My latest: the online road to Hell

“Free speech,” says Salman Rushdie, “is the whole thing, the whole ball game.”

“Free speech,” he says, “is life itself.”

That feels like a bit of an overstatement. But in Rushdie’s case, it’s probably heartfelt. The British-American author has faced several death threats and assassination attempts since the publication of his book The Satanic Verses in 1988 – including one death threat from Iran’s supreme leader, no less.

Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and several Islamic terror groups have also promised to kill him. In 2022, one Islamic terrorist came close to doing so, stabbing Rushdie repeatedly before a speech in New York. Rushdie lost sight in one eye, and the use of one hand.

There’s no way to know, of course, what Rushdie thinks – if anything – about the Trudeau government’s latest attempt to reign in harmful speech online. But it’s reasonable to assume that Rushdie would be unimpressed.

Rushdie might disagree, but it is not ever unreasonable to have some limitations placed on hate speech, terrorist content, incitement to violence, the sharing of non-consensual images, and child exploitation. For example, the toxic wave of anti-Semitism seen everywhere these days is clearly corroding our social fabric, and causing actual terror in the Jewish community.

So, what would Trudeau’s sweeping package of legislative reforms, announced Monday, do to combat anti-Semitism? Not much.

For starters, Trudeau’s bill is predicated on a falsehood – the notion that it is possible for one country to control what is on the Internet. How, exactly, does one do that? The Internet truly is, as its name implies, a World Wide Web. If the owners of a web site promoting hate or terrorism dislike governmental control over what they have to say, they can just move it to another jurisdiction that is less bothered by it.

The proposed Trudeau law anticipates this, and says it will target social media platforms and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) operating in Canada, and essentially deputize them to police content.

But the social media mavens and ISPs – many of which are headquartered in the United States, where the First Amendment frowns on virtually any restraint on speech – have said they have no interest in acting as Internet hall monitors. They will (and have) simply pull the plug. Which doesn’t just limit free speech. It ends it.

Another problem: who decides?

The proposed federal overseer – an ombudsman-type official – will be vested with extraordinary powers to decide what is, and what isn’t, acceptable. The problem with such an approach is obvious: what is one person’s medicine is another person’s poison. It is wildly subjective, always.

The post-October 7 era has offered us plenty of awful examples of why this is problematic. Anti-Israel types are being permitted by the authorities to regularly promote hate – while pro-Israel voices are being suppressed or cancelled with impunity. A Toronto Star former ombudsman and current columnist, to cite just one example, last week opined that Hamas was “provoked” into attacking Israel – and that Hamas is a mere “system of government” composed of “civilians working for a living.” So, what if the proposed online speech ombudsman possesses similarly vile views? Where does a Canadian Jew go to complain, then?

Now, it may be that the online harms bill is simply a ruse – a political head fake. Trudeau’s Liberals can proclaim that they have taken action against online hateful conduct, without ever actually planning to pass it into law. The real objective, perhaps, is to trap the Conservatives into opposing the bill, which will permit Liberals to say that Tories don’t care about hate and child exploitation.

Which would be cynical and duplicitous. And classic Trudeau-style sophistry.

If the bill’s objective is stamp out online harm, it goes about it in the wrong way. It presently gives too much power to an unelected official to decide what is acceptable – and it underestimates the willingness of social media platforms and ISPs to simply ignore the new rules.

The road to Hell, someone once said, is paved with good intentions. Trudeau’s new bill is full of good intentions.

But it’s still a Hellish mess.