Canadian Media Hounds Trudeau on Banning TikTok in Canada

US president, Joe Biden, signed the TikTok ban into law. It took mere hours for the Canadian media to push for a similar ban in Canada.

Yesterday, I covered the news that Joe Biden had signed into law an unconstitutional and potentially harmful TikTok ban. TikTok has vowed it would fight the ban in the courts, but it has left job creators and creatives alike in a position of increased uncertainty. This as there continues to be no real case for why countries are banning TikTok in the first place.

Yet, despite all of that, it appears that the Canadian mainstream media really can’t help themselves when it comes to demonstrating how irresponsible they have become in recent years. On the day that Biden signed the TikTok ban legislation, it appears that the Canadian mainstream media was hounding Trudeau on when Canada would be passing similar legislation, banning TikTok in Canada outright. The questions seemingly took the Canadian Prime Minister off guard who gave a boilerplate response – understandable given how quickly developments happened in the US. Here’s one example from Global News:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he won’t be commenting as the United States closed in on a bill that could ban TikTok but said he continues to “look closely” to ensure cybersecurity for Canadians.

“I’m not going to comment on what other governments are doing. What I will say is Canada will continue to look very closely at how we can make sure we’re keeping Canadians safe while making sure we’re taking advantage of great technologies that spur innovation and opportunity for people right across the country,” Trudeau told reporters on Wednesday.

“We know that the security, privacy and the data protection of Canadians needs to be a first priority for us. We’ve already taken significant measures on that and we will continue to do that. But we will act in ways that are right for Canadians.“

This particular article goes to great lengths at regurgitating the misleading talking points as it tries to justify a ban that would kill jobs in Canada:

The passage of the legislation is the culmination of long-held bipartisan fears in Washington over Chinese threats and the ownership of TikTok, which is used by 170 million Americans.

Both the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission have warned that ByteDance could share TikTok user data — such as browsing history, location and biometric identifiers — with China’s authoritarian government.

Conveniently not mentioned in this report was the fact that those same US intelligence organizations were asked for evidence to back up the conspiracy theories that China is using TikTok as a global spy machine. In response, those organizations admitted that they didn’t have any evidence, just wild speculation and theory.

The efforts to mislead Canadian’s with these reports isn’t exclusive to Global News, either. In another report in the Toronto Star, there was also an effort to push the conspiracy theory that TikTok is a tool for Chinese foreign interferance campaigns:

TikTok is the fasting-growing social-media app in Canada, a report last year from Toronto Metropolitan University shows, but it is also considered the least trusted.

For years, Western governments have expressed concerns that the popular platform could put sensitive data in the hands of China’s government or be used as a misinformation tool.

Who says that TikTok is the least trusted? Why is TikTok considered the least trusted? What makes TikTok such a unique threat compared to other platforms? The Toronto Star doesn’t say. This is classic Canadian mainstream media scaremongering, relying on defamatory statements to push an agenda all the while abandoning any semblance of journalistic integrity.

Further, this showcases the other conspiracy theory being pushed by mainstream media in that TikTok is being used by China as a foreign interference tool. Again, there has been exactly zero evidence to support these claims. Even further, if China is using TikTok for foreign interference campaigns, this wouldn’t exactly be difficult to provide evidence for. It would be really obvious like Russian foreign interference on Facebook. It would be very easily trackable and very public. Further, trying to push the idea of what China “could” do is extremely piss poor evidence that should be laughed out of the conversation from the get go.

This latest development continues a certain pattern of behaviour by the Canadian mainstream media. As long time readers have been finding, the large media companies have been increasingly technophobic and anti free speech over the last few years. Last month, one article published by the Globe and Mail was very direct about this, explaining directly why they feel that free speech is a threat to democracy and must be stamped out. Up until that point, the media companies were backing government policies that were a threat to freedom of expression, but never really coming outright to profess their hatred towards free speech.

What’s more, this isn’t even the first time that the Canadian mainstream media was pushing obviously false conspiracy theories in a bid to mislead the Canadian public. During the Online News Act (Bill C-18) debates, the mainstream media was pushing the conspiracy theory that the platforms were scraping and republishing whole news articles without permission and using ad revenue to make off with the revenue afterwards. This is what we famously labelled Big Lie 1.0. The media outlets never backed up those claims, but had no problem supporting News Media Canada posting the infamous Mark Zuckerberg wanted for theft of journalism posters.

As people like us called out the large media companies for lying about this, the mainstream media doubled down and accused independent experts of being somehow bought out by “Big Tech” and “shilling” for them. So, ultimately, they were never shy about defaming anyone and everyone who questioned their wild claims.

Of course, as we know, reality ultimately dismantled those lies as the platforms announced that they were going to be dropping news links. Meta ultimately did and Google very nearly followed suit until the Canadian government folded in a desperate bid to keep news links on Google services. In the process, the media rolled out Big Lie 2.0 by falsely claiming censorship. In addition, the mainstream media moved the goalposts on their original lie and made the even more ridiculous argument that the platforms were somehow “stealing” the media companies audiences. This laughable claim was never really backed by anything substantive and was ultimately dismissed as nonsense.

In addition to this, the large media companies also pushed the propaganda that the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11) was only about large platforms “paying their fair share”. It was always a misleading claim because online creators knew that what was really going on was that the large media companies were seeking laws that would promote their content over independent online creators. The mainstream media, along with politicians, pushed conspiracy theories that platforms are using creators as political pawns to get platforms out of paying their fair share. Again, there was nothing really supporting these claims of platforms getting creators to lie about the Online Streaming Act, but the media had no problem running with those lies anyway.

In the last few years, we’ve been seeing time and time again large media companies abandoning their journalistic principles in order to push what they see as an opportunity to push their business interests. So, it really doesn’t come to any surprise that we are seeing an erosion of trust in the large media companies. Who could blame Canadians? When they see these obvious examples, who would place trust in the media companies supposedly reporting the news?

All of this would just be cause to roll your eyes at the media for acting stupid had it not been for the fact that it resulted in very damaging real world consequences. For instance, online creators are currently fighting for their livelihoods as the Online News act works its way through the CRTC consultation process. Small newspapers are going under while other outlets are slowing down operations thanks to the Online News Act. Now, we are seeing very real risks for TikTok creators as the media pushes the government to banning the app in this country. In short, these efforts have collectively already caused very real harm to Canadian jobs and investment in this country – this with the prospect of even further harm coming down the pipeline.

What is striking in all of this is just how naked these efforts really are. I mean, the mainstream media didn’t even bother to wait a few days before running up to the Prime Minister asking, “Are you going to be banning TikTok too? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh?” What’s more, the media companies aren’t even hiding this in their coverage afterwards. They went through great pains to write about how threatening TikTok is with careful omissions in their coverage.

Their financial interests in all of this is pretty clear. It’s no secret that there are people who get their news from TikTok. For the mainstream media, this represents a threat to their businesses because they are seeking a monopoly of attention within this country. For them, a ban on TikTok would mean that they could get their audiences back to watching their news coverage or reading it on their websites. It’s similar to record labels suing file-sharers in a bid to get them back into the deprecated record stores (and we all know how well THAT worked out). Ultimately, this is an effort to turn back the hands of time that puts potentially thousands of jobs and millions of dollars at risk – not to mention the destruction of a cultural safe space for Canadians that otherwise doesn’t exist with traditional media companies.

Hopefully, this effort to censor a whole platform doesn’t get very far in Canada. Otherwise, we could be facing a very similar free speech fight in this country as what is happening in the US right now.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.