Imagine A Publicly-Funded Mouthpiece Stamping On An Opinion Forever

Imagine no more!:

The Senate last evening by a 52 to 16 vote passed into law first-ever federal regulations of legal internet content in Canada. “I am excited,” Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez told reporters.

I bet you are, you Argentinian creep.

**

If you’re a culture group that criticizes Bill C-11, government MPs call you a shill and seek investigations into your funding. If you support the bill while receiving hundreds of thousands in government funding, no such questions.https://t.co/FLHsleOgF2https://t.co/Gaz2X85EcF

— Michael Geist (@mgeist) April 28, 2023

Did you see the "social media" bit?

The only news agency left standing will be the CBC.

This CBC:

CBC President Catherine Tait in a private letter dismissed a Conservative Party proposal to cut the network budget as a partisan fundraising ploy. Cutting the CBC’s $1.3 billion annual parliamentary grant would have “implications to this country,” wrote Tait. The CBC disclosed the letter through Access To Information: “Your party continues to run email blasts.”

These "implications":

Feds acknowledge $595M media bailout didn't work; @CdnHeritage exec @ORipley testifies "we continued to see a decline in news" despite subsidies. https://t.co/q5KzRT1j0R #cdnmedia #cdnpoli @pablorodriguez pic.twitter.com/wH4ZaWVJj4

— Blacklock's Reporter (@mindingottawa) April 27, 2023

 

All that money and people still didn't want to watch the CBC.

Well, why weren't you in the streets protesting?:

Canadians are wary of Ottawa deciding what information on the internet is true or false, according to in-house federal research, which also found that few are likely to rely on federal government websites for information.

“Many participants expressed reservations about the Government of Canada telling Canadians what is true or false,” said a report by the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter.

Findings described in the report, titled “Study on Online Disinformation Advertising Creative Testing,” were based on eight online focus groups. The CSE awarded Ottawa-based Ekos Research Associates the contract worth over $47,000 in October 2022 to conduct the study.

The report added that most of the study participants “said they feel confident they can tell the difference between real and false information you can see on the internet at least most of the time.”

The researchers also noted that few respondents said they would “go online to a Government of Canada website for information.”

Many respondents suggested the federal government should focus on “helping Canadians identify misinformation through tips and tricks” while also “being careful to provide neutral information without any political lens.”

The report comes as the Canadian Heritage Department is working alongside other federal offices to draft legislation that will target “disinformation” and “harmful content online.”

In a letter earlier this year to the Commons foreign affairs committee in response to a dozen committee recommendations on the topic of “the situation of human rights defenders, journalists and media organizations,” the federal government said it was “in the process of designing a new legislative and regulatory framework for online services, including social media platforms.”

The approach being considered included creating a “digital safety commission” tasked with enforcing new rules to compel online platforms to “identify, assess, and mitigate risks on their platforms through their own internal systems and processes,” the letter said.