The mandatory backdoors would not help with this problem even if they were somehow magically made safe. If they managed to coerce Signal into installing a back door — which of course they can’t do — it would quickly be abandoned by its users and whatever tiny share it has of all the criminal gang recruiting activity would move on to places that are even harder to monitor.

Telegram users, where more of that sort of thing goes on, would probably be slower to move. But still people would eventually catch on and there are already more secure alternatives waiting to take over. They’ll just be ensuring that whichever one wins out won’t be one that’s in any way cooperative with Canadian law enforcement.

Don’t worry, the criminals will be fine. It’s only the normal people who don’t pay any attention to security since they have nothing to hide who will become super easy to spy on.

Yeah I have no idea how to keep track of what’s going on with it myself, let alone how to get word out to everyone else who’s going to be affected by this national disaster of a legislative project. It would be nice if we had a press that was interested in or capable of covering this sort of thing.

There’s another committee meeting on right now and I only know about it because I happened to remember to check.

I tuned in to watch for a few minutes and saw a Conservative MP asking sensible questions that I guess someone had written for her but not really following up on or challenging the responses to them, which were composed of a lot of vague hand-waving denials by the Liberals that any of the problems are a problem, without actually addressing any of the points made. Democracy in action!

It’s a real contrast to committee meetings I remember watching in decades past when I used to tune in to CPAC more frequently, where real expertise was often on display. Support for this bill would fall apart under the slightest scrutiny if the reality-based community were more involved the debate. But what debate there is, it’s just for show. It’s a majority government, they do what they like — and if someone tells them it’s a bad idea they must be the enemy.

some positive results

I wonder how much of the decline should be attributed to attempts to “disrupt the illegal drug trade” and how much to the slow process of word getting out to people who might otherwise have got themselves hooked on it that this stuff is dangerous.

I didn’t have time to watch much of that committee meeting video, but from what I did see it seems highly unlikely that they’re going to do anything to meaningfully change the situation. Time to retire all the rhetoric about Chinese companies being untrustworthy because they’re subject to secret orders to spy on their customers on behalf of their government, because the same is about to be true in Canada.

But it wasn’t the final meeting, I guess there’s still time for some kind of miracle.

So the plan is to dig up our natural resources, set fire to them, and use expensive machines called “data centres” to dispose of the waste heat? I guess all that activity will juice up the economy numbers but it it’s not easy to understand how that leaves us better off.

What the politicians get: A smug feeling of satisfaction, having done something they were told was good.

What the children get: Anxiety, incentive to cheat the system and to keep their Internet use secret from parents, a new reason to feel that the world is unfair to them.

What the budding “age verification” industry gets: Amazing new business opportunities.

What Facebook gets: A regulatory barrier to entry high enough to keep out any competition from some hypothetical new form of social media that would respect its users, since that is now illegal.

What spies and hackers get: Amazing new opportunities to steal everyone’s personal data.

What those of us too stubborn to ever submit to “age verification” get: We’ll be unable to use regulated social media and will have to make do with the Fediverse, possibly moving to instances hosted in whatever distant corner of the world still allows free use of communications media.

Like everyone else I haven’t seen the text yet but from everything that’s been said about it I guess it’s yet more evidence that the same gang of idiots who led Trudeau astray have found Carney and his crew just as easy to manipulate.

From metafilter:

"[…]Anyone who sees a conversation about how age verification laws are going to cause widespread significant harm to lots of different groups of people and decides instead to talk about how social media is harmful to children is doing the work of disinformation spreading propagandists.

They might not be disinformation spreading propagandists, they might have just been duped by disinformation spreading propagandists, but either way they are doing the work of disinformation spreading propagandists.

This is a propaganda and PR technique that is in common use today.

This is how it works:

Person 1 makes a point that is harmful to the narrative the PR firm has been paid to protect.

One or more accounts on the payroll of that PR firm, who usually just posts innocuous stuff but who always has an opinion on the topic of the day, chimes in with an indirectly related smokescreen argument, usually accompanied by an accusation or an emotional appeal.

Person 1 then gets bogged down with that argument, tacitly approving that the two topics are in fact one topic.

Lots of people then see the argument, and come to associate the smokescreen with the real issue. Some of them will be swayed specifically by the emotionally appeal (“think of the children”) and some of them will genuinely believe in the smokescreen issue (“social media is bad for children”) and accept that the smokescreen is important enough to justify accepting whatever the original post was arguing against.

There are lots of these PR accounts floating around out there. They’re sockpuppets. They look like real people, sometimes they are real people, but they’re also sockpuppets.

