Justice Committee on June 6th, 2024

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Mr. Brown, I don't mean to be rude, but you know that our time is limited.

Did I understand correctly that, in your view, the religious exception in the Criminal Code is a good thing and should be retained? Do you think it's right to promote hatred on the basis of a religious text?

[Stephen Brown]

I never said that promoting hatred was acceptable. As for the applicability of your bill, I think it's up to legal experts to determine how it could be—

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Yes, you're right, but there are legal experts who are working on this issue and will continue to do so. I just wanted to get your opinion, but, of course, you don't have to give it to me.

I'd like to come back to the issue of Bill 21, which you mentioned. Obviously, this is the federal Parliament, and the Quebec legislature doesn't concern us. Nonetheless, I'd like to hear what you have to say about the principle. From reading Bill 21, my understanding is that it's relatively simple. It states that everyone is free to practise the religion of their choice and to display whatever religious symbols they choose, regardless of whether they belong to the Jewish community, the Muslim community, the Christian community, the Catholic community or whatever. However, the state must keep its nose out of it, if you'll pardon the expression. The state must remain neutral, it must be secular. This means that the people representing the state—police officers, judges, teachers and so on—must not display a religious preference, so that the people who come into contact with them feel perfectly at ease displaying their own religious preference and have no fear of being discriminated against as a result.

I don't remember how you phrased it, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but can you explain to me in what way the act implies, in your opinion, hatred by the state or amounts to hatred by the state?

[Stephen Brown]

Yes, thank you very much.

Madam Chair, how much time do I have for my answer?

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

You have time.

[Stephen Brown]

All right, thank you very much.

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

You won't necessarily get a minute; however, I have one minute left to ask my questions.

I'm all ears.

[Stephen Brown]

First of all, it's important to say that the so-called state secularism act should first and foremost be called an act to ban the hijab. According to Quebec's premier, it has nothing to do with secularism. As François Legault said in an interview with Patrice Roy, the real reason for passing it was that, sometimes, you have to give the majority something.

What did the Premier of Quebec give the majority? Chocolate bars? No, he was giving away our rights. You know what else he said? He said he was doing it because there were racist people in society. So, according to what the Premier of Quebec said in an interview with Radio-Canada, his government passed Bill 21 to appease racist sentiments and take away minority rights. What's more, the same law stipulates that the state must be neutral, that crosses on top of schools are acceptable, that crosses in hospitals are also acceptable, but that people themselves must be neutral. What exactly is a neutral human being, Mr. Fortin?

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Brown, my time is up.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Yes, that's correct.

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Thank you for your testimony.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

We will now go to Mr. Garrison, please, for six minutes.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I want to thank the witnesses for being with us today, and in particular on this day, which is a difficult one for the Muslim community around the country, and particularly in London. I would like to acknowledge once again that we were privileged in our first session to hear from family and friends from London who talked about the real impacts of Islamophobia on everyday life.

I want to thank Mr. Brown for drawing our attention to the Senate recommendations, and I want to also thank Ms. Hasan for drawing our attention to silence as well as words. I think the point she made is very important, the point that silence often speaks volumes.

I want to turn my questions to Mr. Ahmed. I think it's clear to all of us that identity-based hate is not new, but the phenomenon of the way it's treated on social media is something new.

I have two questions.

First, in your research, have you found that social media have assumed the primary role in promoting hate? Second, who is the hate most likely to be promoted to in online media?

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Mr. Ahmed, you are having difficulties. We will bear with you because I've been informed there's nothing we can do in the room.

Go ahead. Hopefully you're not frozen.

[Imran Ahmed]

Social media, for better or for worse, has become the primary means by which we share information, by which we negotiate our values and by which we negotiate even the corpus of information that we call facts. It has become the main means by which we set our norms of attitude and behaviour. As such, it has a resocializing effect on the off-line world such that with the heightened prevalence of hate and the lies that always underpin hate—lies and hate are inextricably interlinked—what we see is a growing normalization of hateful ideas and hate speech itself.

To address the second part of your question, I think the real issue that we have with the growing prevalence of hate is that it's fed to the people who are victims, and they engage with it. It therefore makes the world seem more hateful and it leads to polarization as a result. It's also fed to the people who have shown some interest in it before, but the truth is that it's also fed to just normal members of the public and therefore has that resocializing effect as well.

Through all three elements, whether it is terrorizing Muslims, encouraging people who hate Muslims or making the general public feel that most people hate Muslims, it has [Technical difficulty—Editor] but nevertheless highly pernicious effects.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

I think one thing we're all focused on with this committee is finding practical things we can do. The online media giants have proven remarkably immune to attempts to get better behaviour from them.

When you talk about financial incentives, do you see any practical things that governments could do to reduce the ability of online media to profit from online hate?

