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Censorship Industrial Complex

Internet censorship laws lead a majority of Canadians to believe free speech is threatened: poll

Published

8 months ago

5 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

In light of the barrage of new internet censorship laws being passed or brought forth by the federal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a new survey revealed that the majority of Canadians feel their freedom of speech is under attack.

According to results from a Leger survey conducted April 26-28 that sampled responses from 1,610 Canadians, 57 percent think their freedom of speech is being threatened, with 36 percent not believing this to be true.

Not surprisingly, those with conservative voting intentions, about 76 percent, were the most likely to feel that their free speech is under attack, with 70 percent of the same group as well as those over 55, feeling that Canada is not as free as before.

The survey results also show that 62 percent of Canadians think it is “tougher to voice their opinion in their country, while 27% think it is easier.”

“Conservative voters (70%) and Canadians aged 55 or older (70%) are more likely to think that it is tougher now to express their opinion,” Leger noted in its survey.

Not surprisingly, Liberal voters were the most supportive of placing limits on free speech, with 64 percent agreeing with the following: “There should be limits on freedom of speech to ensure that things such as hate speech, speeches preaching a form of intolerance, or speeches against democracy be prevented from reaching the public.”

The survey also revealed that about one of four conservative voters believe that their views are not socially acceptable.

Sixty percent of conservative voters said that free speech should never be limited in any manner and that one should be able to express their opinions publicly without issue.

Regarding their reasons for free speech being under attack, 11 percent blamed politicians causing more hate, with eight percent saying “right-wing” extremists were to blame, with seven percent blaming woke-minded thinking as the issue. Twenty-nine percent of Canadians felt that a growing lack of respect is to blame, and 13 percent thought it is due to “a degradation of the moral fibre in the country.”

When it comes to internet censorship laws, the most recent one introduced in the House of Commons is a federal government bill that could lead to large fines or jail time for vaguely defined online “hate speech” infractions under Liberal Minster Attorney General Arif Virani’s Bill C-63, or Online Harms Act.

LifeSiteNews recently reported how well-known Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy blasted Trudeau and his government over Bill C-63.

Peterson noted that in his view, Bill C-63 is “designed … to produce a more general regime for online policing.”

“To me, that’s what it looks like,” he said.

Two other Trudeau bills dealing with freedom on the internet have become law, the first being Bill C-11 or the Online Streaming Act that mandates Canada’s broadcast regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), oversee regulating online content on platforms such as YouTube and Netflix to ensure that such platforms are promoting content in accordance with a variety of its guidelines.

Trudeau’s other internet censorship law, the Online News Act, was passed by the Senate in June 2023.

The law mandates that Big Tech companies pay to publish Canadian content on their platforms. As a result, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, blocked all access to news content in Canada. Google has promised to do the same rather than pay the fees laid out in the new legislation.

Critics of recent laws such as tech mogul Elon Musk have said it shows “Trudeau is trying to crush free speech in Canada.”

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Censorship Industrial Complex

UNESCO launches course aimed at ‘training’ social media influencers to ‘report hate speech’

Published on December 13, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

UNESCO’s bills its new ‘training’ initiative as empowering participants to be more credible and resilient while simply turning independent content creators into talking heads for the establishment.

UNESCO and the Knight Center for Journalism launch training courses, e-books, and surveys on disinformation and hate speech for influencers and content creators, big and small.

Last month, UNESCO published the results of a survey called “Behind the Screens: Insights from Digital Content Creators” that concluded that among 500 content creators in 45 countries that had a minimum of 1,000 followers, 62 percent said they did “not carry out rigorous and systematic fact-checking of information prior to sharing it,” while 73 percent expressed “the wish to be trained to do so.”

And lo and behold! UNESCO and the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas have launched a re-education course to brainwash independent creators into thinking like unelected globalists and the legacy media, whose credibility are at an all-time low:

The journalism industry is on high alert as news audiences continue to migrate away from legacy media to social media, and many young people place more trust in TikTokers than journalists working at storied news outlets

“Respondents to the survey expressed interest in taking UNESCO’s free online course designed to equip participants with media and information literacy skills and knowledge,” the report states.

To get an idea of the make-up of those 500 content creators that were surveyed in the UNESCO study:

  • 68 percent were nano-influencers – those with 1,000 to 10,000 followers
  • 25 percent were micro-influencers – those with 10,000 to 100,000 followers
  • 4 percent were macro-influencers – those with 100,000 to 1,000,000 followers
  • 6 percent were mega-influencers – those with over 1,000,000 followers

Only 12.2 percent of the 500 people surveyed produced content under the category of “current affairs/politics and economy” while the majority covered “fashion/lifestyle” (39.3 percent), “beauty” (34 percent), “travel and food” (30 percent), and “gaming” (29 percent).

Equip yourself to combat online misinformation, disinformation, hate speech, and harmful AI content. Collaborate with fellow journalists and content creators to promote transparency and accountability on digital platforms, empowering your audience with the media and information literacy skills they need to navigate today’s information landscape.

