Censorship Industrial Complex
Report recommends government surveillance to monitor “disinformation”
From The Democracy Fund
Written by TDF’s Legal Team
The Hogue Report recommends the creation of a government surveillance department to monitor Canadians for online disinformation.
TDF is troubled by comments in the Hogue Report that “disinformation” is an “existential threat” to Canadian democracy. Disturbingly, the Report recommends that the government consider creating a separate entity to “monitor the domestic open-source online information environment for misinformation and disinformation that might impact Canadian democratic processes.”
Problematically, while the report claims that “disinformation is difficult to detect,” the report does not sufficiently define “disinformation.” It assumes that there exists people in government capable of infallibly discerning truth from falsehood.
No government has been able to defend or articulate its claim 1) to a superior theory of knowledge or 2) that government agents have extraordinary truth-seeking cognitive skills. In fact, history demonstrates that governments are often the biggest purveyors of falsehood. TDF lawyers have repeatedly raised this issue, particularly during a 2023 meeting with UNESCO representatives.
Additionally, the Hogue Report claims that “information manipulation (whether foreign or not) poses the single biggest risk to our democracy.” It even acknowledges that online disinformation campaigns could be used to create conflict and amplify division.
However, the Liberal government’s Bill C-63 would require social media companies to create a system whereby anyone in Canada can flag and report “harmful content.” As outlined in TDF’s Online Harms Brief this would, unwittingly, allow for mass reporting of content by bad faith actors, human or AI, domestic or foreign (through a domestic proxy). Rather than strengthen the information environment against manipulation, Bill C-63 would weaken it. It is a contradiction for the government to complain about the manipulation of the information environment while simultaneously pushing a law that makes it easier to do so.
Litigation Director Mark Joseph said: “The Report laments that Canadians are exposed to disinformation, as if this is something new: people have always been exposed to ambiguous or false claims. Canadians have simply used basic human discernment to differentiate between truth and falsehood. It is perilous for citizens to surrender their role as final arbiters of civil, political and moral truths to the government since government censors have no special claim to truth-seeking or infallibility.”
About The Democracy Fund:
Founded in 2021, The Democracy Fund (TDF) is a Canadian charity dedicated to constitutional rights, advancing education, and relieving poverty. TDF promotes constitutional rights through litigation and public education and supports access-to-justice initiatives for Canadians whose civil liberties have been infringed by government lockdowns and other public policy responses to the pandemic.
Censorship Industrial Complex
Liberals gain support for ‘hate speech’ bill targeting Bible passages against homosexuality
From LifeSiteNews
The Bloc Québécois are now backing the hate-speech Bill C-9 in Canada after the Liberal government agreed to take away a religious exception.
A Liberal government bill to criminalize parts of the Bible dealing with homosexuality under Canada’s new “hate speech” laws looks closer to becoming reality after gaining the support of the Bloc Québécois party when a religious exception was removed.
The National Post reported that the Bloc Québécois are now backing the hate-speech Bill C-9 after the Liberal government of Prime Minister Mark Carney agreed to take away a religious exception.
Bill C-9, the Combating Hate Act, as reported by LifeSiteNews, has been blasted by constitutional experts as allowing empowered police and the government to go after those it deems to have violated a person’s “feelings” in a “hateful” way.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, a government insider revealed that the Liberal government plans to remove religious exemptions from Canada’s hate-speech laws by modifying a bill. This would affect passages of the Bible dealing with homosexuality.
A recent media report states that the Carney Liberals and the separatist Bloc Québécois want to amend Bill C-9, which would “criminalize sections of the Bible, Quran, Torah, and other sacred texts,” Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre noted yesterday on X.
Both the Liberals and the Bloc are on board to support the removal of a religious exemption in Canada’s Criminal Code for the bill.
On Monday, Canadian Justice Minister Sean Fraser was rather mum on the deal made with the Bloc, which now says the deal is on thin ice due to canceled justice committee meetings.
Fraser said that it is his “priority” to see “this bill adopted,” but admitted it will need the support of other parties.
“That’s going to require that we collaborate with different parties who have different points of view,” he said.
However, it appears that such meetings will take place this week, but Conservative Party MPs have promised to fight the removal of the religious exception.
Liberal MP Marc Miller had said earlier in the year that certain passages of the Bible are “hateful” because of what it says about homosexuality, and those who recite the passages should be jailed. As reported by LifeSiteNews, he was recently appointed as a government minister by Carney.
