[jszymborski]

Not all speech in Canada is protected, and never has been. Even in the US, there are (albeit far more narrow) carve-outs for "harmful" speech (best not yell "fire" in a movie theatre or "bomb" in an airport).

Nobody has been or ever will be jailed for talking about the FLQ crisis and internet searches for pictures of tanks on Canadian streets aren't banned from search engines, but I guess people can go off on their China and USSR comparisons.

[mitthrowaway2]

The problem of holding platforms accountable for enforcing this is a chilling effect: speech that wouldn't be restricted even by the government gets taken down by the platforms as a proactive measure, to err on staying on the right side of the law. This is especially true of speech with nuance. (See GPT & Gemini's heavy-handed self-censorship as an example).

Nobody will be jailed, their posts will just be hidden or removed for non-compliance with the restrictive terms of the private platform.

[jszymborski]

It's a great reason to leave these platforms for more intentional ones with moderation teams you trust.

Community run Mastodon and Bluesky servers are a dime a dozen. Forums are seeing a bit of a resurgence.

If this makes the big corpo social networks less fun and cool to be on, then bring it on!

[mitthrowaway2]

It is, and it would be nice if it worked out that way, but the dynamics of two-sided markets are really sticky. You need more than a strong incentive, because your audience needs to come along too. And even federated platforms might find they don't want to hold the hot potato of legal accountability, and block Canadian IPs rather than try to ensure their moderation meets the Canadian government's standards.

[jszymborski]

And that's why you have community instances that are geographically tied. That's already happening (I mod at CoSocial.ca for instance).

You're right about networks being sticky, but Fedi is flourishing despite it, and if regulation further accelerates enshitification, I've no doubt we'll have a viable alternative to jump to.

[mitthrowaway2]

I do hope so! (Just as I'd hoped that the government's earlier blunderous and heavy-handed fines for news links from Google and Facebook might move Canadians to looking into other sites like DDG, but it didn't seem like that really happened).

What would CoSocial.ca do about the risk of being held legally accountable for "harmful" content on your platform? The incentive to censor such content with a broad brush may be, if anything, stronger for you than for big companies like Facebook which have legal teams. Some content (like hate speech) might be pretty obvious, but there might also be reasonable content that your platform could still risk a legal battle over. What if -- say, it's early 2020 -- and someone writes a post arguing that Health Canada's official advice about masks is incorrect? Now it's your responsibility to decide if the government is going to deem that post "harmful".

[jszymborski]

> but there might also be reasonable content that your platform could still risk a legal battle over

Yah that's totally fair, and like Michael Geist was quoted in the article as saying, the devil is in the details of this bill. I don't know what the letter of the law is here.

> What if -- say, it's early 2020 -- and someone writes a post arguing that Health Canada's official advice about masks is incorrect?

I understand where you are coming from, but I am personally (can't speak for the team) not worried about the legal liability here. If the law simply requires that platforms enforce the current letter of the law re: speech, then we will be just fine. I'll concede again that the devil is in the details of the legislation. If it's a bad law, bad things will happen.

Furthermore, there's usually carve outs for not-huge organisations (this is true of the link tax as well).

FWIW, we've already deleted or limited posts that have been COVID-denialism related when they are disruptive and/or harmful.

[ramblenode]

> carve-outs for "harmful" speech (best not yell "fire" in a movie theatre or "bomb" in an airport)

Just a reminder that the US Constitution does not explicitly have a carve-out. This argument originated from a Supreme Court justice who wanted to establish a legal basis for censoring anti-war speech. The slippery slope does not even need to be speculated about; it was purposefully baked into the "harmful" speech classification from the beginning.