The U.S. State Department is taking aim at Canada’s Online News Act in a human rights report that criticizes press freedom in Canada — which experts characterized Thursday as Orwellian.
The Online News Act, which requires Meta and Google to compensate news publishers for the use of their content, is cited in a section of the report covering freedom of the press.
“The U.S. is determined to crush two important pieces of Canadian legislation, the Online News Act and the Online Streaming Act. Their end game is clear,” said Carleton University international affairs professor Fen Hampson.
While Meta pulled news from its platforms in response to the 2023 law, news outlets are now receiving payments from a $100 million Google fund. Prime Minister Mark Carney indicated last week he is open to repealing the legislation; a government spokesperson said “implementation of the Online News Act is still ongoing” in response to a query from The Canadian Press.
Carney previously killed a digital services tax that would have applied to many large U.S. tech companies after U.S. President Donald Trump halted trade negotiations with Canada over the tax.
Last week, a group of U.S. Republicans urged the Trump administration to push Canada to eliminate the Online Streaming Act. That bill forces large streaming companies like Netflix and Amazon to make financial contributions to Canadian content and news.
Hampson said large tech companies oppose both pieces of legislation. “What we’re seeing is not what I would call honest criticism. It’s a calculated campaign to protect big tech’s profits,” he said.
“I would say, to put it bluntly, the report takes tiny grains of truth and spins them into a full-blown web of deception and misinformation that is perhaps worthy of George Orwell himself.”
Alfred Hermida, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s journalism school, also referred to the concept of doublethink from Orwell’s famous political dystopian novel, 1984.
Hermida said the report takes things “that are actually promoting press freedom, but presenting them in a way as if they’re curtailing press freedom.”
The report said that the government “generally” respects the freedom of expression in Canada, though it concluded that “significant curtailments of press freedom remained.”
It cited media funding as part of the reason, including the Online News Act, journalism tax credits, and government funding for a local journalism initiative that is administered independently of government.
The state department took issue with a stream of that initiative that prioritizes hiring of diverse journalists, including those who are Indigenous, Black, have disabilities or are part of the LGBTQ community. The report claimed that discriminated “against journalists who fell outside of these favoured categories.”
Hermida said media has “by and large has been very white and very male” and the effort to increase diversity is attempting to correct historical harms.
Hermida added it’s “really startling” to see such a politicized report come out of the state department.
He described it as a “MAGA lens on press freedom in Canada.”
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