CJPME President publishes letter in the Hill Times

2024-07-09 CJPME President publishes letter in the Hill Times

On July 9, 2024, CJPME’s President Thomas Woodley was published in The Hill Times, challenging the one-sided claims made in an article by Jesse Cnockaert the previous week regarding Bill C-63, the online harms bill. Bill C-63 purportedly aims to reduce exposure to harmful content online, including content that promotes hatred, violence, or extremism. However, Cnockaert’s article on the online harms bill presented only the perspective of Shimon Fogel, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), a pro-Israel lobby group, and ignored the fact that in 2021, 30 civil liberties organizations signed a statement criticizing the legislation as drafted. 

In his letter, Woodley pointed out that the bill could incentivize over-removal of content by platforms, and could be understood as conflating vastly different types of online harms under a single regulatory regime.  Woodley pointed out that the bill hadn’t stalled for the reasons Fogel provided, but because the bill was poorly written, and need to be rewritten from scratch.