OTTAWA — When Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez invited representatives from big digital platforms to talk about the Liberal government’s plans to fight bad behaviour online, Twitter’s seat was empty.

Two weeks before the Nov. 17 meeting, the company’s head of public policy in Canada and the U.S. cancelled her lobbying registration.

Like thousands of other Twitter staff, Michele Austin was fired Nov. 4 as Elon Musk scythed through the company after taking it over the week before. At its Toronto office, according to an official notice posted last week, 88 of 153 staff (which doesn’t include workers scattered in other locations) lost their jobs. Austin, Twitter’s managing director for Canada, Paul Burns, and its lead spokesperson Cam Gordon were all out. 

This past week, my 7.5 years leading communications for @TwitterCanada came to an end. A trillion thanks to all the 🇨🇦/🌏 colleagues, journos, partners & pals. You’ve all helped make this the ride of a lifetime. ✌️ https://t.co/UXWE6g5wde

— Cam Gordon (@cam_gordon) November 5, 2022

Austin had been with Twitter since 2018, bringing experience as a chief of staff to two ministers in Stephen Harper’s government to bear for the company’s interests. She lobbied members of Parliament, middle managers in the bureaucracy and ministers’ aides. She testified to MPs in formal committee hearings.

Twitter was invited to the roundtable meeting with Rodriguez last week, said his spokesperson Laura Scaffidi in an email, but did not send anyone. Elon Musk’s cuts to its Canadian workforce mean Twitter has bailed out of dealing with the government here just when the company faces its most serious regulatory challenge yet.

The result could be a flawed law, and a social-media company that can’t easily follow it.

“I think that what we’re seeing with Musk is real underestimation of the complexity of the legal and policy environment that these companies operate in. It’s not easy, and it requires a lot of resources,” said Emily Laidlaw, a law professor at the University of Calgary who holds a Canada Research Chair in cybersecurity law.

“If you were a regulator trying to get a hold of them, and you have nobody there to deal with, it’s a huge problem, because it essentially means you don’t have anyone governing that space,” she told The Logic in an interview.

People in similar posts with Meta were not affected to the same degree by that company’s layoffs a few days later.

Amid an apparent exodus of hundreds of remaining Twitter workers who decided to take Musk up on his offer of three months of severance pay instead of remaining in his “extremely hardcore” new regime, Twitter HQ might be otherwise preoccupied. But if it doesn’t collapse, Canadian laws will still apply.

Unless Twitter replaces Austin (who declined to comment for this story) or assigns a survivor elsewhere in the company to take over her function from afar, Twitter’s voice will be missing as legislators work through bills on privacy and cybersecurity; Canadian content on streaming services; and making digital giants pay for Canadian journalism. Nor would it have input on specific rules for applying those laws.

Twitter is only incidentally affected by several of those measures, but it’s front and centre on online harms—a collection of bad behaviours the government wants to suppress on the internet, from promoting hate and threatening violence to distributing illegal pornography.

The Liberals’ previous attempt at a bill to combat online harms was widely panned as overreaching and unrealistic, effectively making platforms responsible for policing content anybody might find objectionable. They withdrew it after a chorus of criticism, including from Twitter, and named an expert panel—including Laidlaw—to advise them on what to do.

The panel’s results were inconclusive. The members couldn’t agree on the usefulness of the Liberals’ categories of harmful content, or even how best to define “harm.” Rodriguez told The Logic in July the government would press ahead, though.

“Most companies would rather remain unregulated in that space, but they’re happy to participate in the discussion and maybe, in their minds, make the bill less worse—in our minds, make it better,” said Chris Bittle, a Liberal MP, parliamentary secretary to Rodriguez, and active Twitter user.

Canada is aiming to lead with its online-harms efforts, he said, and other countries—smaller ones, where Twitter had less presence than it did in Canada—are watching.

“If they’re here, it always makes it better to talk,” said Bittle. “If they’re not here, I think we would still be going ahead with our plans.”