[Imran Ahmed]

Pass comprehensive transparency legislation that opens up the algorithms and opens up their content enforcement policies on how they take decisions, such that if content is taken down or left up, you know what rule they've applied and how they've assessed it. As well, create transparency on the advertising. That is the main reason that social media exists: We are the cattle. Users are the cattle on social media. We're the eyeballs for the real customers, which are the advertisers. We need to have more transparency on how the demands of advertisers affect the way that they present information to us.

Second of all, you need to hold them accountable more effectively, but you can only do that once you have transparency.

Finally, you need to have means for individual and societal recourse or ways to impose costs on these companies if, in their negligence, they cause harm to be dealt to a member of the public. If you are the victim of an attack by someone who was radicalized by being bombarded with hate content online, you should have some way of holding the media accountable.

At a systemic level, Canada should have the ability to tell them to clean up their act or it will impose costs on them for their failure to act. With social media, we have a crisis of inaction by those companies. They feel no pressure. It's time to ratchet up the pressure.

The European Union has passed a Digital Services Act. The United Kingdom has passed an Online Safety Act. Both of them have transparency, accountability and economic responsibility for their negative externalities deeply embedded within the logic of how they operate.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Have you seen in your research any examples of advertisers taking any responsibility for the connection of their ads to the promotion of hate?

[Imran Ahmed]

We did a study, when Elon Musk took over X, that went on the front page of The New York Times, which led to him lose $100 million—he claims—of advertising. I know this because Mr. Musk and the X Corporation then sued us at the Center for Countering Digital Hate for having done the research—for having had the temerity to do the research.

That's another good reason that we need to have transparency: It's to protect those people who are trying to find out what is going on with those platforms.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Thank you very much.

We will now go to our second round with five minutes for MP Van Popta, please.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to all the witnesses for being here with us today to help us navigate through this very difficult and challenging study on combatting Islamophobia.

We're particularly sensitive to the topic today, as it is the third anniversary of the tragic London killings.

Mr. Ahmed, I have been fascinated by your testimony today and also by what I read about you on your organization's website. You were highly critical of social media giants for not delivering on their promise to uphold the Christchurch call to eliminate terrorism and violent extremist content online. You said, as you repeated today as well, that according to your research to date, the social media platforms failed 89% of the time, so they got it right 11% of the time. That's not a good ratio.

My question to you is whether the technology exists for social media platforms to drastically improve this ratio.

In preparing for this committee, I did a little research of my own. Your website pointed me to the term “great replacement theory”, which I didn't know very much about, so I thought I would google it. These are all just ordinary English words—“great”, “replacement” and “theory”—and what popped up on my screen anyways was five or six academic papers and encyclopedic papers explaining what this theory is and being highly critical of it as being racist.

Does the technology exist to distinguish between good uses of the term and bad uses of that term so that people like me, who are just wanting to do honest and open research, aren't cut off?

[Imran Ahmed]

We're talking about social media platforms specifically, and what we're also talking about is what action they take when users report hate to them and that hate is banned under their rules.

What we found was that when you report to them, you hold out your hand asking for help. We hold out our hands asking for justice under the rules that are our responsibilities as users; I'm sure you're a responsible man, and therefore you abide by all the rules of these platforms and don't post hate content. We feel those rules and responsibilities are a reciprocal right that we expect others to abide by too, and that we expect the platform that owns them to enforce. We find that 89% of the time, even when hate is reported to them, they take no action.

This is not about technology; this is about the will to act. If they want to get that up to 100%, invest in trust and safety, invest in content moderation and invest in rule enforcement, or tell us the truth: You don't care. However, either way, we're either being gaslit or they are chronically underspending on rules that they claim they want to enforce.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Thank you.

What role does education play? You have been quoted as saying you want to make sure that people are fully informed and that we help them to produce material that inoculates them against grand themes that underpin new Islamic conspiracies.

Could you explain what that is? What role does education play for individuals?

[Imran Ahmed]

There is some evidence that inoculation and education can have a limited effect, both in terms of how effective it is and how long it lasts, on reducing the transmissibility of hate. It gives people protection and a pre-existing set of understandings that help give them resilience against hate content and the lies that underpin hate, but that doesn't change the fact that they are being bombarded.

We have something in our psychology called the illusory truth effect. If we see something frequently, we think it's more likely to be true. That's part of the reason that when we are being bombarded with hate content, we end up concluding there can be no smoke without fire, and we start to normalize hateful attitudes, conspiracy theories and lies.

The great replacement theory specifically is the theory that Jews are encouraging migration of Muslims and Blacks to destroy the white race through intermarriage and interbreeding.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Thank you very much, Mr. Ahmed.