Chris Selley on an unusually free-speech oriented comment from Justin Trudeau, who is more commonly heard making threats to shut down speech he doesn’t like:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said something interesting this past week, in a conversation with Vox journalist Liz Plank at the Open Government Partnership Summit in Ottawa. When it comes to regulating social media giants like Facebook, he suggested, governments like Canada’s have to be very, very careful.
“We recognize that the solution doesn’t lie in government’s heavy hand over our internet (and) public spaces,” he said. “Freedom of expression, freedom of speech, is so fundamental to our democracies that … as soon as we say we have to limit hate speech, we have to protect citizens, there are some really tricky decisions we have to (make).”
It’s interesting primarily because Trudeau and various of his ministers have been threatening for what seems like forever to bring the hammer down. “The platforms are failing their users and they’re failing our citizens,” a full-thesp Trudeau intoned in unveiling the government’s buzzword-laden Digital Charter. “They have to step up in a major way to counter disinformation. And if they don’t, we will hold them to account, and there will be meaningful financial consequences.”
Indeed, Trudeau warned Plank that if “partnership” with social media companies doesn’t yield the desired results — whatever those might be; the government has been studiously vague — “we will take measures that we will regret having to take.”
Still it’s nice to see freedom of speech get a shout out from the top. The sabre-rattling act is wearisome, but it’s vastly preferable to the government speech-regulation power trip that a remarkable number of mainstream Canadian voices have been demanding. Perhaps Trudeau realizes that while the government can and should encourage and work with social media companies to weed out national security threats and illegal material, it has no legal grounds to compel those companies to prohibit “disinformation” or “hate speech” as loosely defined by many people calling for serious regulations — which is to say nasty stuff they don’t like.
