Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all of our witnesses.
Mr. Rogers, your opening statement certainly gave us a lot to think about.
About the platforms that have policies against hate but are not enforcing it, we as a committee have had Stripe, GoFundMe and GiveSendGo appear as witnesses.
When GoFundMe was before our committee, they did state in their opening statement that “fundraising campaigns relating to misinformation, hate speech, violence and more are prohibited by [their] terms of service”. I pointed out to GoFundMe that there was a lot of misinformation associated with the convoy that came to Ottawa. It was quite evident that misinformation was surrounding the whole convoy as early as mid-January leading up to the illegal occupation of Ottawa, but they did not stop the fundraising for the convoy until, I believe, February 4.
Similarly, Stripe had an integral role, particularly with GiveSendGo, who took up the slack in fundraising for the illegal occupation after GoFundMe stopped it. GiveSendGo just simply didn't seem to really care about what they were fundraising for.
My question to you is this: What is it about companies and why are they not self-policing? Is it just that there is an obscene amount of money to be made? Are you getting any positive reaction from them when your organization points out what's going on with their platforms?
Can you illuminate a little bit more for us what's going on there?