Twitter and Facebook are under pressure
Attempts to censor large companies have failed.
One of the departments of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada asked Facebook and Twitter to remove an article that "contained errors" but the IT giants refused to comply following recently released documents.
They also said agency officials felt the article contained "serious errors of fact risking and undermining public confidence in the independence of the board as well as the integrity of the refugee determination system." Facebook and Twitter said the article was not their original content and denied the request.
"No government should be able to demand that news be erased from history simply because they do not like the facts," Conservative MP Rachael Thomas said in a statement. "It is extremely concerning that the Trudeau government has sought to censor the free press through secret requests to big tech companies," said Pierre Poilievre.
Paul Knox, a professor emeritus at Toronto Metropolitan University's School of Journalism, said governments have no business telling anybody what can be published where. He said the government was "totally out of their lane on this one" and needs to apologize.
"You can't only have freedom of the press for people you approve of and people you consider to be right," Knox said. And while publications can be held accountable for being wrong, that doesn't give people the right to demand that something be removed from a public platform.
Documents submitted to Parliament detail 214 examples of how Ottawa asked to remove content on social media between January 2020 and February 2023. Companies removed posts in about half of the cases for reasons such as "impersonation" or copyright violations.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn have granted various requests for posts that violate copyright or company policy. However, social media companies often posted stuff that the government and its agencies deemed offensive.
Both Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and Google publish reports on how often the government requires changes to remove posts.
A Google report shows that since 2011, it has received 1,347 requests from Canadian government agencies — whether municipal, provincial, or federal — to remove messages.
The most recent data shows that between January 2022 and June 2022, Google, which also owns YouTube, deleted 73 publications mostly for privacy and security reasons, adult content, bullying, and harassment.
