Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you very much for coming. We're very pleased that you're here, because we're in the final stages of this study. I think that as legislators we're looking across party lines, though I can't speak for my colleagues over there, and I never would try to. We don't want reactive legislation. We want legislation that works so that we can allow the platforms to develop. To us, at least those of us in the New Democratic Party, the enormous possibility for democratic engagement is an essential element.
We think we have a strong privacy regime in Canada. We believe Canadians really value their privacy. They are crazy users of social media—they're all over—but they still want that balance. The question is, how do we strike that balance?
I'd like to ask you about some of the experience with Twitter, because its set-up is different from, say, Facebook's, so it has different strengths and weaknesses. Because of the anonymity features, we've seen a number of cases recently of threatened lawsuits, such as that of Lord McAlpine, who threatened 10,000 Twitter users with lawsuits over re-tweeting allegations about him.
This is certainly putting us into new territory in terms of what is libel and where libel applies. When someone says they're going to sue 10,000 people, 9,000 of them for re-tweeting something that damaged someone's reputation, how does Twitter work with that? Do you say you have to bring a production order to get the data on these anonymous names? Some of them might be obvious, but the vast majority will have an anonymous handle, so how does Twitter deal with those kinds of situations?