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  • 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.

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