Industry Committee on Feb. 7th, 2024

[Rachel Curran]

I think these are two separate issues. Youth safety and youth exploitation online are a key, critical concern of ours. We just announced the further rollout of an initiative with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children that is going to ensure intimate images and sexploitation are more easily removed from platforms. We're assigning an individual digital code to those images. Youth can do that themselves from their devices without sharing the image. Once that code is received by us and by NCMEC, we can fan out to make sure that those images are not shared more broadly on our platforms and across the Internet.

We are taking a number of steps to make sure that youth are protected on our platforms. It's an ongoing battle, I have to say, and we're working with other members of industry to make sure that youth are protected.

That's very different from the issue of C-18 and online news content, which we have had to remove as a compliance strategy in response to the government's legislation. We didn't want to have to remove that news content. If we are carved out of that bill, we would be happy to put it back up. I'm hopeful that we can continue to work with the government on that front.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

I am almost out of time.

I am really concerned that the response to Bill C-18 is not the same across different countries. The spread of misinformation related to the topics that I've noted is particularly troublesome.

Is there any analysis going on about Bill C-18 and the response by Meta putting youth at greater risk or less risk with the spread of misinformation? Again, your CEO has at least apologized to Americans on this issue, but not to Canadians. In your response to Bill C-18, is there an ongoing analysis on whether it has further harmed and spread misinformation, affecting the mental health of young people who are using your product?

[Rachel Curran]

Again, no other government has pursued legislation like Bill C-18. We would be happy to work with the government to put news content back up, if they are able to carve us out of that bill. The Canadian government is unique in pursuing that particular piece of legislation.

That is separate and apart from our efforts to protect youth on our platforms, which are ongoing. We've had a number of recent announcements in that respect. We're going to continue that work very actively, because it's a key, critical priority for us.

Again, it's quite separate from the issue of news online in Canada, which we have had to remove in response to the government's Online News Act.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you, Mr. Masse.

We are out of time, but I'll just give one more minute to Mr. Perkins for a last question. I hope he remembers this kind gesture when we get to clause-by-clause.

Go ahead, Mr. Perkins.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

I will remember all of your kind gestures, and this is not the first one.

I have just a quick question, Mr. Weigelt.

I met with one earlier witness we had here who said that when it comes to thinking in the future and artificial general intelligence, something missing in the bill is the ability of the government to regulate based on computing power. Should a clause be added to the bill that gives the government the ability to adjust based on computing power as time goes on?

[John Weigelt]

There are different schools of thought around the computing power required for these models. We've certainly seen the European Union put a metric out for that.

There are exciting new developments in what are called small language models, SLMs, and a huge open-source community is building very powerful models. I propose against looking at performance and CPU capacity. Look at capabilities instead and talk about what these models actually do and what they provide.

Again, it's important that we put in place the guardrails to look towards the future so that when these new tools come out, we have powerful regulatory environments that help us protect Canadians against the harm that could arise.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you very much.

Thank you to all of the witnesses today. It's been a fascinating panel. Feel free to share with the committee, through the clerk, in writing, whatever you feel is pertinent for us to consider as we go through this process.

Thank you very much for participating in this meeting.

Meeting adjourned.