Canada’s New Online Safety Law

Uploaded on 2024-03-22 in GOVERNMENT-National, FREE TO VIEW, BUSINESS-Services-Law

The digital world can pose significant risks. Social media can be used to sexually exploit children, promote self-harm to children, incite violence, put people’s safety at risk and foment hate. Online harms have real world impact with tragic, even fatal, consequences.

Now, a new Canadian law the Online Harms Act known as Bill C-63, which has the purpose to stop online abuse and it will have very high penalties for hate crimes, including life in prison for inciting genocide.

Canada aims to combat online hate that would force major companies to quickly remove harmful content and boost the penalty for inciting genocide to life in prison. The Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced the bill with the stated aim of protecting children from online predators.

The law would regulate social media companies, live streaming platforms and adult user websites.

The Bill Is To Be Voted On By the Canada's Parliament

It lists seven categories of harmful content that providers would be required to remove from their websites. This Bill would create a digital safety commission of Canada with the aim to regulate online platforms. "We know the harms we experience online can have real world impacts with tragic, and sometimes fatal consequences," Justice Minister Arif Virani said in a news conference recently. "And yet so much of this goes unchecked."

He also said that the bill would ban deep-fakes, such as images that recently went viral showing Taylor Swift's head on a naked woman's body. Private messages sent between individuals would fall outside of the law's provisions, he added.

The Objectives of the Bill Are:

Create and implement a new legislative and regulatory framework through a new Online Harms Act.
This framework would mandate online platforms, including live-streaming and user-uploaded adult-content services, to adopt measures that reduce the risk of harm in seven specific categories of harmful content.

The Online Harms Act would also require services to remove content (1) that sexually victimises a child or revictimises a survivor, and (2) is intimate content posted without consent. Non-compliance could lead to strict penalties;
Requiring, through the new Online Harms Act, that services provide clear and accessible ways to flag harmful content and block users, implement safety measures tailored for children and implement other measures to reduce exposure to seven categories of harmful content, including content that involves bullying children or promotes self-harm among young people.

Creating stronger laws to help protect all people in Canada from hatred, on and offline, by creating a definition of "hatred" in the Criminal Code, increasing penalties for existing hate propaganda offences, creating a stand-alone hate crime offence and creating an additional set of remedies for online hate speech in the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Enhancing the Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service to better protect young people.

Establishing a new Digital Safety Commission to oversee and enforce the Online Harms Act's regulatory framework and a new Digital Safety Ombudsperson to act as a resource and advocate for the public interest with respect to systemic issues related to online safety.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government also plans to amend the criminal code to increase hate crime penalties, including by introducing a new offense punishable by up to life imprisonment for those found guilty of inciting genocide.

The Canadian Human Rights Act would also be amended to classify hate speech as discrimination, and would allow the Human Rights Tribunal to handle hate speech offenses. The ruling Liberal Party had vowed during the 2021 election to introduce an online safety bill within 100 days of re-election.

Critics have expressed concerns that the legislation may be so broad as to infringe on individuals’ rights of expression. The government responded that it “will always uphold Canadians’ constitutional right to freedom of expression, which is essential in a healthy democracy.”

According to section 6 of the Online Harms Act, private messages are explicitly excluded from the scope of the legislation. Other countries, including the UK, Australia and France, have recently introduced new laws intended to stem online hate content.

The new legislation comes amid tensions between the Canadian government and social media companies over a law that forces companies to pay Canadian news publishers for their content. In November, Google parent company Alphabet agreed to pay C$100m annually to the government, while Meta decided to block news content on Instagram and Facebook in order to avoid the law.

Image: Public Domain

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