Censorship Industrial Complex
Elon Musk skewers Trudeau gov’t Online Harms bill as ‘insane’ for targeting speech retroactively
From LifeSiteNews
It literally spits in the face of all Western legal traditions, especially the one about only being punished if you infringed on a law that was valid at the time of committing a crime
Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk remarked that it is “insane” that the Trudeau government’s proposed “Online Harms” bill would target internet speech retroactively if it becomes law.
“This sounds insane if accurate!” wrote Musk on Tuesday, in reply to an X (formerly Twitter) user named Camus who detailed that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government’s Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, could see Canadians fined or even jailed for things posted on the internet prior to the bill becoming law.
Camus noted how Bill C-63 could give police “the power to retroactively search the Internet for ‘hate speech’ violations and arrest offenders, even if the offence occurred before the law existed.”
A brief time later, X’s “CommunityNotes” program – a system in which users collectively “fact-check” information shared on the site –confirmed what Camus had written was accurate, quoting a section of the bill’s text.
“Part 3 of Bill C-63, which is still at first reading stage and is not yet law, adds to the Canadian Human Rights Act: ‘a person communicates or causes to be communicated hate speech so long as the hate speech remains public and the person can remove or block access to it,’” CommunityNotes wrote.
Camus observed about Bill C-63 that the “Trudeau regime has introduced an Orwellian new law.”
“This new bill is aimed at safeguarding the masses from so-called ‘hate speech,’” he wrote. “The real shocker in this bill is the alarming retroactive aspect. Essentially, whatever you’ve said in the past can now be weaponized against you by today’s draconian standards.”
Camus observed how historian Dr. Muriel Blaive has weighed in on “this draconian law,” labeling it outright “mad.”
“She points out how it literally spits in the face of all Western legal traditions, especially the one about only being punished if you infringed on a law that was valid at the time of committing a crime,” wrote Camus.
Bill C-63 was introduced by Liberal Minster Attorney General Arif Virani on February 26 and was immediately blasted by constitutional experts as troublesome.
The bill, if passed, will modify existing laws, amend the Criminal Code as well as the Canadian Human Rights Act, in what the Liberals claim will target certain cases of internet content removal, notably those involving child sexual abuse and pornography.
However, the bill also seeks to police “hate” speech online with broad definitions, severe penalties, and dubious tactics.
Trudeau’s new bill a ‘terrible attack’ on speech, Musk warns
On Tuesday, well-known Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson replied to Musk by saying about Bill C-63, “It’s much much worse than you have been informed: plans to shackle Canadians electronically if accusers fear a ‘hate crime’ might (might) be committed.”
“It’s the most Orwellian piece of legislation ever promoted in the West.”
Musk replied to Peterson by saying Bill C-63 is “[a] terrible attack on the rights of Canadians to speak freely!”
Other notable X users, such as Canadian lawyer David Freiheit, who is known online as Viva Frei, confirmed Musk’s concern that Bill C-63 could go after X users from posts/tweets made long ago.
“It’s pretty close to accurate, Elon. If someone has the ability to delete a ‘hate speech’ tweet / post and does not, and someone else retweets that tweet, it would qualify as ‘publication’ under the law and be sanctionable,” he wrote.
Details of the new legislation to regulate the internet show the bill could lead to more people jailed for life for “hate crimes” or fined $50,000 and jailed for posts that the government defines as “hate speech” based on gender, race, or other categories.
The bill also calls for the creation of a digital safety commission, a digital safety ombudsperson, and a digital safety office.
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) has said Bill C-63 is “the most serious threat to free expression in Canada in generations. This terrible federal legislation, Bill C -63, would empower the Canadian Human Rights Commission to prosecute Canadians over non-criminal hate speech.”
In a recent podcast, Peterson and Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy warned of the “totalitarian” impact Trudeau’s new Online Harms bill will have on Canada.
Peterson observed that the Trudeau government is effectively “establishing an entirely new bureaucracy” with an “unspecified range of power with non-specific purview that purports to protect children from online exploitation” but has the possibility of turning itself into an internet “policing state.”
Brownstone Institute
Freedumb, You Say?
From the Brownstone Institute
By
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health”
Didn’t give much thought to freedom until four years ago, at age 63. Freedom was just there, like the water surrounding a goldfish. And then the Covid-19 pandemic blew in, the world locked down, and admonitions to “stay the ‘$^#&’ home” blazed through social media. No freedom was too important to discard in the name of public safety: jobs, family businesses, artistic endeavours, public meetings, social connections that kept despair at bay, all took a backseat to the grim business of saving grandma (who ended up getting Covid anyway). No discussion of moral or practical trade-offs, no pushback from the press, nothing. It felt wrong to me on a cellular level.
Apparently I was the only one in my middle-class liberal circle to harbour misgivings about this astonishing new world. If I tried, ever so timidly, to articulate my concerns on Facebook or Twitter, the online warriors shot back with a string of epithets. “Go lick a pole and catch the virus,” said one. “Crawl back into your cave, troglodyte,” said another. And my all-time favourite: “You’re nothing but a mouth-breathing Trumptard.”
From the get-go, I perceived Covid as more of a philosophical problem than a scientific one. As I wrote on more than one occasion, science can inform our decisions, but not dictate them. What ultimately powers our choices are the values we hold. I saw Covid as a morality play, with freedom and safety cast as the duelling protagonists, and it looked like safety was skipping to an easy victory.
