Quick: What’s The Difference Between Fake News and Hypernormalisation?
Before the current Coronavirus pandemic, the Canadian government took delivery of the Broadband Telecom Legislative Review. The 235-page report offered 97 recommendations for revamping internet and broadcasting oversight, most of them bad ones. Among them were provisions for requiring all content creators to obtain a license for operating from the government and “discoverability provisions” to force major tech platforms to emphasize “credible sources of news” over others (what the government calls “Approved Media”).
I wrote an article about it at the time and tabled a petition into the House of Commons to call on the government to reject BTLR in it’s entirety (still open, so please sign and share). More recently the Internet Society Canada Chapter (of which I’m a board member) submitted a point-for-point critique of the framework (it’s not on the site yet, will link when it is).
Shortly after that the government-funded CBC marshalled a gaggle of “Approved Media” in Canada (no doubt one of entities who will receive part of that $600,000,000 subsidy package announced in the run up to the last election) to call forth the government to legislate “trusted sources” of news…..
If you’re with me so far, the logic flows like this:
The latest beat in this march toward CCP-style control over the narrative is the federal governments’ latest declaration that “they are open to new laws against spreading pandemic misinformation”
The federal government is considering introducing legislation to make it an offence to knowingly spread misinformation that could harm people, says Privy Council President Dominic LeBlanc.
Rex Murphy was quick out of the gate with a scathing criticism of the idea, drawing the quite apt parallel to the similarity any Canadian legislation to control the narrative would be the same as the Chinese Communist Party’s total control in that country, and we see firsthand the horrors that causes.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
