Federal legislation is needed to control the internet's "craziness," a cabinet advisor said yesterday. “We are now looking at a whole new alignment of what is online harm,” said Bernie Farber, appointee to a 12-member panel on censorship..“We live in a time of craziness,” said Farber. “We live in a time where people will believe whatever they want to believe.”.According to Blacklock's Reporter, testifying at the Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee, Farber said social media platforms were complicit in murder. “Something must be done,” said Farber, chair of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network..“In the good old days, people used to stand at Bank and Sparks Streets and hand out little leaflets of hate and if five people took that leaflet that was considered a pretty darn good day,” said Farber..“Today they go onto their laptop and they get messages out through Twitter and Facebook and telegraph and signal and you name it, potentially reaching hundreds of thousands of people, even millions.”.“It just takes one,” he said. “Today we have moved, sadly because of social media, I believe, from hateful words and hateful symbols to hateful action, assaults and even murder.”.Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez on March 30 appointed Farber and others to an advisory panel mandated to propose methods of censoring legal internet content. The Department of Canadian Heritage last July 29 issued a Technical Paper suggesting that cabinet should appoint a chief censor called the Digital Safety Commissioner to block websites..No bill has been introduced in the current Parliament. “We’re working on different fronts,” Minister Rodriguez told reporters Monday..Senator Larry Campbell (B.C.) yesterday told the constitutional affairs committee that rural Canadians appeared to produce a disproportionate amount of hurtful comments. “We get emails that would make you throw up in a bucket with regards to anti-Semitism, racism and the rest of it,” said Campbell..“From the emails, I get the worst come from very small towns that I have to look up to even find out where they are,” said Campbell. “It comes from very small towns and covers the gamut of disgusting racism, ‘who’s in charge of the world’ and all the rest of it.”.Testimony yesterday at the Senate committee came in hearings on Bill C-19. One clause inserted in the omnibus budget bill would amend the Criminal Code to prohibit any public statements that “willfully promote anti-Semitism by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust” under threat of two years in jail..Section 319 of the Criminal Code already outlaws hate speech under provisions passed by Parliament in 1970..Civil liberties groups have opposed the amendment. “None of these egregious lies are criminal in and of themselves,” said Cara Zwibel, director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. “It is likely unconstitutional,” added Zwibel..“‘Downplaying’ could reasonably capture someone who recognizes the historical reality of the Holocaust for the atrocity that it is but might argue other historical atrocities were worse,” said Zwibel..“Could an academic who examines historical genocide but doesn’t characterize the Holocaust as the worst example be considered ‘downplaying’ and thus captured by the law?”.“What about anti-abortion activists who use the term ‘holocaust’ to describe abortion?” said Zwibel. “Could this kind of rhetoric give rise to criminal sanctions? In our view the proposed offence creates too much potential to capture speech that while offensive and unpopular should not and cannot be properly criminalized.”.Joanna Baron, executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation of Calgary and the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, said censorship was no solution to anti-Semitism. “Of course protecting Jews and noting the disturbing rise in anti-Semitic incidents is vital,” said Baron..“Those who downplay the Holocaust are ignorant,” said Baron. “The best remedy for ignorance of history is education and the open marketplace of ideas, where the utter falsehood of any denial of the atrocities committed against the Jewish people can be openly demonstrated by free citizens, not the threat of imprisonment by the state.”