It was a heady time for the health bureaucrats, whose increasingly arcane rules betrayed a naked impulse to control: the Canadian high-school students required to use masks on both their faces and their wind instruments during band practice, the schoolchildren forced (for hygiene reasons) to study on their knees for hours in an Alaska classroom, the “glory-hole” sex advised by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. The lack of public pushback against these absurdities heightened my awareness of the fragility of our freedoms.
One of the earliest memes to surface during the pandemic was “muh freedumb.” The locution became a shorthand for a stock character – a tattooed man wearing camo gear and a baseball cap, spewing viral particles while yelling about his rights. A selfish idiot. The memes kept coming: “Warning, cliff ahead: keep driving, freedom fighter.” “Personal freedom is the preoccupation of adult children.” Freedom, for centuries an aspiration of democratic societies, turned into a laughing stock.
Eventually, pro-freedom voices began trickling into the public arena. I wasn’t alone, after all. There were others who understood, in the words of Telegraph writer Janet Daley, that the institutional response to Covid-19 had steamrolled over “the dimension of human experience which gives meaning and value to private life.” Lionel Shriver decried how “across the Western world, freedoms that citizens took for granted seven months ago have been revoked at a stroke.” And Laura Dodsworth brought tears to my eyes when she wrote, in her 2021 book A State of Fear, that she feared authoritarianism more than death.
Once the vaccines rolled out, the war on freedom of conscience went nuclear. If you breathed a word against the products, or even the mandates, you were “literally killing people.” The hostility towards the “unvaxxed” culminated in a Toronto Star front page showcasing public vitriol, splashed with such sentiments as: “I honestly don’t care if they die from Covid. Not even a little bit.”
This, too, felt viscerally wrong. I knew several people who had refused the vaccine, and they all had well-articulated reasons for their stance. If they didn’t fully trust the “safe and effective” bromide recycled by all government and pharmaceutical industry spokespeople, I could hardly blame them. (And I say this as someone who writes for Big Pharma and got five Covid shots.)
One of the most deplorable casualties of Covid culture was freedom of expression, a core principle in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Experts speaking publicly about the harms of lockdown faced systematic ostracism from mainstream media, especially left-wing news outlets. By early 2021, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 83 governments worldwide had used the Covid-19 pandemic to violate the lawful exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly.
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health,” the group wrote in a media release. “The victims include journalists, activists, healthcare workers, political opposition groups, and others who have criticized government responses to the coronavirus.”
But what about misinformation? Doesn’t it kill people? Newsflash: misinformation has always existed, even before TikTok. It’s up to each of us to sift the credible folks from the cranks. The best defence against misinformation is better information, and it’s the policy wonks’ job to provide it. Modern science itself depends on this tug-of-war of ideas, which filters out weaker hypotheses and moves stronger ones ahead for further testing.
Besides, misinformation comes not just from cranks, but from “official sources” – especially those tasked with persuading the public, rather than informing it. Remember when Rochelle Walensky, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, asserted that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus?” Or when Anthony Fauci maintained that getting vaccinated makes you a “dead end” in the chain of transmission? I rest my case.
The marketplace of ideas is like a souk, with a lot of hollering and arguing and the odd snatched purse – and that’s exactly how it should be. It’s an ingenious and irreplaceable process for getting to the truth. There are few ideas too sacrosanct to question or too ridiculous to consider. That’s why, unlike just about everyone in my left-leaning circle, I take no issue with Elon Musk’s shakedown of the old Twitter, now the Wild West of X.
Under Musk’s algorithms, my feed has become a true philosophical souk, with wildly disparate views smashing into each other, leaving me to sift through the rubble in search of a gold nugget or two. Love him or hate him, Musk offers a much-needed counterweight to the ideological lockstep in much of the mainstream media. And when it comes to free speech, Musk has put his money where his mouth is: when media personality Keith Olbermann recently hopped on X, where he boasts a million followers, to call for Musk’s arrest and detainment, Musk made no move to censor him. Works for me.
While the “old normal” has thankfully returned to our daily lives, save the odd mask in a shopping mall or subway car, the stench of censorship that blew in with the pandemic has yet to dissipate. An obsession with disinformation permeates the zeitgeist, spurring lawmakers in several Western countries to censor the flow of thoughts and ideas that gives a free society its pulse.
We cannot excise personal freedom from a democratic society, even in the interests of the “public good,” without poisoning the roots of democracy itself. Article 3 of UNESCO’s 2005 Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights states this plainly: “The interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society.” In our post-pandemic reality, the statement seems almost quaint. Nonetheless, it expresses an enduring truth: that a democracy must never discard the idea of freedom – even in a pandemic.
Freedom desperately needs a comeback from its current incarnation as an expendable frill. In my own small way I’m trying to make this happen: never much of an activist before Covid, I’m now part of a small group preparing to launch a Free Speech Union in Canada, modelled after the highly successful one in the UK. The organisation will offer legal advice to individuals facing censorship, cancellation, or job loss because of their words. I look forward to supporting people caught in this anti-freedom web, including those whose words I heartily disagree with.
My newfound respect for free speech is also what propels me to keep talking about Covid. The response to the pandemic exceeded the bounds of public health, and we need to expose the forces that drove it. Here’s Daley again: “The world went crazy. There is no other way to account for what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of particular liberties and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.” We can’t let it happen again.
Republished from Perspective Media
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