More and more governments are rushing to confront the dangers posed by Facebook, Google, Netflix and other digital giants. But Ottawa has yet to grow out of its infatuation with them.

In genuflecting to these rapacious American corporations, Justin Trudeau and his two cabinet colleagues entrusted with the file, Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly and Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould, are failing to stand up for Canadians, Canadian companies and Canadian sovereignty.

Several reasons are proffered for their deference:

They don’t want to risk antagonizing the Donald Trump administration in the middle of testy NAFTA negotiations.

They are being particularly nice to Facebook since they are lobbying it to locate a data centre in Canada.

They want Facebook to ensure that the Liberals are not undermined in the 2019 federal election the way Hillary Clinton was in the 2016 presidential election by Russians and others to help elect Trump, “the first Facebook and Twitter president.”

They don’t fully grasp the dangers posed by these American mega-corporations operating mostly above the law across borders.

Or they do but have not the fortitude to tax and regulate these companies to ensure competition, safeguard citizens’ privacy, stem the flow of hateful and fake content, and stop the steady erosion of democracies. Nothing less would do, given that:

Facebook, Google and others are conducting citizen surveillance far more than the Soviet KGB or East German Stasi ever did during the Communist era.

They have amassed fortunes selling the treasure trove of your and my data, without our permission and without ever compensating us a penny.

They are bleeding mainstream media by stealing news content paid for by someone else and vacuuming up an estimated 75 per cent of digital revenues in Canada that total about $5 billion a year.

Facebook, YouTube, Reddit and others have allowed their platforms to be hijacked by the likes of Daesh and also western hate-mongers — right-wingers, racists, white supremacists, xenophobes, homophobes, misogynists, anti-Semites and Islamophobes.

In fact, the more shocking and sensational the content — murders, suicides, cop chases, cop killings, beheadings, etc. — the higher the audience and the attention span, the bigger the profits.

Similarly, they have had little incentive to monitor, let alone stop, foreign interference to spread political disinformation and stoke discord in democratic societies.

They care not for the privacy of users, and they are not transparent about their users or advertisers.

That the profiles of up to 87 million Facebook users were tapped by the British firm Cambridge Analytica, and allegedly used to help Trump win, is only the latest chapter in the scandal.

Facebook has had as many as 270 million phoney accounts, many used to spread fake news and conspiracy theories, and polarize democracies. In that 2016 election, incendiary Russian posts reached 126 million users on Facebook; 131,000 messages were published on Twitter, and more than 1,000 videos were uploaded to YouTube.

Last month, when U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russians for “sowing discord in the U.S. political system” in that election, he cited Facebook 35 times.

The U.S. Congress has summoned Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to testify on April 11, and British parliamentarians are angry that he has refused to appear before them. But Trudeau and his ministers have been satisfied meeting his minions informally, trying to coax favours out of them.

While Facebook, Google, YouTube, Reddit and others have broadened the public square, paradoxically they’ve also made us anti-social, indeed tribal.

Users cluster in social media bubbles, talk mainly to those who share their interests and prejudices, and bully those they disagree with or dislike. Their alternate reality breeds alternate facts and a post-truth world that’s proven to be ideal playing ground for populists — from Donald Trump to Doug Ford.

Yet, the Trudeau government has offered mostly platitudes, contradictory ones at that.

Last fall, Trudeau was said to have warned Facebook to fix its fake-news problem or face undefined repercussions. Mélanie Joly, however, said that Ottawa does not want to decide what Canadians should or should not consider fake news. Instead, she went pleading with Facebook to advance media literacy, as though that were the magic potion to cure all the ills caused by the internet behemoths.

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Karina Gould has refused to try to stem the tide of poison coursing through social media. She said Ottawa would not follow Germany, which has passed a law forcing online platforms to remove hate speech. Such curbs on speech, she said, won’t be acceptable to Canadians. Her free-speech absolutism is American, not Canadian — the Supreme Court of Canada having repeatedly upheld the right of governments to curb hate speech.

Canada used to pride itself on independent thinking and policy leadership, rather than being a supplicant to foreign corporations.

Tomorrow: A digital policy for Canada

Former Star columnist and editorial page editor emeritus Haroon Siddiqui is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University in the Faculty of Arts as well as the Faculty of Communication and Design. Siddiqui.canada@gmail.com

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