards of 50 survivors of terrorist attacks — including the Manchester Arena bombing of 2017 and the London Bridge attack in 2019 — have signed an open letter warning politicians to cease conflating British Muslims with extremism. The letter stated: “To defeat this threat the single most important thing we can do is isolate the extremists and the terrorists from the vast majority of British Muslims who deplore such violence.”
Several groups — from Just Stop Oil to Greenpeace to Palestine Action (which has organized many of the protests over the past five months) — have already threatened legal action and demanded a judicial review for any organization that falls afoul of the definition.
It was the government’s Commissioner for Countering Extremism who last weekend claimed that London has become a “no-go zone for Jews” during marches demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. And former Conservative party deputy chair Lee Anderson who was suspended after refusing to apologize for accusing London Mayor Sadiq Khan of being under the control of Islamists — wildly racist stuff from a Tory-meister in a party that has now anointed itself as definer of extremism.
The extremity of doctrine, wielded by politicians, is the truer menace to society, in the U.K. and in Canada.
Governments are never more baleful than when cloaking themselves in virtue — by way of shielding us from what they’ve decreed to be harmful