Canadian civil liberties groups gave a cool reception to the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference's call for a new federal watchdog to monitor social media for "disinformaton."
Foreign interference inquiry calls for government agency to monitor online misinformation | True North | Clayton DeMaine, True North Wire:
January 28, 2025 - "Mary-Josee Hogue, the commissioner of the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions, released her final report Tuesday.... Among the 51 recommendations was for the government to establish a federal watchdog for foreign disinformation campaigns on social media.
"'The government should consider creating a government entity to monitor the domestic open-source online information environment for misinformation and disinformation that could impact Canadian democratic processes,' Hogue said in the report.
"The proposed entity would work with national security and intelligence agencies, international partners and 'appropriate civil society and private organizations' ... [with] authority to 'interact with' social media platforms.... Hogue said the entity should also sit on the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force, or SITE-TF....
"Also among the commissioner’s 60-page report was for the Canada Elections Act to be amended to ban 'false information from being spread to undermine the legitimacy of an election or its results'."
Read more: https://tnc.news/2025/01/28/foreign-interference-inquiry-government-monitor-online-misinformation/
Civil liberties groups warn about inquiry’s recommendation for “foreign disinfo” monitor | True North | Clayton DeMaine, True North Wire:
January 30, 2025 - "The Canadian Constitution Foundation and Open Media have raised concerns over Commissioner Mary-Josee Hogue’s final report on foreign interference. They say that Hogue’s 11th recommendation to establish a 'government entity' to monitor social media for disinformation and misinformation could be used as a 'back door' to target Canadians with government censorship and privacy violations. The recommendation, one of 51 recommendations to bolster Canada’s defence against foreign interference in its elections, suggests that the “entity” has the authority to 'give and receive intelligence and information.' It also says the government should consider giving the new government agency the authority to 'interact' with social media platforms, though it does not define what the term 'interact' would entail....
"Matt Hatfield, the executive director of the online civil liberties group Open Media told True North that the recommendations are just vague enough that they could be used to justify 'both bad and good ideas'.... He said it is 'critical' that any power to compel data from social media platforms be 'very carefully' described so it can’t easily be abused to surveil or silence Canadians.
"Christine van Geyn, the litigation director of the CCF, laid out her concerns on the most recent episode of the CCF’s civil liberties podcast, 'Not Reserving Judgement,' on Wednesday. 'There is an issue with defining what disinformation or misinformation is, and this is actually an issue that’s been created by the government,' she said. 'No one trusts these terms anymore, and it’s because of the way the government conducted it has conducted itself in large part during the pandemic.' She noted that the government had claimed many subjects were disinformation, only for those topics to be later revealed by the government or journalists to be founded in truth or a matter of opinion.
"'Giving authority to a new agency to monitor online behaviour and develop intelligence information, I think, is a gateway to collecting information about citizens posting things online that the government doesn’t like or disagrees with,” Van Geyn said. She said there are still people who claim the freedom convoy was a foreign-funded disinformation campaign, naming Liberal leadership candidate Mark Carney as one such offender.
"Van Geyn noted an Op-Ed the central banker wrote in the Globe and Mail where he said anyone donating to the Freedom Convoy 'should be in no doubt: You are funding sedition' and that foreign funders of 'the insurrection' interfered 'from the start.' 'This just wasn’t true. You know, 88% of the donations on GoFundMe were from Canadians, both Give-Send-Go and GoFundMe said there were zero donations from Russia or China,' Van Geyn said. She said even the CBC repeated the narrative that the Kremlin was behind the protest, and she worries that the state will wield the new government entity to crack down on similarly unfounded concerns."
Read more: https://tnc.news/2025/01/30/civil-liberties-warn-foreign-disinfo-monitor/
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