I think self-regulation is absolutely insufficient. What Facebook in particular has been doing in reaction to the pressure now being put on them is good. We need to continue seeing those things.
Professor Pal brought up the example of making a repository of some election advertisements available voluntarily. Yes, that's great, and I am happy that happens, but as Professor Pal also mentioned, they could take that away and we would have absolutely no recourse. Elections Canada would then be left vulnerable because they decided to rely on something that was not legally mandated. If that's taken away during an election, we have a huge risk to our democracy and our democratic system.
We also need to remember that these are major international companies. They are not going to have the specifics of the Canadian population in mind when they're designing their self-regulation. Thinking about the Canadian population, we have large parts of the northern bit of Canada that are very reliant on Facebook as their main source of connection to political information. If Facebook is not actually able to pay attention to the nuances of aboriginal populations in Canada and the ways they share information, then those people are potentially underserved in a way that is counter to our democracy and potentially really marginalizing.
Why would we expect the people at Facebook who are making decisions about how Facebook will roll out all across the world to understand the specific Canadian context in those particular areas? That would be unreasonable, I think, to place on them and just say, “Oh yes, they'll take care of it.” In fact, we need the Canadian government to be the one standing up for Canadian citizens.