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In Canada, media companies like The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, or CBC are liable for the content they publish and face severe penalties for publishing harmful, defamatory, or illegal content like hate speech. As a result, these media companies take great care to ensure the content they publish is legal and accurate, and in doing so, they preserve the integrity of democratic debate.
Platforms like Facebook and YouTube that host user-generated content consider themselves not responsible for users’ posts, and so far, Canadian police and prosecutors have done little to oppose that argument. This leaves platforms free to publish, amplify, recommend, and make unprecedented sums of money from content that would land most other media companies in court. Examples include child abuse, revenge pornography, incitement to suicide, or worse.
However there is reason to believe that existing Canadian law says that companies like Facebook are responsible for promoting hateful and illegal content.
Source: Platform Liability
Sobering Facts
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The early internet held out the promise of Eden but delivered anarchy instead. Nowhere is this anarchy and its consequences more evident than on social media, particularly Facebook and YouTube.
This timely and essential paper documents how these platforms have been overrun by hate speech, threats, and other illegal or otherwise objectionable content. It makes a compelling argument that Canadian law, while certainly imperfect, is decently equipped to beat back the online harms—individual, social, and political—with which platforms like Facebook are increasingly synonymous.
This paper reveals that the platforms’ standard excuses for failing to address the scourge of illegal content—for example, claiming not to know about it until it is flagged by users—are likely insincere. Among the paper’s many striking insights is that social media platforms—by their own admission—have technology that correctly interprets even highly nuanced user-generated content before they publish it. What is most shocking is not the ghastly prevalence of illegal content online, but rather how little governments have done to crack down on the businesses that profit from it
