I think you've hit the nail on the head. This is perhaps the hardest one for us. That is because speech is nuanced, so we do want to make sure we take a nuanced approach, that we don't overcensor people. Obviously the way we look at it is if there is speech that is directed at a particular group, that is an attack on a particular group, whether by race or by sexual orientation, for example, then those things would be prohibited by our community standards.
I would also say, though, what we've discovered as we work through these issues is that in fact, depending which community you're talking about and what the local contexts are, sometimes people might actually use code words, or even emoticons, to represent something. It would be a slur if we knew it were a slur, but it actually is known in the local community, not more broadly to the public. That's the real challenge. The work we're undertaking now is to work with local partners to better understand what are the kinds of specific words in specific communities that are equally damaging, hurtful and hateful and try to remove those.
One example, I can tell you, is the word spelled S-Q-U-A-W, which is a word that's used in a derogatory manner to attack indigenous women. That is one of the words that we have through our consultations picked up and used to refine our list of slurs so that we can more properly enforce our community standards in Canada.
