Public Safety committee  I think this legislation makes our privacy much worse, actually.

Public Safety committee  I think the necessity and proportionality tests that we've applied are a really important piece here to make sure information is being collected only for appropriate purposes. I think getting those kinds of fixes, which are similar to what Australia has done, will greatly mitigate some of the potential harms of the legislation.

Public Safety committee  I would reinforce what Ms. Robertson said. I think transparency is actually the ally of effective cybersecurity. A lot of mistakes get made when things are stored in the dark. Rather than allowing our security establishments to hoover up the maximum possible amount of information and sit on all of it, I think putting some limits in terms of retaining only information that is strictly necessary and deleting other information at a certain point helps minimize the risk of that information transfer.

Public Safety committee  Hi there. I'm Matt Hatfield, and I'm the executive director of OpenMedia, a grassroots community of 230,000 people in Canada who work together for an open, accessible and surveillance-free Internet. I'm joining you from the unceded territory of the Sto:lo, Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish and Musqueam nations.

Canadian Heritage committee  It's a great question. I think, in many cases, it's not that the algorithms are built to amplify rage, necessarily. It's that they're build to amplify engagement, and rage is one of the most powerful drivers of engagement. I do think we need to look at what might need to change in algorithms to discourage those kinds of dynamics in some cases.

Canadian Heritage committee  It's a fair question. I think lawful but awful speech is a lot of what many people experience daily on platforms that they don't like. There's always going to be quite a bit of that speech, and you really can't regulate away things that are functionally dog whistles, because people will just find new ways of expressing that.

Canadian Heritage committee  Don't make news production follow the algorithm. We don't need news that is viral and emotionally activating. We need quality journalism.

Canadian Heritage committee  It's critical to get more transparency into how algorithms are working. I don't know if they would face legal liability, but certainly they would face bad press in some cases. Frankly, we're regulating in the dark on a lot of these issues. We truly don't always understand what is occurring on platforms and why.

Canadian Heritage committee  It's not looking very good right now. I don't think it is. I live in a small, rural community in Canada called Salt Spring Island, and we're very blessed to still have a local paper. It makes a huge difference to the way the community understands and relates to each other. There needs to be a very serious study on whether some level of public support is needed, but we need to take that problem head-on as a single, coherent problem.

Canadian Heritage committee  Certainly. I think some of those concerns are what we're going to be looking for when we assess the final regulatory agreements that Heritage reaches with Google. I'm concerned that the government has essentially tried to create public support for news on the cheap without doing some of the work of establishing a truly transparent, open system to provide that support.

Canadian Heritage committee  I welcome this committee doing a study because I think it's an open question whether we need some dedicated government support. I think there's a strong case that some types of journalism we need are not commercially viable, but I don't think the CBC should be cannibalizing the funding we need for a diversity of sources.

Canadian Heritage committee  I think it reduces it. It reduces both the innovation and representation of different voices in Canada. Obviously, the CBC has made diversity a huge priority of its own. That's probably good. The CBC can't fully represent that by itself. We need to see a genuine diversity of viewpoints beyond just the editorial line.

Canadian Heritage committee  Good morning. I'm Matt Hatfield. I'm the executive director of OpenMedia, a grassroots community of nearly 280,000 people in Canada who work together for an open, accessible and surveillance-free Internet. I am speaking to you today from the unceded territory of the Tsawout First Nation.

Canadian Heritage committee  Certainly. My apologies. To me, this hearing's topic seems to be pinning down what's wrong with tech platforms and what our government can do about it. I'll try to answer that question very precisely for you. What's wrong with tech platforms and their influence on society? It's three things: their size, their vast asymmetrical data compared to regulators and citizens, and the engagement algorithms that drive their business model.

Canadian Heritage committee  Over 12,000 members of our community asked you for fixes to Bill C-18, and over 20,000 of us raised concerns around the government's first online harms proposal, but that's far from the extent of our community's interest in tech platforms. Over 9,000 OpenMedia community members have demanded more anti-harassment tools and control of our data on online platforms.