Internet and Social Media

The interests at stake in a recent investigation[1] by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (the “OPC”) can be evoked in two imaginative exercises. First, how would you feel if you had been accused of a crime, the charge had been stayed many years ago, but news articles about the incident were still easily accessible to anyone who typed your name into a search engine?

There is little doubt that social media has introduced many kinds of challenges to the lives of young people. Whether we chose to or not, most of us have come upon some nasty stuff on the internet. Australia has led what will likely be an international rush to regulate kids’ access to social media. Should we applaud this new measure or should we worry about it?

The Centre for Free Expression has joined 40 other organizations and more than 120 individual experts, human rights advocates, and community representatives across Canada in an Open Letter expressing our opposition to the federal government’s deeply misguided thirty-day “national sprint” public consultation on Canada’s artificial intelligence (“AI”) strategy.

Only a few months removed from last fall’s mass cancellation of X accounts following the US election results (see James Turk’s piece on that here), it looks like we may be in for a similar exodus from META’s Facebook, Threads, and Instagram.