The Weekly Weird #16

Canada poops on speech, Uncle Sam poops on TikTok, the China Problem (University Edition), if you buy...it spies, eco-terrorists hate electric cars, digital ID for thee

Roll up, roll up, for another fantabulous foray into the fractious forest of foreboding!

Welcome back everyone, and thank you for your continued interest and support.

The next episode of the podcast drops this coming Sunday, so make sure you check it out and let me know what you think.

The world has not been disappointing on the dystopian front this week, so strap in, we’re going deep.

On our tour of what’s been happening, our first stop is the delightful and apologetic nation of Canada…

Canada Poops On Speech

Although still technically in the ‘attempted pooping’ phase, the Canadian government is going full steam ahead to pass their Online Harms Act, or Bill C-63 to those in the know. The “zombie law” has been lingering around Canada’s Parliament for a decade.

From the National Post:

Hate speech is punishable under criminal law, but in the past, it could also be met with a civil penalty under Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. In 2014, the penalty was killed by Stephen Harper’s government after being badly abused. In 2021, the Trudeau government tried to resurrect Section 13 in Bill C-36, but the bill died when an election was called. Now, it’s back for a third time as Bill C-63, and is as dangerous as ever to freedom of speech and the free press.

C-63 claims a focus on child sexual abuse and content related to that, as well as so-called ‘revenge porn.’ Child abuse and revenge porn are already illegal in Canada, including on the Canadian internet, which is like the normal internet except with a funny accent.

The real issue is that C-63 has additional provisions related to hate speech that expand its scope far beyond child safety or protecting women from revenge porn. Where hate could previously be considered as an aggravating factor to an existing crime, the bill creates a new “offence motivated by hatred.” The maximum sentence for “advocating genocide” is increased from five years to a life sentence - that’s life in prison for speech, not for actually doing anything. Instead of criminal courts determining whether a precedented legal threshold has been met by an alleged offence, C-63 would allow offences to be tried by a civil tribunal who can make a determination using a much lower bar.

The supermassive black hole at the centre of the bill, as is the case with similar legislation around the world, is a simple question with an impossible answer: What exactly is hate speech?

As mentioned in the National Post, another problem is that the way C-63 outlines the structure of the process for pursuing a hate speech complaint creates an avenue for spurious claims to be used to silence or at least chill speech:

Individuals who complain bear no costs in bringing a complaint — not even the costs of a lawyer.

[…]

If the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal were to find a hate speech violation under the proposed C-63, defendants could face fines of up to $50,000, and could be made to pay up to $20,000 to complainants. The process financially incentivizes complaints at essentially zero cost.

It’s worth watching the video below from Christine Van Geyn at the Canadian Constitution Foundation. It’s a comprehensive (and worrying) primer on C-63.

Van Geyn says in the video above:

If Trudeau suddenly wants to get tough on child abusers, okay, I’m here for it, but…the child abuse portions of the bill, which are entirely good and defensible, are really designed to inoculate the bill from criticism for the other things that it does.

Why would sex crime provisions “inoculate the bill”?

In October 2022, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that enrolling sex offenders on the sex offender registry for life if they committed multiple acts in the same case was unconstitutional. A common perception of the Liberal government in Canada is that it is soft on crime, and in particular sex crimes. This National Post article is a good example of the thinking involved.

[T]he increasing frequency with which rapists, sexual assaulters and child molesters are given the benefit of the doubt and allowed to skirt prison time is alarming, to say the least. Not only does this forgo justice in individual cases, it makes Canadian women in general less safe.

Interestingly, as an aside within this aside, a 2022 study funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada reviewed recidivism (re-offending) data going back 80 years and found that “weighted pooled recidivism rates have declined since the 1970s by more than 60%.” This drop in re-offending was taken to show that the Canadian approach to dealing with sex crimes, involving community sentencing, treatment, and offender support, had helped significantly reduce the chances that a convicted sex offender would do it again.

Meanwhile, according to Statistics Canada, total sexual violations against children in Canada were up 18% percent from 2020 to 2021 but down 9% from 2021 to 2022, and the number of people charged with offences is more or less at record highs.

