Online harms debate pits real threats against elaborate fears

Announcing the government's new online harms legislation on Monday, Justice Minister Arif Virani led with the realities the bill is supposed to address.

After introducing two women who spoke about their own experiences with child abuse and harassment, Virani said his bill would create three "overarching obligations" for major online platforms: "a duty to protect children, a duty to act responsibly and the duty to remove the most egregious content."

Specifically, Virani said, C-63 "targets the worst of what we see online, content that sexually victimizes children or revictimizes survivors, intimate content shared without consent, content that incites violence, extremism or terrorism, or foments hatred and content that is used to bully a child or induce a child to self-harm."

Virani then made a point of underlining what he says the bill won't do.

"It does not undermine freedom of speech," the minister said.

That statement almost certainly was aimed at Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who rejected the bill last week before getting a chance to read it.

Asked about the impending legislation last Wednesday — five days before it was tabled in the House of Commons — Poilievre described it as "Justin Trudeau's latest attack on freedom of expression," part of a "woke authoritarian agenda" that would see Trudeau ban "unacceptable views."

"Go down the list of things that Justin Trudeau disapproves of and you can imagine all of the things that will be criminalized," Poilievre said.

The Conservative leader's predictions had something in common with his party's opposition to an earlier piece of legislation, the Online Streaming Act. The government introduced and passed that bill with the stated purpose of compelling major Internet platforms to promote and support Canadian content. The Conservatives said it was "censorship."

It might be tempting to conclude that the Conservatives are simply opposed to all regulation of the Internet — and willing to indulge the worst fears of their supporters. But then, Poilievre also has said a government led by him would compel websites showing pornographic content to verify the ages of their users.

The Conservatives also can't quite claim to be completely opposed to restrictions on speech. Poilievre was a minister in a Conservative government that made it a crime to promote terrorism. His deputy leader, Melissa Lantsman, has said that the "glorification of terror" should not be allowed.

Poilievre may have been disappointed on Monday afternoon when the legislation was finally tabled. After running their intentions through multiple rounds of consultations, the government ended up with a rather narrow piece of legislation.

Platforms will be required to produce "digital safety plans" to mitigate the risk that users will be exposed to harmful content, and they will be subjected to new oversight and transparency requirements. But they will only be required to remove two types of content — material that sexually victimizes a child and intimate content posted without consent. 

The legislation does not deal with "misinformation" or "disinformation" and it does not cover private communication — thus avoiding some of the most fraught questions about the digital world.