Petition calls for empowered agency to compel deletion of false ads

Thousands of Canadians have signed separate petitions created by Democracy Watch, with one calling for a strengthening of the elections law body that could compel media sites to remove false ads. The two petitions garnered a total of more than 15,000 signatories so far on change.org. They follow a report from the House of Commons ethics committee calling for stronger data protection and privacy measures, including enforcement powers for the privacy commissioner and privacy laws that govern political parties. The first petition focuses on privacy protection, and asks for a strengthening of the rules, enforcement and penalties and to apply them to all political parties, government and businesses. The second petition zeroes in on online election ads and calls for all such advertising in media and social media to comply with elections laws, including banning false ads and limiting third-party advertising spending. The latter is dealt with in a proposed elections reform bill before parliament, which limits to zero the amount of money foreign third-parties can spend on Canada’s elections. But Democracy Watch said in the release that the bill doesn’t go far enough to stop political parties from “abusing” the personal information of Canadians or to stop “secret, false online election ads.” To aid in stopping this, the campaign is calling for an empowered Commissioner of Canada Elections which, during the six months leading up to the election, would “order clearly false, illegal ads be deleted from media and social media sites, and require the head to issue these orders within a few days of receiving the information about each ad.” The online election ads campaign calls for five other changes, including requiring media and social media companies to submit ads to election law enforcement during the six months leading to an election to check for false claims about a party or candidate; require those companies to report who placed and paid for each ad and how much they spent; and give the head of the election law enforcement agency the power to impose significant enough fines to deter social media companies and advertisers from violating the rules. Democracy Watch said on its campaign page that companies like Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc., and Twitter Inc. know this information and can “easily report” it. “Businesses and political parties and social media companies cannot be trusted to protect Canadians’ privacy or to stop fake or foreign ads on their own because they are in a conflict of interest since they make money from privacy invasions and ads,” Duff Conacher, co-founder of Democracy Watch, said in a release.

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Petition calls for empowered agency to compel deletion of false ads

Brief | June 20, 2018

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