In October 2023, the Liberal government passed a law refining the rules around the sex offender registry and the definitions of sex offences. This was seen as an attempt to solve issues created by the Supreme Court ruling in 2022.

As per CTV News, the 2023 law added “new entries to the list of offences that can result in someone being added to the registry, including the non-consensual sharing of intimate images and extortion.” In short, revenge porn and blackmail.

All this is to say that there is a political situation in Canada where the government is seen as soft on sex offenders, while evidence apparently points to fewer repeat offences due to the change in rehabilitation practices, against a backdrop of a consistently rising number of reported offences.

One could conclude that the appetite among the Canadian public for proof of the government’s intention to tackle sex crimes, especially against children, makes that angle a reliable basis for a new and restrictive law that mostly deals with online expression rather than novel criminal behaviour not already prohibited elsewhere.

Back to C-63 itself. Josh Dehaas, Van Geyn’s colleague at the CCF, has an excellent X thread outlining the serious problems with C-63:

In 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada said in the R v Whatcott decision that hatred is only the "most extreme manifestations" of the emotion captured by the words "detestation" and "vilification." Only that type of speech can be outlawed without violating s 2(b) of the Charter.

[…]

But how do we know if what we're seeing rises to the level of "detestation" or "vilification?" Whatcott tells us to look for the "hallmarks of hatred." This is where things get frightening because some of "hallmarks of hatred" are things people should frankly be allowed to say.

Dehaas goes on to give multiple examples from the text of the bill where existing activist groups would fall foul of the provisions and potentially be guilty of hate speech. It’s such a dispiritingly long list that for brevity I’ve omitted it here, but take a look at his thread using the link above. It’s eye-opening.

His conclusion:

As you can see, it's almost impossible for a lawyer like me who studies free expression to know whether I've committed "hate speech." It's going to be even harder for regular Canadians to know where to draw the line.

As Van Geyn rightly points out, hate speech is “categorically amorphous” and “inherently subjective.” What is hateful and unacceptable to one person is fine for another. A word or phrase that is frightening or disgusting to one person or group can be a badge of honour to another. An attempt to decide what is acceptable for everyone is very likely to end in a speech landscape that is accommodating to no-one.

The CCF have a page up for those of you who are in Canada and want to write to your MP.

On balance, the content of the bill is terrible, but the shocking provision that speech (no matter how grotesque or unpalatable) can be punished with a life sentence in prison is surely a bridge too far for a liberal society. Maybe Canada can live up to its reputation for mildness by sending this atrocity packing.

C-63, and by extension the Canadian government shilling it, gets a full five-out-of-five poops. 💩💩💩💩💩

Uncle Sam Poops On TikTok

Remember when Trump tried to ban TikTok, ordered that the Chinese owner of the app divest themselves, got tied up in court, and then had his executive order rescinded by Joe Biden?

Well, now Biden wants to ban TikTok, coming out in favour of the ban he overturned, while Trump is now against the ban he ordered (because Facebook?), and doesn’t want his old policy re-enacted by the old guy who got rid of it, making his position…clear?

"There are a lot of people on TikTok that love it. There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it"

There are lots of people on fentanyl too, Donald, and they really “go crazy without it,” but we still don’t think it’s an overall bonus for society to embrace it. Not the strongest argument.

The US House of Representatives has voted 325-65-1 in favour of the divestment bill, so if it clears the Senate, ByteDance will be forced to sell off its hold on TikTok. President Biden has already confirmed that he will sign the bill if it hits his desk. After four years of haranguing, haggling, and huffy humbug, the plan is to do what Trump did/tried to do in 2020.

TikTok has been called a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “trojan horse” by fans of the ban in the US legislature, and there’s fire under that smoke.

It’s fairly common knowledge that Chinese companies are, where and when it counts, extensions of the CCP.

From Richard McGregor writing in the above article in The Guardian:

The party doesn’t habitually micromanage their day-to-day operations. The firms are largely still in charge of their basic business decisions. But pressure from party committees to have a seat at the table when executives are making big calls on investment and the like means the “lines have been dangerously blurred”, in the words of one analyst. “Chinese domestic laws and administrative guidelines, as well as unspoken regulations and internal party committees, make it quite difficult to distinguish between what is private and what is state-owned.”

