by Robert Kraychik
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau linked “flat-earthers” to “anti-vaxxers” while warning of online “disinformation” during a town hall event Monday in Ottawa, ON.
Trudeau framed the government policy debate around digital censorship as a competing balance between degrees of free speech and the state’s ability to “protect” citizens from “disinformation”:
Governments have very limited tools to protect people in an online world, which is a good thing. It allows for a tremendous amount of freedom — freedom of expression, freedom of discovery — no oppressive governments controlling what you see, what you want, but it also opens us up to a tremendous amount of crap, of hate speech, of things that are illegal, but also things that are just going to bring us down roads where we’re going to get lost.
The prime minister then linked “flat-earthers” to “anti-vaxxers” via a shared “anti-science” identity:
I remember a few years ago before the pandemic, getting really fascinated by flat-earthers, and trying to understand — sort of — the thinking behind them, of people who decided actively to create an identity for themselves that was to just clearly reject what science settled thousands of years ago with the ancient Greeks, and that there’s no real contrast to.
It’s more of an identity thing rather than a reasoning thing, and to have people sucked into that, it was fascinating to try and see what it was all about.