FOSS Academic | Reading the Digital Safety Act with My Mastodon Admin Hat On

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Back in 2024, I published a reading of the Online Harms Act from my perspective as an admin of a Mastodon instance. The Online Harms Act was a proposed Canadian bill meant to regulate social media to prevent "harmful content," particularly hate speech and child abuse materials. While the Online Harms Act ultimately did not come to pass (due the proroguing of Parliament later that year), the Carney Liberal government is bringing much of it back with a new Digital Safety Act. In this post, I am also giving the new Act a look from the perspective of a Mastodon admin.

(Head's up: this a long post!)

Background: What's Mastodon? What's the Fediverse?

Since I'm hoping this post might be useful for debate about this bill, let me offer a very short primer on Mastodon (skip it if you're familiar). Mastodon is a microblogging system, so it's a Twitter-like social media system. But it's different in that there are thousands of installations of Mastodon all around the world. Each installation is a small community of people who can do social media things: share posts, comment or like posts, read other people's posts. So it's decentralized (or, as I prefer, noncentralized): there are many Mastodons out there.

What's important to note is that, as I discuss in my latest book, these community servers tend to be run by volunteers on a non-profit basis. They nearly all avoid surveillance capitalism -- they don't sell user data, thus protecting people's privacy. And they are moderated by the communities who run them, not by third parties, algorithms, or AI.

Each of these communities can connect (or federate) with others, meaning a person on a Mastodon server in Canada can connect to a person on one in Brazil. The linking of all these little servers into one big network is called "the fediverse." And the fediverse can include more than microblogging -- there are photo-sharing services (e.g. Pixelfed), video-sharing services (e.g., PeerTube), and more.

Mastodon and the fediverse have a very strong Canadian history and presence. Two of the authors of the underlying protocol are Canadian, the developer of Pixelfed is Canadian, and I would estimate there are more than 700 fediverse servers in Canada currently. I also believe things are growing as Canadians seek digital sovereignty in the face of troubled relations with the USA.

Finally, the fediverse can also connect to other social media, such as Bluesky, BlackSky, and NorthSky.

I can say a lot more about the fediverse -- I think it's a very exciting development in social media -- but I will leave this to get to the reading.

What's Different about the Digital Safety Act?

The 2024 Online Harms Act (OHA) was criticized because part of it involved criminal penalties for hate speech. The concern was that it would give the Canadian government too much power over how Canadians communicate online. That bit is removed from the Digital Safety Act (DSA).

The DSA has a new element that wasn't present in the OHA: the regulation of generative AI chatbots (think ChatGPT). The justification for this regulation is tied to the Tumbler Ridge Shooting in BC earlier this year, where the shooter had consulted ChatGPT prior. That part won't be too relevant here since I'm interested in the social media aspect.

The other difference between the OHA and the new DSA is the proposal of age verification or estimation for users of social media, chatbot, and pornography sites. I think it's safe to say that this part -- age verification and a potential ban of kids under 16 from social media -- is the most controversial part of the DSA, and it certainly will figure into my reading here.

What's the Same?

There's a lot. Rather than list the ways in which the DSA repeats material from the OHA, I'm just going to dive into the my reading of the Act.

Usual caveat: I'm not a lawyer.

I am reading this as an admin of a Mastodon server called AoIR.social. AoIR.social is a Mastodon server that serves the membership of the Association of Internet Researchers, an international group of scholars who study the Internet. We set up AoIR.social in the wake of Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter -- our members decided to no longer contribute to Twitter in light of Musk's atrocious politics (see this news today for the latest reason why).

Reading the DSA

Would AoIR.social be affected? Would the Fediverse?

Just as I asked back in 2024: would AoIR.social be affected by the DSA? And would I, as a Mastodon admin residing in Canada, be affected? And would the broader fediverse be affected? The answer is: most likely.

Social media, per the act, is

a website or application that is accessible in Canada, the primary purpose of which is to facilitate interprovincial or international online communication among users of the website or application by enabling them to access and share content.‍

Social media allows people to...