Status of Women committee  I'm thinking here of a previous witness, my colleague Dr. Rena Bivens, who probably addressed some of that. Again, there are all kinds of things that are possible through the code. Even a company as established and wealthy as Facebook chose to, at the surface—where the user inter

Status of Women committee  My view is similar. I don't know that it's legislation, but regulation is certainly possible by code. If we're working with big corporate providers that have the power to write the code and control the code, as they currently do, they already can filter code as it's uploaded. It'

Status of Women committee  I think it does make a difference. I came from the private sector in the software industry back into academia, and I think it absolutely makes a difference. We can't be what we can't see. If we go into those software development places and participate fully in designing and devel

Status of Women committee  I would invite the Microsofts, Googles, and Twitters of the world to help us combat cyber-bullying, because they have the power and the funds to do so.

Status of Women committee  Google has the good and the bad at times, right, in terms of the leadership they show. There have been some things this year that have pushed companies like Twitter to be more proactive in combatting hate speech. When you think about this, I think we're in a funny situation her

Status of Women committee  I think that opening up that mysterious black box that runs those things can only be done through reverse engineering, by studying how they work, because those companies that have those proprietary platforms of algorithms are not going to divulge them, for trade secret reasons an

Status of Women committee  In my view, yes.

Status of Women committee  Not really. There's a huge effort going on right now at Google and elsewhere to try to pre-empt that kind of activity. Google has actually done a pretty good job of tweaking their algorithm to stay one step ahead of what is essentially, instead of marketing-based search engine op

Status of Women committee  Digital literacy education can never hurt. It's particularly crucial among young people.

Status of Women committee  On the issue of violence and cyber-bullying online, it seems to me that it would be tough, I think, for any corporate citizen in Canada not to get onside there, so I don't think the kinds of ways in which we would address that are necessarily going to constrain the apparatus of d

Status of Women committee  One of the things they did, for example, was that they didn't speak back strictly by using the same hashtags in campaigns. They went directly to Facebook executives. They went directly to the leadership of Twitter. They went directly to the leadership at Instagram. I think that's

Status of Women committee  Sadly, no. Nothing leaps out at me. I think there's potential there for an increase in natural language processing and machine learning to actually help us identify some of the speech that goes on in the public Twittersphere and on Facebook. That might over time improve our abili

Status of Women committee  Yes. There are some key examples of it that have occurred on Facebook. Groups of women did come together to organize a response to Facebook's refusal to remove gender-based violent images and content. It took quite some time. It was started by a group in the United Kingdom. They

Status of Women committee  Personally, I'd love to see a commitment to advancing this issue through education, right from primary school through to high school and well beyond. I use MediaSmarts materials in my courses from the first year of university through to the fourth year, and they're outstanding. T

Status of Women committee  I would agree. I think the other thing is that because there are so many mobile devices now, the difficulty with that sort of “one fix” is that the platforms work quite differently—the mobile technology platform versus the browser-based desktop or laptop—so it's difficult for tha