In addition to the survey and the online course called “Digital Content Creators and Journalists: How to Be a Trusted Voice Online,” UNESCO and the Knight Center also published an e-book in October called “Content Creators and Journalists: Redefining News and Credibility in the Digital Age.”

This pyramid of propaganda is billed as empowering influencers to be more credible and resilient, but these efforts are also aimed at turning independent content creators into talking heads for the establishment.

 

Despite their expanding outreach, many digital content creators who work independently face significant challenges including the lack of institutional support, guidance, and recognition. — UNESCO, Behind the Screens: Insights from Digital Content Creators, November 2024

How can an independent content creator remain independent if he or she needs institutional support, guidance, and recognition?

This is an attempt by the United Nations to take independence away from the equation, so that its messaging becomes indistinguishable from mainstream, establishment narratives.

And between the survey and the e-book, there is not one, single, solitary example of disinformation or hate speech – save perhaps the claim that denying official climate change narratives is considered disinformation, but that’s highly debatable.

Threats to collective climate action are often perpetuated not only by individual creators but by industries, like fossil fuels, that actively shape public discourse to their advantage.

Speaking of climate change, the e-book contains a lengthy chapter called “Content Creators and Climate Change” that is entirely dedicated to pushing climate activism while claiming climate change disinformation is often perpetuated by coordinated campaigns from fossil fuel industries.

The UNESCO documents place heavy emphasis on disclosing who’s funding content creators while ignoring its partner, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP), and its alleged influence over UNESCO:

The Chinese Communist Party uses UNESCO to “rewrite history” and to “legitimize the party’s rule over regions with large ethnic minorities.”

When held to a mirror, UNESCO comes off as little more than hypocritical with massive conflicts of interests of its own:

One of the biggest ethical questions is knowing from where content creators derive their income.

 

At the same time, UNESCO points readers towards organizations like factcheck.org, which itself is funded by the likes of the U.S. State Department and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, the latter of which holds approximately $2 billion of stock in COVID vaccine manufacturer J&J, according to U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie.

In January 2021, UNESCO, the WHO, UNDP, EU, and the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas ran a similar type of propaganda campaign for so-called COVID vaccine disinformation training for journalists as they are now doing for so-called climate change disinformation for content creators.

Another goal of UNESCO and the Knight Center is to create an environment where content creators snitch on one another under the guise of “hate speech”:

Among those targeted by hate speech, most chose to ignore it (31.5%). Only one-fifth (20.4%) reported it to social media platforms. This indicates an area where UNESCO and its partners could provide valuable training for digital content creators on how to effectively address and report hate speech.

In other words, the U.N. is partnering with journalists to teach influencers how to become victims that need protection.

Hey! Content creators. Were you aware that any criticism against the propaganda that we’ve planted within you means that you were a victim of hate speech? No? Well, climb on board and let’s “effectively address and report hate speech!”

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

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Business

TikTok Battles Canada’s Crackdown, Pitching Itself as a “Misinformation” Censorship Ally

Published on December 11, 2024

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If you’re tired of censorship and surveillance, subscribe to Reclaim The Net.

By Didi Rankovic

TikTok challenges Canada’s decision to shut down its operations, citing its role in combating “misinformation” as a reason the government should let it stay in the country.

In Canada, TikTok is attempting to get the authorities to reverse the decision to shut down its business operations by going to court – but also by recommending itself as a proven and reliable ally in combating “harmful content” and “misinformation.”

Canada last month moved to shut down TikTok’s operations, without banning the app itself. All this is happening ahead of federal elections amid the government’s efforts to control social media narratives, always citing fears of “misinformation” and “foreign interference” as the reasons.

TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, was accused of – via its parent company – representing “specific national security risks” when the decision regarding its corporate presence was made in November; no details have been made public regarding those alleged risks, however.

Now the TikTok Canada director of public policy and government affairs, Steve de Eyre, is telling the local press that the newly created circumstances are making it difficult for the company to work with election regulators and “civil society” to ensure election integrity – something Eyre said was previously successfully done.

In 2021, he noted, TikTok initiated collaboration with Elections Canada (the agency that organizes elections and has the power to flag social media content) which included TikTok adding links to all election-related videos that directed users toward “verified information.”

And the following year, TikTok was invested in monitoring its platform for “potentially violent” content, during the Freedom Convoy protests against Covid mandates.

More recently, TikTok was also on its toes for “foreign interference and hateful content” related to Brampton clashes between Sikhs and Hindus.

This approach, Eyre argues, is now jeopardized because TikTok employees are not present in Canada, who would be able to inform the platform’s decisions in terms of the political and cultural “context” in Canada.

And the political context is that of the Trudeau government playing the election misinformation card indirectly and directly, to put pressure on social sites.

Even though the decision regarding the company’s business operations has been described by Foreign Minister Melanie Joly as “a message to China” – it’s really a message to TikTok, since the app remains available, but has been “put on notice.”
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