Everything the Americans said about TikTok and more can be said about Twitter/X’s dangerous role in Canada.
Best time was years ago, but now will work.
I dunno if the government should be babying us by banning it because I’m sure a replacement would just spring up immediately anyway.
Maybe they should just go after the dumbasses who spread misinformation or promote violence to the best of their ability. Oh but definitely make government agencies and officials stop using the platform though.
There already are replacements. Replacements not owned by fascists.
I see what you mean. Even if we ban it, the toxic users would find another platform, but we could hurt Musk’s bottom line by making the users migrate. In that case, then, I’m not so opposed to the ban.
The Canadian government could even set up their own Mastodon server and disallow public sign-up, ensuring that fakes could be easily spotted.
Deleted it yesterday, I never used it but i got around to deactivating it properly this time
Just stop using it!! Meaning government officials agencies etc. It blows my mind that any thing close to any level of government in Canada still has or uses an account there
They said such an app could be used for espionage and tracking down locations of federal employees and contractors.
But an operating system by an American corporation, and its office software, and authentication services, used by governments, business and citizens, is just fine.
I understand Twitter is used as a propaganda tool, but if we are also talking about espionage and tracking, then we should also pay attention to how many people and organizations are using companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google.
So, the Great Firewall of Canada?
I wouldn’t shed a tear if this happened.
Banning it just causes them to be the victim.
Put a massive tax on all of the multinational american leech corporations that control our media. Musk isn’t the cause of the problem, he’s a symptom of it.
You can’t think like this anymore. We are dealing with fascists. We are bordering Germany pre-WWII. Any nonviolent action that will give us an advantage in a theoretical conflict is necessary.
Who cares if they’re perceived as the victim? People will forget about Twitter within 6 months if it’s blocked, and during that time, the propaganda machine takes a hit.
I do believe we have a system for that now thought the digital tax act that JT and the liberals along with the NDP AND bloc pushed through. Allows us to levy taxes on tech companies and I think it was meant for exactly this
Shut down that shit!!! Fuck X.
Use Bluesky instead.
If you absolutely need to use a social media network like that choose another decentralized one, like Mastodon.
What Twitter/X has done is no conduct that the Canadian people would tolerate if they were conducted by a corporation that was aligned with, say, the government of China
And yet, we did not ban TikTok. Nor did the Americans, when it came down to it. Perhaps they saw no prospect of such a law surviving the legal challenges that would rise against it.
As a general rule, the government can’t simply ban speech it dislikes. The government in Canada would perhaps have a marginally easier time of it with our less complete constitutional protection of the freedom of expression, but it would remain a bad idea, unlikely to succeed legally and very likely to do more harm than good if it did stand. It’s wrong to say that “no reasonable jurisprudence would defend” Canadians’ rights to visit the website and run the software of their choice when doing so is not in violation of any laws other than an arbitrary ban on one specific vendor who is disliked.
If social media firms have engaged in practices that should be illegal, then make those practices illegal. It will be discovered that once they are identified and specified, far more than just Facebook and Twitter will be affected. That is as it should be. The government of Canada should do what it can, and not attempt to do what it cannot. It should pass data privacy laws that make the worst practices of surveillance capitalist social media illegal in Canada. Legislate directly against the “data harvesting” and ad targeting.
And obviously, first of all, the government should stop using Twitter and Facebook, stop promoting them on government web sites, and thereby start leading people away from that shit instead of towards it. Here’s the petition again, which has 15000 signatures so far and lots of time left to sign it.
It is about more than speech.
It is a genuine threat to our nation.
I’m all in favor of Canadians taking up the cause of helping their American (not-Trumplican) cousins.
Favour, we are in Canada gosh darn it!
David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald
“Mean’s” in the headline.
Good Lord, I thought that was just the OP’s screwup. Nope, it’s on the actual source page. What a bummer.
Everyone seem’s to be doing that now and I hate it.
It’s all just bots anyway. At least 80%
Do it!
