Are you wondering if you can be censored on social media in Canada? Whether it’s being outright banned from a social media platform like Facebook or Twitter, or temporarily suspended for posting a comment or photo or video, the potential chilling effect on free speech rights has now become a source of seemingly endless public debate.

Being banned from social media or being what’s known as “shadow banned,” cutting off someone’s access to online platforms where people connect and share ideas can be extremely problematic. But the issue of online censorship in Canada and throughout the world is far from a black-and-white, right and wrong type of binary situation.

There is a real question as to how shadow banning impacts free expression. This is something that the federal government in Ottawa should investigate.

When we tried to post this article on Facebook, it wouldn’t let us. See below. It let us post other articles! Unbelievable.

Photo: Facebook wouldn’t let us share ONLY this article. Other articles were fine.

Fundamental freedoms

We call on Justin Trudeau and Michael Geist (law professor and e-Commerce Law expert) to push for free speech. The Canadian Charter doesn’t allow for social media censorship. We call for an investigation by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission. It’s time for a crackdown, and to protect fundamental freedoms.

The pandemic has been a real enabler for disinformation and defamation on the internet. The Government of Canada needs to do a better job. Even Netflix has been pushing a political agenda to Canadians, causing online harm.

We make fun of others like Trump and some countries’ censorship over the Ukraine war, but then we allow companies like Reddit and Twitter to do it. Twitter decides what is trending or not.

Canadian freedom of expression

While Canadians of all political stripes can and perhaps should be concerned about curtailing and limiting free speech, online or otherwise, current discourse in both the public and the political sphere has somewhat failed to capture any nuances. Instead, the political class and the media can often be found deferring to the loudest voices and may be prone to hyperbole, misinformation, or fear-mongering about the implications of online censorship by big tech companies and governments.

However, that’s not to discount the potential deleterious effects on democracy itself when the public conversation, increasingly happening in the digital world, becomes curated, homogenized, or sanitized by for-profit companies. For big tech companies, their only motive is to maintain profitability for shareholders, which makes maintaining a healthy sphere for public debate and the free exchange of ideas, even bad or evil ideas, take a back seat to making money.

Social media platforms have been censoring Canadians, regardless of the laws.

So, in short, the answer to the question “can social media censor you in Canada?” is yes, but with some important caveats. The thing about social media “censorship,” is that it deals with the rights of private companies to choose who they allow on their platforms. Just like a coffee shop or restaurant can have a sign about their right to refuse service if someone isn’t wearing a shirt or shoes, tech firms and social media companies can refuse and restrict who uses their platforms according to their own policies.

Public policy, meanwhile, has struggled to keep up with technological developments in the space, and has often been reactive in nature and lacking critical foresight. While autocratic and dictatorial governments such as those in North Korea, Iran, China, and Russia have no trouble limiting citizens’ access to the internet, the challenge for democratic societies is striking a balance between combatting political extremism and hate-filled content without placing unconstitutional limits on freedom of speech.

On the three most popular social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram – there are a host of reasons a user can get banned or have their account suspended. Twitter’s terms of service, for example, outline the types of content that can get an account deactivated or temporarily suspended. Twitter has both its own rules and policies and also follows the Periscope Community Guidelines, although the video-sharing app was shut down in March 2021.

According to Twitter’s rules, accounts can be terminated for content that creates legal liabilities for the company such as content that violates the intellectual property rights of a copyright or trademark holder. The company also restricts content like pornography and violent imagery, and posts that encourage self-harm, advocate for targeted harassment, or any content that threatens real-world physical violence.

Users can also be banned or suspended for exposing peoples’ private information or for posting misleading spam messages. Of course, the difficulty is compounded by automated and fake bot accounts, while people can also avoid bans and suspensions by creating new accounts under different email addresses. The company says permanently suspending an account is its most “severe” enforcement measure against those who post prohibited content, but it also has appeal mechanisms and other less harsh forms of bans, such as limiting a specific Tweet’s visibility.

Hate speech vs free expression

The platform’s “sensitive media” rules also prohibit so-called “platform manipulation” that seeks to “artificially amplify or suppress information.” Meanwhile, it also prohibits the use of its services from being used to manipulate or interfered with “elections or other civic processes.” Despite company policies against them, though, it’s difficult to think that automated bot accounts, of which there may be hundreds of thousands, can be combated with any effectiveness to ensure they’re not used for nefarious, inauthentic, or anti-democratic purposes.