The end result of that is a bunch of people popping in to conversations about Age Verification laws to talk about separate and legitimately important issues as if those issues and Age Verification laws are the same thing.

And some of those people might be paid PR Sockpuppets, but some of them are definitely real people who really care about the harm social media might have on children.

And so we spend so much time talking about the nuance and potential solutions to this much more complicated problem that the real issue (these proposed Age Verification Laws are actually tools of fascist surveillance and control which will be used to suppress dissent and harm marginalized communities) gets lost."

I’m sure there probably are far-right instances out there somewhere federating with each other. If the Naziverse federation somehow grows to have anything like the cultural relevance of the mainstream Fediverse federation, the problem will not be the technology. The problem will be that your society is full of Nazis.

“People would block it” is the solution, yes. Not that Fedi is perfect but it got that bit right.

That’s getting awfully hypothetical. Should we not wait and see if the social norms of fedi continue to hold up before condemning it along with its more evil-oriented analogues?

It seems like you are dead set on a course that leads only to concluding that humanity is evil at heart and we should all be locked up and prevented from ever being seen in public in the name of safety. In an era where so much of social life is online that’s only a few small steps beyond the idea of making everyone show their ID before they’re allowed to use the Internet. Even if it’s done in the name of safety, it works in service of oppression.

I’ve been exploring the fediverse for several years and have never seen anything like “body shaming videos” anywhere on it. Have you? Really? I think you’d really need to go out of your way to look for it, because any instance routinely allowing that kind of shit would be quickly blocklisted into oblivion, perhaps still in existence but unseen by casual users.

There do exist other things that one might say are not suitable for children here and there — but on social media that respects its users they are not pushed on people who don’t want them by algorithms designed to hook into people’s anxieties and keep them dependent.

If free-world social media like mastodon is too dangerous for you I really don’t know what to recommend, because obviously going outside instead would be even more risky.

Pass comprehensive data privacy laws that prohibit the surveillance capitalist business model on which the current social media giants depend. It is the driving force behind their continued enshittification.

61 per cent of 12-to-15-year-olds in Australia continue to hold social media accounts despite being banned, while 70 per cent said it was “easy” to circumvent the ban.

Well there you go, at least it will do some good for young people. It will teach them how to circumvent whatever age-probing nonsense they come up with for use in Canada. It will teach them that the government can’t be trusted. It will teach them that the right to freedom of expression does not apply to youth. It will make them aware, as they approach the age where they’re able to vote, that the tradition of “good government” in Canada, if there was any life left in it, is now dead.

For the rest of us, and for the international reputation of Canada, it will only be harmful.

The real beneficiaries are not in Canada. They’re the American tech giants who will maintain their grip on Canada all the more tightly with this fancy new regulatory barrier to entry standing in the way of any possible competition, as the blame for whatever they continue doing to their younger users is shifted to disposable 3rd-party “age verification” providers given the job of doing the impossible.

This one looks like it’s going nowhere. We are not likely to get a better chance to reform the electoral system than to vote NDP at the next opportunity.

I don’t know how many minutes of this I’ll be able to take. Already I’m getting tired of watching this group of a dozen unfortunate souls stuck standing there behind the speaker, acting as human furniture, smiling and pretending to be impressed for the full hour from the looks of it. I hate it. It’s got to be going out of style some day soon. If not, maybe they should be first in line to have their jobs replaced by AI.

“Too often, AI is talked about …”

So true. I’m going to stop watching right there. Looking forward to getting my official government AI learning kit in the mail so I can learn to AI all the AI in the new AI-powered Canada.

Federal and municipal social media bans are also unlikely to work. It’s best regulated at the household level.

Much as I would like to completely ban everyone in the world from visiting facebook and twitter, you can’t really do that and still pretend to have a free society that cares about human rights. What you could do instead is outlaw the surveillance capitalist business model they depend on — universally, through strong privacy laws not aimed specifically at social media or any other narrowly-defined type of application.

The collection, use, and disclosure of personal information must be limited to reasonable purposes, which organizations must identify to individuals at the time of collection … Organizations must limit their collection of personal information to that which is necessary for the purpose identified to the individual.

That’s what Canada’s Vehicle Cyber Security Guidance says is required by Canadian privacy law. Maybe start enforcing that law, then? If that principle were adhered to in reality, cars wouldn’t collect any sensitive data at all. It would not have intelligence value for friends or adversaries if it didn’t exist.

Even after two rounds of everyone pointing out that it’s an incredibly bad idea, they still plan to make some cosmetic changes and push it through. The arrogance of this government is stunning.