Canadian Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis blasted the Carney Liberals’ federal plan to criminalize parts of the Bible as an attack on “Christians,” warning it sets a “dangerous precedent” for Canadian society.
In response, the party launched a petition over fear that religious texts could be criminalized.
Europe calls it transparency, but it looks a lot like teaching the internet who’s allowed to speak.
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When the European Commission fined X €120 million on December 5, officials could not have been clearer. This, they said, was not about censorship. It was just about “transparency.”
They repeat it so often you start to wonder why.
The fine marks the first major enforcement of the Digital Services Act, Europe’s new censorship-driven internet rulebook.
It was sold as a consumer protection measure, designed to make online platforms safer and more accountable, and included a whole list of censorship requirements, fining platforms that don’t comply.
The Commission charged X with three violations: the paid blue checkmark system, the lack of advertising data, and restricted data access for researchers.
None of these touches direct content censorship. But all of them shape visibility, credibility, and surveillance, just in more polite language.
Musk’s decision to turn blue checks into a subscription feature ended the old system where establishment figures, journalists, politicians, and legacy celebrities got verification.
The EU called Musk’s decision “deceptive design.” The old version, apparently, was honesty itself. Before, a blue badge meant you were important. After, it meant you paid. Brussels prefers the former, where approved institutions get algorithmic priority, and the rest of the population stays in the queue.
The new system threatened that hierarchy. Now, anyone could buy verification, diluting the aura of authority once reserved for anointed voices.
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However, that’s not the full story. Under the old Twitter system, verification was sold as a public service, but in reality it worked more like a back-room favor and a status purchase.
The main application process was shut down in 2010, so unless you were already famous, the only way to get a blue check was to spend enough money on advertising or to be important enough to trigger impersonation problems.
Ad Age reported that advertisers who spent at least fifteen thousand dollars over three months could get verified, and Twitter sales reps told clients the same thing. That meant verification was effectively a perk reserved for major media brands, public figures, and anyone willing to pay. It was a symbol of influence rationed through informal criteria and private deals, creating a hierarchy shaped by cronyism rather than transparency.
Under the new X rules, everyone is on a level playing field.
Government officials and agencies now sport gray badges, symbols of credibility that can’t be purchased. These are the state’s chosen voices, publicly marked as incorruptible. To the EU, that should be a safeguard.
The second and third violations show how “transparency” doubles as a surveillance mechanism. X was fined for limiting access to advertising data and for restricting researchers from scraping platform content. Regulators called that obstruction. Musk called it refusing to feed the censorship machine.
The EU’s preferred researchers aren’t neutral archivists. Many have been documented coordinating with governments, NGOs, and “fact-checking” networks that flagged political content for takedown during previous election cycles.
They call it “fighting disinformation.” Critics call it outsourcing censorship pressure to academics.
Under the DSA, these same groups now have the legal right to demand data from platforms like X to study “systemic risks,” a phrase broad enough to include whatever speech bureaucrats find undesirable this month.
The result is a permanent state of observation where every algorithmic change, viral post, or trending topic becomes a potential regulatory case.
The advertising issue completes the loop. Brussels says it wants ad libraries to be fully searchable so users can see who’s paying for what. It gives regulators and activists a live feed of messaging, ready for pressure campaigns.
The DSA doesn’t delete ads; it just makes it easier for someone else to demand they be deleted.
That’s how this form of censorship works: not through bans, but through endless exposure to scrutiny until platforms remove the risk voluntarily.
The Commission insists, again and again, that the fine has “nothing to do with content.”
That may be true on a direct level, but the rules shape content all the same. When governments decide who counts as authentic, who qualifies as a researcher, and how visibility gets distributed, speech control doesn’t need to be explicit. It’s baked into the system.
Brussels calls it user protection. Musk calls it punishment for disobedience. This particular DSA fine isn’t about what you can say, it’s about who’s allowed to be heard saying it.
TikTok escaped similar scrutiny by promising to comply. X didn’t, and that’s the difference. The EU prefers companies that surrender before the hearing. When they don’t, “transparency” becomes the pretext for a financial hammer.
The €120 million fine is small by tech standards, but symbolically it’s huge.
It tells every platform that “noncompliance” means questioning the structure of speech the EU has already defined as safe.
In the official language of Brussels, this is a regulation. But it’s managed discourse, control through design, moderation through paperwork, censorship through transparency.
And the louder they insist it isn’t, the clearer it becomes that it is.
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