I guess as I’ve grown older I’ve become more paranoid and I just came across this article today and couldn’t disagree more.
The federal government is considering introducing legislation to make it an offence to knowingly spread misinformation that could harm people, says Privy Council President Dominic LeBlanc.
LeBlanc told CBC News he is interested in British MP Damian Collins’s call for laws to punish those responsible for spreading dangerous misinformation online about the COVID-19 pandemic.
LeBlanc said he has discussed the matter already with other cabinet ministers, including Justice Minister David Lametti. If the government decides to follow through, he said, it could take a while to draft legislation.
Source: CBC
At first reading it sounds good but there’s just so much damn room for abuse. First to do this, they’ll have to greatly expand their surveillance capabilities, next what if an unfriendly government forms next and uses this for bad? After all many western governments are electing authoritarians and well if they’re allowed to define fake news we’re all screwed. Next much of this discord is done by foreign governments what will this stupid law do?
Another sounds good thing that will do absolutely nothing, you combat fake news with education, no law will stop it.
Terrifying.
Who decides what the facts are? If you look at history, it’s damn hard to determine what the “truth” is. Why did something happen? It all depends on which facts you choose to evaluate, and how you feel that it impacts the narrative.
Who would be in charge of determining which facts are to be disallowed? Does it need to be approved by a minister or MP? Who sets the policies?
I get that there is a lot of terrible information that isn’t sourced, but that’s part of learning how to navigate our new, information saturated world. Gotta teach people how to evaluate what they’re reading, and hopefully make better decisions.
I believe that the proposal has good intentions but the ability to for abuse is huge. What if we get an authoritarian leader with a substantial following, this could very easily become ugly with what’s politically correct being “true”.
I agree best thing to do is to teach people critical thinking and how to differentiate between fake and true information.