When it comes to tech companies, especially those with infrastructure of strategic importance to the CCP, the desire of the government to have a proactive toehold is more evident.

Meanwhile, China’s three dominant internet companies, Baidu (a search engine), Alibaba (e-commerce) and Tencent (messaging and gaming), known collectively as the BAT, have all felt the government’s wrath. In 2018, Tencent lost $200bn in its market capitalisation after regulators stopped approving new online games, pushing the company out of the world’s top 10 companies ranked by their share market valuation. The rapid growth of the BAT companies and their dominance of the internet in China has given them an outsized economic status. But their political value is just as important, as they have become indispensable to China’s surveillance state. With the mountain of data they generate, the BAT trinity are in effect turning into a real-time, efficient and privately run intelligence platform.

Enter TikTok, a by-all-accounts highly addictive app used by millions worldwide, many of them young people (i.e. under 30). The algorithm, like any other social platform, is adept at pushing content at you that can affect your emotions, change your mind, lead you down a rabbit hole towards more and more extreme content, silo you off in an echo chamber surrounded by a vocal minority you are led to believe constitute a meaningful chunk of society…the list goes on and on. This isn’t unique to TikTok, of course, but it is noticeable how young the TikTok crowd are, how hooked on the platform they get, and how the ‘viral’ sensations that emerge into the broader culture often skew weirdly anti-social.

When a whole slew of young people got super-emotional about how the scales had fallen from their eyes about America because they read Osama Bin Laden’s Letter to America, it was TikTok. When a social media platform was found pushing content to viewers “including dangerously restrictive diets, pro-self-harm content and content romanticising suicide to users who show a preference for the material, even if they are registered as under-18s,” it was TikTok. On the whole, social media isn’t exactly proving itself to be a net benefit for the world’s youth anyway, so TikTok isn’t the sole offender here, but it seems to have been particularly effective at spreading memes, ideas, and trends that run counter to the self-image established in ‘Western’ countries. Whether that is because the public is picking up on genuine rot at the heart of many democratic nations, or because the CCP is running a psy-op using a social media platform’s algorithm, or a combination of the two, is anybody’s guess.

As for protecting user data and privacy against CCP encroachment, the short version is: If your data goes to China, fuggedaboutit. Harris Slivoski puts it bluntly in his blog post titled The Chinese Government Has Your Data And There’s Not Much You Can Do:

Any form of data you transmit across the Chinese border is available for inspection and use by the Communist Party and its agents.

Suffice it to say that China has form in hoovering up data without your knowledge and/or against your will, even if you don’t live there.

Here’s CNN talking about Pinduoduo, a shopping app that Google ended up removing from its Play Store because of the malware it contained:

Sergey Toshin, the founder of Oversecured, said Pinduoduo’s malware specifically targeted different Android-based operating systems, including those used by Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi and Oppo.

[…]

Toshin described Pinduoduo as “the most dangerous malware” ever found among mainstream apps.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s like, super expansive,” he said.

Not even Google could live with how much user data the app took. Think of how high that bar needs to be.

Anyway, I could go on, but this isn’t a Lovejoy argument.

Is it a good idea to ban TikTok, even if it whiffs of dark and horrible practices? I don’t know. I don’t use it, I don’t like the sound of it, and whenever someone explains to me how great they think it is, they make it sound even worse than I imagined it to be. I don’t have a horse in this race, other than a free speech reflex that gives me the willies about government banning access to places where speech takes place. That said, having the CCP all up in your phone doesn’t sound good either.

China regularly installs spyware on the phones of tourists, and reportedly even has its own mandatory ‘anti-malware’ app that resident smartphone users have to have installed, which blocks what they can and can’t put on their phones. If they have a back door to access personal data, it seems believable that they would use it, and I don’t think it’s a good idea for that or any government to have unfettered access to our private information. However, it’s not a good look for a country like the United States, billing itself as free by comparison, to be deciding what you can and can’t have on your phone.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) gave his objections to the divestment bill during the debate on the House floor.