For Facebook and Instagram, both of which are owned by Meta Platforms, the censorship and limitations placed on user-generated content also fall under broad and specific company policies. Facebook’s Community Standards, along with Instagram’s Community Guidelines, also spell out what kind of content the company allows on the platforms.

Ottawa needs to protect free speech

Like Twitter’s rules, Facebook and Instagram both prohibit overtly pornographic content, as well as posts that promote violence or crime in general. Though the company does make exceptions for content that would otherwise be considered against its guidelines, such as “newsworthy” content. This exception was created and implemented after Facebook was criticized around the world for removing a post of the iconic “Napalm Girl” photo from the Vietnam war depicting a young child fleeing in horror with her clothes and skin scalded by the explosive gelatinous gas.

Social media censorship and public policy attempt to regulate user-generated content

With much of the public dependent upon private social media platforms to stay connected to friends and family, being kicked off those apps or websites for a flippant remark, a bad joke, or a mistake by the companies’ artificial intelligence can leave people isolated, angry, and fearfully confused. The fears of big tech companies increasing control as overseers of public interest debates have governments around the world scratching their heads about how to preserve freedom of speech and freedom of expression online.

Preserving those fundamental rights, however, can cause serious conflicts about what behaviours should and shouldn’t be allowed online. Many countries, Canada included, already have laws against hate speech and human rights codes to prevent discrimination. But those laws and rules aren’t easily enforced on the internet, where user-generated content is the fuel for so many successful platforms.

It was in 1996 when the internet was still in its relative infancy when the United States passed the Communications Decency Act. The legislation is credited with allowing the internet and online platforms to thrive when it absolved websites of legal liability for the content provided by third parties. This meant that user-generated content, whether it was defamatory, libellous, or illegal in some way wouldn’t allow a website to be sued as a “publisher or speaker” of that content.

But fast forward to 2022 in Canada, and the debate over regulating user-generated content on the internet has generated much controversy for the Trudeau government. The Canadian government claims online platforms have become a cornerstone of “democratic, cultural and public life.” But it aims to regulate “harmful” content that has been weaponized against vulnerable communities and used to erode the country’s “social cohesion and democracy.”

The legislation, known as Bill C-11, aims to tackle the explosion in hateful and harmful content online including child exploitation images, terrorist propaganda, racist and white supremacist hate speech, and the sharing of intimate photos without consent. But the bill has spurred fears of censorship from digital policy experts about its implications and possible unintended consequences.

The Canadian Heritage Committee, which is tasked with vetting the legislation, has heard numerous concerns about the bill’s tacit attempt to regulate user-generated content. For instance, the company behind the popular short-video sharing service Tik Tok warned the committee that the bill would subject any video with accompanying music to regulation by the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission.

Canadian record company Nettwerk Music Group has also sounded the alarm about the bill’s consequences for the music industry, claiming it will make deals it has with online streaming services subject to CRTC regulation as well.

The federal government needs to protect freedom of speech

But the plan to regulate user-generated content on the internet in Canada is perhaps most controversial for its potential to cause the removal of vast swaths of “legal” content by social media companies in a rush to comply with the unruly legislation.

In effect, critics say, the new law proposed by the Liberal government would turn social media companies, their algorithms, and human moderators, into state surveillance agents. This fear arises out of the plan to make social media companies required to report flagged content to law enforcement, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

For its part, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has not come out explicitly against the government’s plan but points out that much of the behaviour online that the bill seeks to regulate is already illegal. While some nations in the European Union have attempted to legislate against similar types of harmful online content, the CCLA says there’s scant evidence it’s working.

The danger in Canada is that if platforms are subject to big fines for not removing harmful content quickly enough, they’ll likely adopt a scorched-earth, blanket approach to removing content and “err on the side of more censorship, not less.”

It seems that it doesn’t matter if social media companies can legally censor you or not, they are doing it.

The RCMP, Prime Minister, and Supreme Court of Canada need to act on these issues. We will keep our eyes on bill c-10.

It’s clear that fears of censorship in the modern digital era in Canada are widespread, crossing political divides, and show no sign of abating.

With the Canadian government’s current approach to potentially subjecting user-generated content to regulation, preserving freedom of speech and freedom of expression online has become a hot-button political issue that won’t likely be resolved anytime soon, at least until the next election. Whether public policy can strike the right balance between the early wild west days of the internet and the fears of a near-future techno-dystopia, unfortunately, remains to be seen.

We hope you found this guide on if social media can censor you in Canada helpful. If you did, please share it all over social media so others can learn.

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Can social media censor you in Canada?