Ottawa’s new online harms bill would force tech platforms to become more transparent about their efforts to fight harmful content, and likely add to compliance costs – along with the threat of fines of up to $10-million for violations.
The legislation, which was unveiled on Monday, proposes a range of responsibilities for online platforms to fight online hate and harm. The bill covers social-media platforms, some pornography platforms and live-streaming services whose user count meets a certain threshold. The government has not listed companies involved but Meta Platforms Inc. META-Q (which owns Facebook and Instagram), X Corp. (formerly called Twitter Inc.) and Pornhub would be affected.
Under the bill, these platforms would be required to remove content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, or intimate content communicated without consent, within 24 hours of that content being reported. This is a different approach from the first time the Liberal government introduced legislation tackling online hate, when it had been proposed that platforms would be responsible for removing a wider range of content within the same amount of time even without a notice from a user.
While this cuts down on the labour of compliance with the bill, it could still mean that tech firms would need to hire more employees or spend more on content review.
“Some platforms are going to be obligated to expand their team for handling user harms and user complaints. But I think that’s a good thing. Platforms have underinvested in this area, to be honest,” said Matt Hatfield, executive director of OpenMedia, a non-profit internet advocacy organization. “There will be more opportunities for all of us to see if they’re doing a good enough job.”
These costs are reasonable given the potential harm to users, and since platforms are already responding to similar legislation in Britain, the European Union and elsewhere, said Heidi Tworek, a history and policy professor at the University of British Columbia whose research focuses on the effects of new media technologies on democracy.
Coyne: One cheer for the new Online Harms Act
Under the bill, for instance, Ottawa would require platforms to submit a digital safety plan and enable tools to block other users and flag harmful content. These tools are already widely available on most large platforms, Prof. Tworek said.
“This should not be a heavy lift in the sense that these are things many platforms are already doing in other jurisdictions,” she said.
Companies could also be on the hook to pay up to $10-million in fines should they fail to comply, and up to $25-million if they continually violate the regulation.
It’s still unclear who will pay for the digital infrastructure proposed by the bill, which includes a new Digital Safety Commission and ombudsperson. Michael Geist, the University of Ottawa’s Canada Research Chair in internet law, says it’s possible those costs could also fall to the platforms, as the bill gives Ottawa the power to establish regulations that would require the platforms to fund the costs of operating the commission.
“It’s one thing to ask the company to ensure that they are compliant and bear the costs of compliance. It’s another thing for them to actually bear the costs of running the entire system,” Prof. Geist said.