They’ve described the TikTok application as a trojan horse, but there’s [sic] some of us who feel that, either intentionally or unintentionally, this legislation to ban TikTok is actually a trojan horse. Some of us are concerned that there are First Amendment implications here. Americans have the right to view information. We don’t need to be protected by the government from information. Some of us just don’t want the President picking which apps we can put on our phones, or which websites that we can visit. We don’t think that’s appropriate. We also think it’s dangerous to give the President that kind of power, to give him the power to decide what Americans can see on their phones and their computers.

Massie goes on to argue that, because the determination of whether a company falls foul of the law is at the President’s discretion and not limited to social media companies or even Chinese companies, “the bill is written so broadly that the President could abuse that discretion.”

Massie also reads out an exclusion that was added to the bill, specifically exempting websites where users post reviews or travel information, and avers:

Why is this exception in the bill? Why did somebody feel that like they needed this exception if the bill itself only covers social media applications that foreign adversaries are running?

Good question, Congressman. Why indeed? It was, after all, the Biden administration that created the Disinformation Governance Board and then shelved it because of the swift, fierce, and totally justified backlash. Was the door shut on that only to have this bill come in through the window?

Three-out-of-five poops (for now). 💩💩💩

The China Problem (University Edition)

More China shenanigans this week as the Free Speech Union (FSU) released a video in support of an academic at University College London (UCL) after she was sanctioned by the university because students complained when she posed the following question in class, as a prompt for a discussion: Why does China have so many slaves?

Associate Professor Michelle Shipworth describes in the above video how a Chinese student objected to her open question, calling it “provocative.” Shipworth then found herself prevented from properly accessing and using the online portal through which she edits her modules and teaching materials. A colleague had “turned off [her] editing rights.”

She managed to get her access restored, but then was on the receiving end of “extreme insistence that [she] drop the exercise in future years.” The irony is that she was inviting student criticism of the claim, not simply calling China a modern slave state.

Two of her colleagues then filed complaints against her for questioning her Chinese students in class, posting on social media about academic freedom in China, and reporting cheating by her students, some of whom were Chinese.

Shipworth then received an email from UCL in which they cut to the chase and said the quiet part out loud (emphasis mine).

We have a collective duty to ensure all students have a good educational experience at UCL, and in order to be commercially viable, our MSc courses need to retain a good reputation amongst future Chinese applicants.

According to the FSU, she has been told not to post about China on social media because it is “problematic,” not to use China as a case study, not to question individual students in seminars, and that her question about slavery in China violated UCL’s rules on bullying and harassment.

This comes just one month after the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) released a statement about a successful meeting with the CEO of the world’s largest chemical producer, BASF, Martin Brudermüller, in which he “committed to accelerate their withdrawal from Xinjiang ‘within months’ because a ‘red line’ had been crossed regarding their partner's complicity in the treatment of Uyghurs.”

The IPAC letter to BASF that led to the meeting:

This is a round-up, so we won’t get into the weeds on Communist China’s devilishly ironic mistreatment and exploitation of its workers, but let’s just say that the conversation prompt “Why does China have so many slaves?” shouldn’t be considered off-limits or controversial. Debatable, maybe, but not outside the lines.

If You Buy…It Spies

From a university in London to one in Ontario, Canada now, for a rare (if small) win in resisting techno-feudal dystopian horror.

CBC reports on the removal of 29 vending machines from the University of Waterloo after an error message on the screen of one of them led to a post on Reddit asking a simple, valid, and hilarious question: “hey so why do the stupid m&m machines have facial recognition?”

As Chandler Bing would say, “can open, worms everywhere.”

The thread that followed is worth reading just to bask in the inimitable Reddit vibe, and to enjoy the fact that the outrage was led by a user with the handle ‘shitfartpissballs’.

The question “Wait this is so fucked how are people okay with this” followed by the reply “small price to pay for M and M” is the perfect summary of how our society got to this point, isn’t it?

River Stanley, a student majoring in computer science and business, broke the story in a university publication, mathNEWS.

