The Canadian government has just announced the conclusion of its national security review of TikTok and arrived at a curious conclusion: it plans to ban the company from operating in Canada but the app will remain available here. I wrote earlier this year about the need for better laws to counter the risks associated with TikTok, rather than banning the app altogether. That post came in response to U.S. legislation that proposed to ban the app, but which is now in doubt given the results of yesterday’s U.S. Presidential election. There may well be good reasons to ban the app if it poses security and privacy risks that differ from those of other platforms, but banning the company rather than the app may actually make matters worse since the risks associated with the app will remain but the ability to hold the company accountable will be weakened.
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Why the Conspiratorial Responses to Canada’s Antisemitism Guide Demonstrate Its Necessity
Delegates from dozens of countries gathered nearly 25 year ago in Stockholm, Sweden for the Stockholm International Forum, where they affirmed a global commitment to combatting racism, antisemitism, ethnic hatred, and ignorance of history. That meeting sparked what became a 16-year open process to develop much-needed anti-racism tools, including the creation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.
Antisemitism is generally understood as a certain perception of Jews that veers into hatred, but specific examples can be helpful for those seeking to apply policies in the workplace, codes in educational environments, or standards for government funding programs. The IHRA definition, which is non-legally binding, seeks to fill the void by including both general principles and specific examples. It has struck a chord with endorsements from 45 countries and hundreds of provincial and local governments. And Canada has been a leader in this regard: the federal government adopted it in 2019 as part of its anti-racism strategy and the majority of provinces have followed suit with their own support measures.
Combatting antisemitism should not be controversial, yet a new Canadian effort to provide governments, businesses, and schools with greater clarity on implementing the IHRA definition has sparked opposition from the NDP and even outrage in some quarters.
CRTC Approves Google’s $100 Million Online News Act Exemption Deal
The government’s deeply flawed attempt to force tech platforms to pay Canadian news outlets for linking to news is nearing its payout. The CRTC this week formally exempted Google from negotiating individual agreements and facing a potential mandated arbitration system in return for a lump sum $100 million annual payment. The $100 million deal was the government’s last ditch attempt to salvage the Online News Act as its insistence that tech platforms would never walk away from news proved to be disastrously wrong. Within weeks of the former Bill C-18 receiving royal assent in June 2023, Meta blocked news links on its Facebook and Instagram platforms. The block has remained in place for more than a year, causing significant harm to news outlets and sparking a CRTC investigation into whether user attempts to evade the block bring the company within the scope of the law.
When Antisemitism No Longer Shocks
Last week, Green College, an interdisciplinary graduate college on the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, hosted a medieval workshop titled The Writing of Ancient Christianity in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. As the title would suggest, the workshop was highly specialized and of limited interest to anyone outside of the scholarly field. Yet, as my Hub opinion piece notes, the presence of a professor of Jewish Law and Ethics alongside academics from the University of Haifa and Hebrew University in Jerusalem placed a target on the workshop that sparked online harassment of participants as well as vandalism and graffiti that called for the removal of Zionists on the walls of the college.
Few Canadians heard about the incident at UBC. They similarly were likely unaware that last week the University of Windsor’s Board of Governors refused to consider a motion to examine a controversial agreement arising from last summer’s encampment protests on the spurious grounds that the deal falls outside of its purview.
Is Meta Offside the Online News Act? The CRTC Wants to Know.
Meta has blocked news links on its Facebook and Instagram platforms for more than a year in response to the Online News Act, resulting in significant lost traffic to many Canadian news sites. The company’s position has been pretty clear from the start: the law applies to digital news intermediaries that make “news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada.” By blocking news links, the company believes that it falls outside the definition and therefore is not required to register with the CRTC and enter into negotiations for payments to Canadian news outlets. After Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge repeatedly urged the CRTC to examine the issue, this week the Commission sent a letter to Meta giving it seven days to comment on “what measures Meta is taking to comply with the Act, and whether news is being made available on Meta’s platforms.”
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