Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly made an ominous call for social media regulation, claiming it’s needed to fight Russian “disinformation.”
“We’ve banned Russia Today and Sputnik on the broadcasting side,” Joly said, “We’ve pushed digital platforms to also ban them, but we need to do more.”
Joly was responding to a Liberal MPs question about what’s being done to fight Russian propaganda and disinformation.
“[The Russians] said that the reason they were sending troops to further invade Ukraine was to de-Nazify the country,” Joly said. “We know that Zelensky himself is Jewish.”
While Putin’s claims that his primary goal in Ukraine is to fight Nazis is, of course, dubious at best, it isn’t misinformation to point out that Ukraine does have an actual Nazi presence.
In a separate exchange, Joly said, “Propaganda is not only happening in Russia, it’s happening in new virtual battlegrounds, which are our social media companies.”
“So what Canada will be doing, and what I want to make sure that we push even more … is (that) social media companies need to do more to prevent propaganda, and to counter any forms of disinformation.”
“They’re not technological companies; they’re content producers. And they have a responsibility, and they have to step up to the plate.”
To this end, Joly also said that “[her] mandate as foreign minister is really to counter propaganda online,” she said.
If this were true, would Joly go after the CBC? After all, it was recently revealed that the CBC has to print a correction — sometimes severe — or clarification nearly every week to combat their own misinformation.
Unfortunately, it’s unlikely, as the CBC has essentially served as federally-funded PR for Trudeau and the Liberals in recent years.
It’s become so apparent that CPC front-runner Pierre Poilievre led a “Defund the CBC” chant among hundreds of supporters just this morning.
Of course, the Liberals trying to control what you do and see isn’t anything new.
Recently, they re-tabled Bill C-10, the broadcasting act that would limit what Canadians can see through the internet, such as Youtube, in a move strikingly similar to what happened in China under the Chinese Communist Party.