Stanley explains:

Facial recognition software isn’t inherently malicious. Many use Apple’s Face ID every day. The key is that in such situations, the individual provides express, meaningful consent.

Stanley chased up the operator of the machines, Adaria, and the manufacturer, a Swiss company called Invenda, and got conflicting answers.

While Adaria claims the machines take no images of customers, and has no demographic imaging capabilties, Invenda contradicts them in saying they do—however, relevant data is only used locally.

Giving the example of “express, meaningful consent” from a case involving involuntary consumer surveillance at a Canadian shopping mall chain, Cadillac Fairview, Stanley sums up (emphasis in original):

Express, meaningful consent means two things. One, that the individual understands the full context of what they consent to. Two, that the consent is express—it is not implied, but rather openly given by the individual.  Adaria’s Invenda M&M’s machines fail both counts.

On campus today, Adaria’s machines can conduct the privacy violations Cadillac Fairview ran afoul of. With almost imperceptible cameras, they identify biometric information of M&M’s shoppers without our permission. Never in the user interaction flow are we asked “do you consent to having your biometric data scanned?”, because ideally, we shouldn’t have known we are being scanned at all.

The university administration were quick to agree to having the machines removed, thanking the students for “bringing this matter to our attention.”

Word on whether this will be a trend is pending. From CBC:

Approximately 100 Invenda vending machines have been shipped to Canada, the company said, although it's not clear if all of them have been installed.

According to Invenda’s response to mathNEWS, “only the final data, namely presence of person, estimated age and estimated gender, is collected without any association with an individual,” and then “Clients are furnished with anonymized data analyses.”

Ars Technica have more here, including the following corporate malfeasance nugget:

Mars, the maker of M&M candies, was a key part of Invenda's expansion into North America. It was only after closing a $7 million funding round, including deals with Mars and other major clients like Coca-Cola, that Invenda could push for expansive global growth that seemingly vastly expands its smart vending machines' data collection and surveillance opportunities.

Coming soon: Facial ID verification sponsored by Coca-Cola, to make sure you’re “the real thing.”

Eco-Terrorists Hate Electric Cars

This week’s crop is irony-rich. Vulkangruppe Tesla Abschalten (Volcano group shutting down Tesla), referred to by DW below as “a far-left militant group,” claimed responsibility for an arson attack on Tesla’s Gigafactory in Germany over a beef with the company’s environmental impact, which seems odd since Tesla are by all accounts at the forefront of electric car and battery-storage technology.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest shit-poster, retorted on X:

These are either the dumbest eco-terrorists on Earth, or they’re puppets of those who don’t have good environmental goals. Stopping production of electric vehicles, rather than fossil fuel vehicles, ist extrem dumm.

Reuters had more:

In a letter posted on website kontrapolis.info, the group said destroying Tesla was "a step on the path to liberation from patriarchy".

According to German law enforcement, the Vulkangruppen (volcano groups) have been active since 2011, are “left-extremist,” and take responsibility for their attacks by signing statements with the names of volcanos.

Irony Alert: Volcanos, which (albeit briefly) emit large amounts of CO2, being used as a symbol of environmental resistance.

I say bring back the Monkey Wrench Gang. At least Hayduke had a sense of humour.

Digital ID For Thee

A short dystopian coda from our friends at Verizon and the World Bank Group, who made an appearance at the Global Digital Summit to talk about how awesome it would be if we citizens were all included in a government database, for our well-being and inclusion. Did I mention they think it will be inclusive?

Ajay Banga, President of the World Bank Group, wants you to know how important for you being included in a database in the hands of your government is:

Creating a digital identity platform for citizenry is kind of foundational. I believe your government should be the owner of your digital ID. Private companies should not own that. It is the social contract of a citizen with their country to have an identity, a currency, and safety.

Banga goes on to add: “That digital identity should guarantee the privacy of that citizen…but the government should give the identity.”

Cool. Now name a government you can trust with that type of leverage.

I’ll wait.

That’s it for the Weird this week.

Outro music is dedicated to our confused chums in the Vulkangruppen: Mighty funk-ecology from Tower of Power with Only So Much Oil In The Ground.

Stay sane, friends.