Trump Trudeau Tweets Truth by Bill Fox

Author:Bill Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Digital companies have certainly been more active in launching government relations initiatives. Twitter Canada named Michele Austin, one of the country’s most able government relations practitioners, as its head of government, public policy, and philanthropy. In 2020, Facebook hired the highly regarded Rachel Curran as the public policy manager for Canada (Curran 2020). But a controversy flared in October 2020 when news accounts appeared claiming Facebook Canada’s Kevin Chan had emailed a senior official at Canadian Heritage earlier in the year asking if there were “promising senior analysts” in the public service who might be interested in jobs at the social media company even as Ottawa was considering how best to regulate the internet companies (Boutilier 2020b).

McGill’s Taylor Owen says governments, and not just Facebook, have to face the broader policy issues – a challenge the Trudeau government has only recently seemed inclined to meet (Owen 2017a).

In a speech delivered in Paris intended to presage his government’s “digital charter,” Prime Minister Trudeau said social media platforms and tech giants have failed Canadian consumers and it is time the government stepped in. “Now, citizens are living more and more in a digital space that’s unregulated,” the prime minister stated. “This leaves people incredibly vulnerable” (Boutilier 2019).

Trudeau’s declaration was, in part, an indirect response to a question put to Taylor Owen at an IRPP function scant days before. “We know publicly traded monopolies do not self-regulate,” Owen said (Dubois, McGuire, and Owen 2019), which raises the question whether we, as citizens, should be outsourcing public policy decisions to large, non-Canadian corporations.

Social media companies can’t and won’t fix the problem of fake news. For example, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, told a British parliamentary committee, “Our community would not want us, a private company, to be the arbiter of the truth” (Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee 2018, 16). Chan, director of policy for Facebook Canada, insists “we very much don’t want to have an editorial voice.” A participant on a panel organized by the journalism fellows at Massey College on 28 March 2017, Chan insisted, “We are not in the business of telling friends what to tell each other.” Yet with the use of algorithms, Facebook is in fact doing just that. Another participant, Jesse Hirsh, encouraged the audience to “see algorithms as a gateway” (pers. notes 2017).

The folks at Facebook did not invent the law of unintended consequences. But it is a bit much for Facebook’s leadership to assume that the law doesn’t apply to them or that in instances where it is a factor in their business, they are entitled to an exemption of some sort.

Columbia University professor Emily Bell says the lines between technology companies and publishers can no longer be blurred. Writing in the Guardian’s 2 April 2017 edition, Bell states Facebook is “being unmasked as the world’s largest repository for made-up stories and ‘fake news’” (Bell 2017). Bell says these new digital platforms with their algorithmic gatekeepers need to face reality. In a separate

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