Liberals drop the ball on outlawing deepfake porn

As if the federal government doesn’t have enough problems, it’s now being accused by its own experts of failing to fight online harms. During the 2021 election, the Liberals promised that by 2022, they would bring in new legislation dealing with online hate speech, incitement to violence and child sexual exploitation, as well as addressing the responsibility of social media platforms and offering recourse to victims. As 2023 draws to a close, with the internet feeling more like a sewer than ever before, that bill is still nowhere to be seen.Bernie Farber, a member of Ottawa’s advisory panel and chair of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, lamented the foot-dragging. “It’s horribly frustrating. The only tool in our anti-hate tool chest … is a series of laws around hate that in many cases, will not have any effect on online speech,” he said.The holdup is apparently due to a Keystone Cops routine playing out between ministries. According to news reports, the file changed hands from Canadian Heritage to the Justice Department shortly after last summer’s cabinet shuffle, but the transfer hasn’t been fully executed and Justice can’t move ahead.Some people may cheer the government’s failure on this. After all, who wants the state policing more of what we can say or see? But the elephant in the chatroom isn’t verbal, it’s visual — in the form of the non-consensual distribution of pornography and its latest iteration, deepfake porn.Read the full column on the National Post website