This view breaks the statement into its steps and names what each one does.
Mr. Speaker, Claims · 16 wordswe have the biggest companies on earth with the most sophisticated attention-holding technologies known to humanity, Positioning · 60 wordsand we have a kid with a phone. There are the most dazzling, seductive, funny, curiosity-inducing images, texts and videos, and there is a family at the dinner table, hunched and shrouded in a blue glow, or there is a classroom of semibored learners. There is a predator, and there is a child on the other side of the world.Positioning Promise · 22 wordsIt is time to act for these families, kids and learners, and to start to rebalance the playing field just a little. Claims · 44 wordsIt is time to do what one parent said at the round table the member for University—Rosedale and I co-hosted with SickKids and other stakeholders. She said she wanted her kids to discover who they are, who they were, before their algorithms told them. Procedure · 32 wordsThis is the opportunity in front of us. This is why we are acting today. This is why we are acting now. This is why we are acting to get it right.ProcedureVague promise Positioning · 22 wordsMany of us have had different journeys to this piece of legislation. Many of us have had different journeys to the House.Positioning Claims · 325 wordsIt was the prospect of bringing this bill, and this measure, over the finish line that helped inspire me to run for office. As a parent and a new educator at what was then Ryerson University, in the late 2010s we started to see the kinds of things that are causing such concern today, and that have resulted in the bill before us. I started a think tank that was then called the Ryerson leadership lab with colleagues Shoaib Ahmed and Sam Andrey. We decided to test what was happening in the world, what Canadians were thinking about the power of this technology and whether they wanted intervention on this. We did a survey. We put it out in 2019 in “Rebuilding Canada’s Public Square”.1 This is seven years ago now, and already the appetite was there. In that survey, it was found that 60% of Canadians believed that government should intervene with social media companies to require that they fix the problems they created in our political system.2 At that time, in 2019, social media companies were already amongst the least trusted companies in Canada when it came to doing what was in the best interest of the public. Seven years ago, 52% of Canadians already felt that they had little or no control over what they saw in their social media feeds.3 This was at a time when the social feed still had at least a bit of a chance compared to the algorithmic feed that has become so dominant in our feeds. I mentioned that 60% requested government intervention. Just two years later, the number of Canadians went up 11 percentage points, with 71% of Canadians supporting government intervention with social media companies.4 Canadians were already seeing the hateful content, the harmful content, seven years ago and five years ago. Racialized Canadians were 33% more likely to encounter hate speech and 52% more likely to encounter racist content online than non-racialized Canadians.5 Reasoning · 51 wordsAlready, years and years ago, Canadians were telling us, Canadians were telling each other, young people were telling their parents and educators were telling parents that there was a problem, that these technologies were too powerful, that the machines guiding these technologies were too powerful and that we needed to act. Claims · 67 wordsGovernments slowly attempted to do so. In the meantime, in that period of time, the information, the technologies and the research became even more convincing. From the social scroll to the infinite scroll, there is perhaps no more powerful tool in the world to monetize our attention, that most scarce resource, that most precious resource. New features were being added to social media platforms such as streaks, Aside · 3 wordswhich was fun.Aside Anecdote · 42 wordsI am going to click on this today, and I am going to click on it again tomorrow. I am going to click again, and someone will see that I saw them and I saw that they saw me. That is great.Anecdote Claims · 8 wordsThere were GPS connections within social media feeds. Aside · 20 wordsGreat, now someone can find me wherever I happen to be, even if I do not know who they are.Aside Procedure · 7 wordsOn the corporate side, what was happening?Procedure Claims · 63 wordsTrust and safety divisions were gutted. Content moderation was being rejected. The investment in the very AI tools that can be misused to make the existing tools even more dangerous was embraced by these companies. Companies were suppressing research, litigating or budgeting for the fines they would incur by failing in litigation. It was just a cost of business, as was attacking whistle-blowers. Positioning · 53 wordsThis adoption of the AI technologies that are being used to supercharge what was already a dangerous platform is kind of like owning the drugstore, buying the cigarette company, and then putting those cigarettes back at the front of the store, but then spiking those