Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I'd like to thank our witnesses. You're providing very important testimony to us this morning.
I want to note very clearly that the government already interferes massively in the marketplace, giving over $1 billion in indirect subsidies each and every year to Meta and Google. Meta and Google, with fat profits and all of the despicable practices they have shown, have been heavily subsidized from the Harper government to today with over $1 billion a year. That obviously has influenced the market and has led in part to the crisis we are experiencing now.
I'd like to start my questions with Madam Benavidez.
Thank you very much for your testimony.
It's chilling, what you're saying. The first part of what you said, which I believe is important to follow up on, was on the rise in hate. As you pointed out, the Center for Countering Digital Hate has pointed to Meta and X contributing to what the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have called “the pipeline of hate”.
We've seen a rise in anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny and racism, with racist attacks seen right across North America. They were all provoked by Meta's secret algorithms, which attempt to foster and provoke, through what the Center for Countering Digital Hate calls “malgorithms”, that rise in far-right extremism. We certainly saw last year that every single ideologically motivated mass killing in North America was caused by the far right.
Madam Benavidez, I want to ask you what governments should be doing to counter this pipeline of hate that is contributing to real-world killings as a result of being fostered online by these malgorithms and deliberate policies that help stoke engagement in all of its toxic forms?