“Because Shut Up!”

OTTAWA—The advisory panel tasked with making recommendations for Canada’s pending legislation on online safety has failed to come to an agreement on how online harms should be defined, and whether dangerous content should be scrubbed from the internet altogether.

On Friday, the federal government published the findings from the expert panel’s tenth and final session, which summed up three months of deliberations over what a future legislative and regulatory framework might look like.

… Most of the panel found that child exploitation and terrorist content should be handled in “an unambiguous manner by future legislation.” Others deemed the five categories “deeply problematic,” in one instance, taking issue with definitions of terrorism for focusing on “Islamic terror” and omitting other forms.

There is already a familiar culture war over the origins of this apparently species-leaping virus

I hate to be one of those columnists who says “I told you so.” But I told you so. Looking back this week through the vast underground vaults at Spectator HQ I see that centuries ago in April 2020 I explained the problem with us humans as a species. As I said back then, someone always shags a monkey. There are almost eight billion of us on this planet today, and the likelihood that we’re all going to make judicious decisions all the time is vanishingly small. The mating decisions of the species alone are notoriously prone to trial and error. And the entire future of our species rides perpetually along this cliff edge.