cigarettes with crack cocaine made in the pharmacy.Positioning Claims · 91 wordsThe combination of social media and AI technologies was used in a potent way to monetize the worst forms of attention-seeking and of attention-grabbing content. This was the fundamental objective and the fundamental economics of the platform. The discovery pieces from the lawsuits coming in from the United States thankfully revealed that this was being used in a systematic way by platforms and continues to be used, in the case of X, or Twitter, to monetize our attention and to cause many of the harms we see in front of us. Procedure · 19 wordsMeanwhile, what was the research telling us about about the kids, and what were kids and teenagers telling us?Procedure Claims · 131 wordsVery importantly, we were learning that the time of greatest vulnerability coincided with important life stages and that these differed by sex. For girls, the time of greatest correlation between social media use and lower life satisfaction was between the ages of 12 and 14, during those very key puberty adolescent years, 6and again at age 19, which is often the age when they take on higher education. For boys, the association between lower life satisfaction and increased social media use was highest between the ages of 15 and 17.7 Again, this correlates with their journeys through pubescence and adolescence, and into adulthood. The platforms knew this, and they took advantage of this to feed teens the very content that got them further hooked to these platforms, to their business models. Positioning · 10 wordsParents were at a loss. Parents were around dinner tables.Positioning Claims · 258 wordsStudents, including the university students I was teaching at that time, were telling us that they were addicted and hooked to this content. They wanted alternatives they could not find. Policy-makers started to act. We started to act. Just in this Parliament in the last 12 months, as new MPs, we started to act. At the gathering the member for University—Rosedale and I co-hosted, we heard from Coleen Dudley from The Neighbourhood Group, a peer educator who was telling us about the solutions we needed to find. We heard from Jessica Besser-Rosenberg from Unplugged Canada. We heard from Dana Cramer from the Young Digital Leaders of Canada. We heard from the leaders who are on the front lines of these issues saying that it is time to act, that there are solutions available and that we must act. Recently, at the Attention conference at McGill, we heard Alex Munter of the Canadian Medical Association compellingly say that a parent’s no has no power because of the power of the biggest social media companies in the world and their biggest technologies. We heard from Ravi Iyer that AI-empowered chat bots are doing such a good job of easing the way into a false sense of socialization for kids, that kids are losing the ability to have the frictions that are required to develop social learning. Recently, we heard from Suki Huang, a youth champion at The Dais, who told us that the youth did not choose this system, but they feel that they need to be on social media. Reasoning · 47 wordsWhat alternatives are available to those kids? I think a complementary piece of work that we and the government have to be doing around news literacy is figuring out, if kids are not present on social media platforms, how they can get that news from other places. Promise · 23 wordsWe need to put forward efforts to help them touch grass, enjoy the off-line world and be able to gather all those pieces. Claims · 20 wordsThis bill, Bill C-34, is a culmination of the work that is a response to all those things I mentioned. Thanks · 29 wordsI want to salute the former occupant of this seat, the hon. Arif Virani, former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, who brought a bill forward beforehand.8Thanks Claims · 35 wordsThere are so many aspects of this bill that are important, such as the requirement to file digital safety plans, the requirement to publish those plans and the requirement for the commission to review them.9 Reasoning · 66 wordsThis would not just protect kids; this would protect all of us, because if the digital safety plans and the design features that need to be improved would be improved with a push from this bill and from the commission, which would need the crucial flexibility to adapt to changing technologies, then we would have a safer online space, not just for teens, but for everyone. Claims · 13 wordsThere would be the requirement of a resource person to address user concerns.10 Aside · 5 wordsHow nice that would be.Aside Positioning · 14 wordsWho has tried to reach out to a social media company and been deterred?Positioning Claims · 26 wordsWe have learned so much over the last six to seven years. We have been able to experience and expose the harms that have been created. Promise · 48 wordsIt is time to take our agency back. It is time to reclaim a greater share of digital sovereignty for Canada. It is time to claim a share of our humanity back. It is time to act now, and protect not just the kids, but everyone in Canada.
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