Documents reveal that the Public Health Agency of Canada makes regular requests to Twitter to censor tweets from social media users for “offensive language” — and usually gets denied.
On March 27, Conservative MP Dean Allison received back an order paper request he submitted in the House of Commons.
Allison asked “with regard to requests made by the government to social media companies to take down, edit, ban, or change in any other way social media content, posts, or accounts, since January 1, 2020.”
The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) revealed that since 2020, the department asked Twitter to remove twenty-one tweets from social media users for “offensive language.”
Twitter rejected 18 of PHAC’s 21 requests.
In other words, Twitter determined that its policies were not violated 86% of the time that PHAC asked for censorship.
The department did not specify what accounts or tweets it considered offensive.
Another response from the Department of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada revealed that the Trudeau Liberals asked Twitter and Facebook to censor a 2021 specific news article.
However, both social media companies denied the request.
The specific article was unnamed in the documents obtained by Allison. But one day before the request, Lorne Gunter of the Sun wrote a piece titled ‘Liberals to make immigration to Canada much easier.’
Last week, Gunter confirmed that his article from September 2021 was indeed what the feds tried to censor.
“The [Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada] asked my editors to correct or pull my column, which the editors courageously refused to do,” Gunter said.
“When that route failed, we have now learned, the then director of communications for the IRB approached the big social media platforms to ask that they take down any posting of my column and prohibit users from linking to it.”
