Canada’s justice minister to introduce new bill to tackle harmful online content
By Rachel Aiello
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OTTAWA (CTV Network) — Today, Justice Minister Arif Virani will be tabling a long-awaited piece of legislation proposing new measures aimed at combatting a range of harmful online content.
According to a senior government source who was not authorized to speak publicly about details yet to be made public, the legislation is expected to:
– Put an emphasis on harms to youth including specific child protection obligations for social media and other online platforms including enhanced preservation requirements; – Target seven types of online harms: hate speech, terrorist content, incitement to violence, the sharing of non-consensual intimate images, child exploitation, cyberbullying and inciting self-harm; and – Include measures to crack down on non-consensual artificial-intelligence pornography deepfakes and require takedown provisions for what’s become known as “revenge porn.”
Further, while the source suggested there will be no new powers for law enforcement, multiple reports have indicated the bill will propose creating a new digital safety ombudsperson to field Canadians’ concerns about platforms’ decisions around content moderation.
The bill is being tabled after question period, and that’s when more concrete details of the size and scope of these new rules and reforms will be revealed.
According to the legislative notice given, the bill seek to enact a new “Online Harms Act” and advance amendments to the Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act, as well as laws regarding the mandatory reporting of internet child pornography.
This is not the first time the Liberals have tried to advance legislation to this effect. After experts panned the first proposal as flawed, the government went back to the drawing board, heavily consulting experts and marginalized groups, to reshape its plans.
While until recently this file was in the hands of successive heritage ministers who handled a pair of previous online regulation focused bills for streaming and news content, this likely equally, if not more, controversial piece of legislation is being led by Virani.
Last week he was sworn-in as a special “Minister of State (Online Harms)” specifically to allow for the departmental experts at Canadian Heritage that have been working on this bill for years to be available to the justice minister as the bill winds its way through Parliament.
The justice minister will be holding a press conference on Monday afternoon to discuss the contents of the bill—a long overdue election platform pledge—following a technical briefing led by government officials.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has signalled that the bill will focus on making online spaces safer for Canadian kids, while not censoring the internet for others. Though, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has already prepositioned his party as against the bill, which he’s said is the “latest attack on freedom of expression.”
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