Censorship Industrial Complex
Here’s what Canadians need to know about Trudeau’s proposed Online Harms Act
From LifeSiteNews
On this week’s episode of The Van Maren Show, Jonathon speaks with Andrew Lawton about Canada’s proposed Online Harms Act, why Christians and conservatives would be the primary targets, whether or not it can be defeated, and more.
Andrew Lawton joins Jonathon on this week’s episode of The Van Maren Show to discuss the Online Harms Act, Canada’s proposed internet “hate speech” law.
Lawton begins the show addressing the confusion surrounding Bill C-63, pointing out that it does contain things “sensible” people would support, such as provisions concerning child sexual exploitation and terrorist content. However, the bill treats “online hate” in the same way as child exploitation and terror, Lawton observes.
He states that the “hate” portion of the legislation is a reintroduction of section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act – something the previous Conservative government of Canada managed to get rid of in 2013. The reintroduced section, however, “supercharges” the original proposal’s language, giving the Human Rights Tribunal the ability to prosecute people for “hate speech” online and forcing social media companies to take down offending content.
“As anyone who’s paid any attention to these sorts of issues can tell you, this is just a recipe for disaster when you give government that authority to define and then to execute,” says Lawton.
He also addresses the “Orwellian” aspect of the bill, observing that it allows people to be prosecuted while they have yet to commit an offense. In other words, if someone suspects someone else of future “hate propaganda” or a future “hate crime,” then any Canadian, whether it be an average Canadian or the attorney general, can appear before a judge and argue that a would-be perpetrator be arrested.
Lawton also notes that sentencing for “hate motivated offenses” – any crime such as vandalism or murder that is motivated by “hate” – can carry a lifetime prison sentence rather than the normal criminal sentence. While people have responded to this worry by saying that judges won’t use that power, Lawton says he doesn’t “like legislation where the only guardrail against abuse is just, ‘Trust us.’”
The language used by the bill itself is broad, Lawton says, maintaining that its drafters have no concern for free speech issues. “Justice Minister [Arif Virani] … was asked about this, and his only justification for how is this going to protect free speech was, ‘Oh well, the law requires that we respect the Charter,’” Lawton notes. “Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to do it. It just means you’re supposed to do it.”
Lawton further addresses an apparent enforcement problem, saying he does not expect the law to be enforced the same way for someone who commits arson against a synagogue or mosque as for someone who commits the same crime targeting a church. Lawton observes that the “political class” treats these offenses differently, and he suspects that since the “judicial class” is appointed by the “political class,” then it will follow the former.
“Already there is a sense that this is not going to be protecting all groups equally,” Lawton opines.
“When you bring that into the speech realm … I don’t think that you’re right to make gender critical comments as a feminist, say, is going to be upheld as much as your right to make trans-friendly comments if you’re a trans activist. And I think right here we have the case of these administrative bodies, these tribunals that have to pick and choose the winners of whose free speech matters more than the other.”
When Jonathon asks Lawton if he suspects Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is pushing the legislation because of a potential Liberal defeat in the next election, Lawton responds by noting that Trudeau first tabled the legislation in 2021 the day before he dissolved Parliament and called for an election, suggesting that Trudeau believes in the legislation. He also believes that Trudeau sees it as a “political win.” He admits that this prospect unsettles him, observing that most are no longer likely to defend freedom of speech as they once did. Later in the episode, he also opines that criticism of the legislation will not stop Trudeau from pushing it.
Lawton further notes that “a lot of” Canadians have not given critical thought to the “edge cases of things that they care about,” observing that if one were to ask Canadians if they support free speech, most would answer positively, and that people would “generally agree” if they were asked if the government should regulate “hate speech.” The problem, he notes, is how to define “hate speech” and what it actually entails.
Lawton, looking at how the issue will pan out, believes that the bill will indeed pass one day, but he makes note of two issues. First, he says there is a question of what happens in parliamentary committee, stating that committees have a “significant role,” especially in minority governments. He says this has been made clear by parliamentary discussion on Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). What he would like to see happen is that the parties agree to split the bill in committee, one bill dealing with child sexual exploitation and the other dealing with “hate,” but suspects that there will not be opposition to it either way.
