I need an introduction that may be long, so bear with me.
In my comments, I will disregard and not consider disinformation like calls that send someone to the wrong poll or anything covered by the Criminal Code.
In talking about junk news, fake news, whatever, in the Cold War, and especially in war times, propaganda was one of the best tools in town to make sure that your message, whatever it was, went through. This, and magazines, photos in Middle East countries, in which you see food, everyone at the table, big cars, well-dressed people, just to push the population against their own government....
At the time, sending a thousand letters for publicity, whatever it was, cost a fortune. You had to send one or two pages. Today you send five million to 10 million emails in a clickâno cost.
I will submit for your consideration that you are looking at the problem from the wrong end. That's my hypothesis. We try to focus on those who provide this information and bad content, and try to regulate company's social media because they do things that are not good, probably because people are too lazy to do their own cross-checking and verification of information. By the way, we don't prevent people from seeing specific information. We just download a huge amount of information and you don't see where you are anymore.
From a regulatory standpoint, how do you expect me as a government to act on those companies that are sending this kind of content without touching their freedom of speech?