4 days ago
Chris Selley: Governments won't save your kids from internet smut
There is another legislative effort afoot to keep Canadian children away from pornography. It's well-intentioned effort, I suppose, but such efforts didn't work very well when pornography was printed on glossy paper and distributed on VHS tapes and pay-per-view, so it seems particularly improbable in the internet age.
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Bill S-209 is Independent (Liberal-appointed) Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne's second attempt at a private member's bill on the topic. It is predicated on the notion that it's easier to verify age automatically than it used to be: 'Online age-verification and age-estimation technology is increasingly sophisticated and can now effectively ascertain the age of users without breaching their privacy rights,' the bill's preamble avers.
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It is absolute rubbish, to the extent that even the Liberals under former prime minister Justin Trudeau seemed to realize it the first time it was tried. We can only hope Mark Carney's Liberals are of similar mind. Early signs are not positive. The reappointment of Steven Guilbeault as heritage minister (now called Canadian identity and culture minister, for some reason) doesn't bode well. He seems genuinely to dislike the online world on principle.
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Or, maybe it does bode well. Guilbeault did a singularly terrible job trying to sell the Liberals' anti-internet agenda in English Canada. I'm not sure he could give away ice cream in a Calgary heatwave. So if you think laws targeting 'online harms' are doomed to fail at best — and could lead to dystopian outcomes — then maybe Guilbeault is exactly the fellow you want in charge.
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When it came to online porn, the Trudeau Liberals seemed to have some sense of the Sisyphean proposition before them. Miville-Dechêne's first attempt at a bill received support from MPs of all parties in the House of Commons last year, but the Liberal leadership cited privacy concerns in refusing to get behind it.
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In large part that might just have been because Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre supported the idea and, to Liberals, anything Poilievre supports must obviously be a serious threat to humanity's survival. But still, Trudeau was pretty unequivocal in rejecting the idea.
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'(Poilievre is) proposing that adults should … have to give their ID and their personal information to sketchy websites, or create a digital ID, for adults to be able to browse the web where they want, where they want to,' he told reporters last year. 'That's something that we stand against and disagree with. We think we need to responsibly protect kids. But we need to do it in a way that is acceptable to all Canadians.'
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Answer: It doesn't. Obviously. It's magical thinking.
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Instead, the Pollyannas who support these efforts will tell you about 'age estimation' and similar technologies. Instead of just asking your kids for ID, Pornhub (for example) would scan users' faces and study their choice of words and maybe root around in their browser and shopping histories a bit, and using that information make an educated guess as to the hairy-palmed applicant's age.
