Across Canada, online antisemitism is on the rise — a 135 per cent increase in 2023 over 2022 according to B’nai Brith Canada.
Altogether, there were 4,847 reported incidents of online harassment against Canadian Jews last year, up from 2,056 the year before. Many of the antisemitic incidents were related to the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
For this reason, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) is welcoming Bill C-63, the proposed Online Harms Act. The bill, which was introduced in Parliament in February, will hold online platforms accountable for content they host that foments hatred, incites violence or promotes extremism or terrorism. It will also require social media services to act responsibly by actively reducing the risk of exposure to harmful content.
“We have been advocating for legislation that addresses online hate for a long time,” said Richard Marceau, vice-president for external affairs for CIJA.
“The status quo is not acceptable. There is so much online hate out there,” he said. “Something must be done.”
One area of concern is the algorithms social media platforms use. “We need more transparency about how they work,” Marceau said, adding currently “social media platforms are more a problem than a solution to stopping hate … We have to stop hate from getting to the top of the page.”
For Marceau, the act achieves a balance between protecting Canadians, especially minority groups, from online harassment and hate, while not restricting free speech.
“Finding that balance isn’t easy,” he acknowledged, adding he has “a strong belief in freedom of expression.”
But people also have “a fundamental right” to be safe, he said. “I hope all political parties can work together to make sure we find that balance.”
Other groups are also concerned about finding that balance. This includes the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC), which represents evangelical denominations and churches in Canada and has a special concern about religious freedom.
According to Julia Beazley, who directs public policy for the EFC, the organization has “strong concerns” about the impact of this bill on the expression of religious beliefs.
“We believe holding religious beliefs and acting on them is of ultimate importance,” she said, noting the act would lower the burden of proof for filing a hate speech complaint.
While agreeing that something needs to be done to address the rise in online hate, the EFC worries that the proposed act might go too far in limiting valid expression of opinion that is not popular with wider Canadian society. This would include churches that use an interpretation of the Bible to speak against same-sex marriage.
Although the government proposes to provide clarity on these and other issues, “there are still concerns with how this would be understood and applied, given the context of public discourse in which, for example, biblical teachings on sexuality, are commonly described as hateful,” she said.
The EFC is also concerned that social media platforms might over-react to content some see as hateful, such as a traditional biblical view of sexuality, and remove it without recourse so they don’t run afoul of the act.
This, said Beazley, could result in de facto censorship of what some view as controversial opinions, even if, “upon closer analysis, a particular post would not in fact meet the legal threshold of hate.”
For Carmen Lansdowne, moderator of the United Church of Canada, one of the challenges of the “online universe” is that “so little of it is controlled by humans.”
Unless there’s real teeth behind the act when it comes to dealing with the algorithms that determine the content people see, she doesn’t see it as providing much help when it comes to reducing online hate.
As for whether it will limit legitimate religious expression based on various holy scriptures, she noted that all scriptures have problematic verses that could be seen as hateful or discriminatory.
“These things are part of the historical canons,” she said, adding there needs to be more discussion about these texts and how they can be discussed today.
In an editorial, the Catholic Register rang an alarm bell about the act, saying Canadian Catholics must reckon “the potential cost to ourselves as individuals and to Holy Mother Church as a whole.”
Catholics, the editorial went on to say, “live in a society where our most profound convictions are routinely deemed aggressions against the fashionable verities of the day. We live in a country where our churches can be burned with virtual impunity, and we are blamed for striking the match and adding the gasoline.”
While praising the part of the act that addresses “revenge porn” and the non-consensual sharing of sexualized images, the editorial went on to say it will only “feed the fever dreams” of those who want to restrict the religious expression of Catholics even further, “purely because of the creed we profess.”