“The best that the Conservatives could hope for is some level of dilution in the committee stage, but it won’t be what it needs to be, which is just killing the bill outright,” Lawton suspects.
Should the bill pass, however, Lawton observes that regulations surrounding the legislation would still need to be written by the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC), and that social media companies would have to respond to it. It would be in the Conservatives’ interest, he asserts, that it would not be fully implemented by the time of the next election, since it would be easier to undo it.
Further, Lawton says it would send a “chill” and that people will become “leery” of what they say, while others like himself will look at the CHRC and say “come at me,” and still others will not wish to deal with it. He once again points to the reaction of social media companies, however, and says that their response will be “fascinating,” given how Facebook blocked news in Canada rather than abide by government regulations.
Lawton closes the interview observing that the legislation targets speech that is “likely to foment detestation or vilification” of people based on a “prohibited ground of discrimination,” while offensive, disdaining, humiliating, hurtful, or speech expressing dislike, is allowed.
“What I would tell Canadians is that if you think that your speech at some point will not be targeted by this, you listen to that definition and tell me where the line is between disdain and detestation, or the line between dislike or vilification, and ask whether you trust the government to draw that line fairly,” he says.
Lawton adds that the fight against the bill is “winnable” and notes there is more discussion on the issue now than there was when it was last introduced, given events in Great Britain and Ireland over “hate speech” policy, and hopes that people in Canada don’t have to experience prosecution in order to know why the bill was a bad idea.
The Van Maren Show is hosted on numerous platforms, including Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, iTunes, and Google Play.
From Reclaim The Net
By Cindy Harper
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Joe Rogan has accused YouTube of making it difficult for users to find his recent interview with former President Donald Trump, saying that the platform initially only displayed short clips from mainstream media instead of the full episode. Rogan sarcastically remarked on YouTube’s actions, saying, “I’m sure it was a mistake at YouTube where you couldn’t search for it. Yeah. I’m sure it was a mistake. It’s just a mistake.”
In episode 2200, Rogan explained that even though his team contacted YouTube multiple times, the episode remained difficult to find. X CEO Elon Musk intervened, contacting Spotify CEO Daniel Ek about the issue. (Spotify exclusively licenses The Joe Rogan Experience but allows the show on third-party platforms like YouTube.) Watch the video clip here. Rogan noted the explosive viewership once the content was available, with the episode racking up “six and a half million views on mine and eight plus million on his.”
Emphasizing the episode’s broad reach, Rogan expressed frustration with the initial suppression, stating, “You can’t suppress shit. It doesn’t work. This is the internet. This is 2024. People are going to realize what you’re doing.” He pointed to the significance of this episode’s reach, asking, “If one show has 36 million downloads in two days, like that’s not trending? Like what’s trending for you? Mr. Beast?” Describing the power of YouTube’s algorithmic influence, Rogan claimed the algorithm worked against the interview’s visibility, only showing clips instead of the full conversation. According to him, when YouTube initially fixed the issue, users had to enter highly specific keywords, like “Joe Rogan Trump interview,” to find the episode. Rogan argued that YouTube’s gatekeeping reflected an ideological stance, remarking, “They hate it because ideologically they’re opposed to the idea of him being more popular.” He suggested that major tech platforms, such as YouTube and Facebook, which hold significant influence, often push agendas that favor specific narratives, stating, “They didn’t like that this one was slipping away. And so they did something.” In a telling moment, Rogan noted the impact of the initial suppression, explaining how “the interactions…dropped off a cliff because people couldn’t find it.” He claimed that this caused viewers either to give up or settle for short clips, leading to a dip in views before the episode gained traction on Spotify and X. |
Since there's an issue with searching for this episode on YouTube here is the full podcast with Trump pic.twitter.com/sl2GTUaWdE
— Joe Rogan (@joerogan) October 29, 2024
From the Brownstone Institute
For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.
It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.
Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.
Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.
The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.
In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.
It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.
What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.
We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”
When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.
Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years, Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.
Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.
Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.
This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.
Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.
Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.
No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.
One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.
As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.
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