Any abridgement of freedom of expression must, therefore, be only the barest minimum necessary to preserve the dignity and security of citizens.
We believe that Canadian laws defining illicit hate speech are sufficient for that purpose, and the scope of proscribed speech need not and should not be expanded further. Legal, regulatory and social media frameworks fall short, not in defining hate but in identifying it and quarantining it before the virus spreads and wreaks its damage.
We do not underestimate the scale of the challenge that legislators and social media firms face. During the two and half hours set aside for this hearing, there will be 54 million new tweets and 4.7 billion new Facebook posts, comments and messages.
For your consideration, here are our recommendations.
First, social media firms must, either voluntarily or under legal compulsion, adhere to a set of industry standards on the speed with which they review reports that posts violate Canadian anti-hate laws or their platforms' own terms of service. For example, the European Union standards require firms to review a majority of reports within one day.
Second, social media firms should be required to have specific conduits to prioritize complaints from trusted institutions about offending content. A complaint from a children's aid society, for one, should be treated with immediate concern.
Third, there must be financial consequences for firms that fail to remove illegal content within a set period—penalties severe enough to make the costs of inaction greater than the costs of action. Germany's network enforcement act sets fines as high as 50 million euros when illegal posts stay up for more than 24 hours.
Fourth, social media firms should be required to publish regular transparency reports providing anonymized information on, among other issues, the performance of their machine learning systems at automatically intercepting proscribed posts; the speed with which firms respond to complaints from victims, trusted institutions and the public at large; and the accuracy of their responses to complaints as measured by a system of third party random sampling of posts that have been removed and posts that have been allowed to stand.
Fifth, social media firms must be more forthcoming in revealing the factors and weightings they use to decide what posts are prioritized to their users. They must give users greater and easier control to adjust those settings. Too often social media platforms privilege content that engages users by stoking fear and hatred. A business model based on dividing our communities should be no more acceptable than one based on burning down our cities.
Sixth, Parliament should enact the necessary appropriations and regulations to ensure that CSIS and the Communications Security Establishment have both the mandate and the means to identify and disrupt organized efforts by hostile state and transnational actors who exploit social media to sow hatred and polarization amongst Canadians in an effort to destabilize our nation.
Seventh, Parliament should consider legislative instruments to ensure that individuals and organizations that engage in incitement to hatred bear vicarious civil liability for any violent and harassing acts committed by third parties influenced by their posts.
Eighth, the federal government should fund school programs to build young Canadians' abilities to resist polarization and hatred, and to cultivate critical thinking and empathy. The best defence against hatred is a population determined not to hate.
Finally, especially in this election year, I would put it to you that parliamentarians must lead by example. Everyone in this room knows that the guardians of our democracy are not ministers but legislators. We look to you to stand between our leaders and the levers of power to ensure that public office and public resources are used only in the public interest. More than that, we look to you to be the mirror of our better selves and to broker the mutual understanding that makes it possible for a vast and pluralistic society to thrive together as one people and one country.
During the upcoming campaign, you and your parties will face your own choices on social media: whether to campaign by degrading your opponents, whether to animate your supporters through appeals to anger or whether to summon the better angels of our natures. Your choices will set the tone of social media this summer more decisively than any piece of legislation or any regulation you might enact. I hope you will rise to the occasion.
Thank you.