Nathalie Maréchal, the Washington-based policy director at the think tank Ranking Digital Rights, is alarmed but fascinated by Musk’s apparent belief there’s a technological solution to incredibly messy human-behaviour problems, as if coding is the most important form of work. He put that in writing in his note to staff saying they should leave if they weren’t ready to be “extremely hardcore” and committed to an engineering-driven culture.

Here’s the text of the email Musk sent to Twitter staff overnight.

Those who don’t commit to being “extremely hardcore” by 5pm ET today must leave the company. :bangbang:

Story: https://t.co/expt0d63dH pic.twitter.com/C8VDjRBvk1

— Donie O’Sullivan (@donie) November 16, 2022

“What’s really challenging is not the engineering, it’s the policy decisions that you then have to implement in part through engineering,” said Maréchal. “Musk just seems to refuse to acknowledge that or he rejects that reality, or he wants to make it not true.”

Ranking Digital Rights produces an annual scorecard on how well Big Tech respects users’ rights. For a second year in a row in the 2022 report, Twitter ranked at the top—albeit the top of a “failing class.” Before Musk, Twitter wasn’t great but it was improving, Maréchal told The Logic, apparently through genuine effort.

“The really tough reality about being a responsible social media platform is that you have to do content moderation,” said Maréchal. “And that means you have to have all the types of people that Musk just fired.”

The arbitrariness of the cuts and subsequent resignations by other top executives has already put the company at risk of fines from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission if it doesn’t live up to the terms of a May settlement over privacy violations. The settlement requires Twitter to examine and address the privacy and security risks of new products, among other things; the FTC has said it’s watching Twitter closely.

Musk testified in a Delaware court hearing over his pay as CEO of Tesla that he doesn’t think a separate settlement he reached with the Securities and Exchange Commission over his behaviour at the auto company applies because he agreed to them under duress. Maréchal said that sort of response indicates that this is less a social-media problem than “an unaccountable-billionaire problem.”

Even under Musk, though, Twitter appears willing to follow some oversight laws.

Ireland’s data-protection commission supervises Twitter on behalf of other members of the European Union, because of Twitter’s corporate presence in the country. When Twitter’s data-protection officer there recently quit, the commission signalled doubt over whether the company still qualifies for that simpler “one-stop shop” treatment. Twitter swiftly named an acting data-protection officer to mollify the Irish regulators.

The episode makes Laidlaw think Canada would be wise to “align our laws with a big player like the EU.”

She said she isn’t sure whether Canada should require that social-media companies operating in Canada have staff in Canada—perhaps when they reach a certain size—but it’s something legislators ought to consider.

“This isn’t telling them precisely what they need to do. It gives a lot of room to the company to be able to develop these solutions that are fit for their company,” she said. But requiring that a company designate a specific person whose job it is to meet minimum Canadian standards shouldn’t be controversial.

A social-media platform could theoretically handle dangerous or objectionable content well without dealing closely with regulators, said University of Ottawa law professor Vivek Krishnamurthy (another member of the online-harms advisory panel), but Musk’s Twitter is probably not that company.

Krishnamurthy pointed to the company’s chaotic rollout of its program to give blue “verification” check marks to users who paid US$8, which Musk abruptly cancelled after impersonators targeted pharma company Eli Lilly, as well as Pepsi, Nintendo, Tesla and Musk himself.

“Twitter seems to be, under Musk, systematically undermining its capacity to make safer products,” said Krishnamurthy. “So that’s not just a compliance problem, in terms of complying with whatever laws that we have are going to have. It’s, frankly, going to expose some people to a lot of danger and peril.”

Krishnamurthy compared online harms to road safety. We pursue that through laws on safe driving, education, street design and standards for cars. What we have isn’t perfect, but it’s taken multiple types of action, and people working on it in many different domains, to make roads as safe as they are.

“I’m really scared about what’s happening at [Twitter], because leaving alone those regulations, there’s no one doing that kind of function anymore,” Krishnamurthy said.

If Twitter ends up in court or before other regulators over bad things on its platform or data breaches, he added, Musk’s dismantling of Twitter’s safety teams will be a big problem.

“The regulators are going to come at you much, much harder if you had a bad process in place, as opposed to a good process that failed,” he said.

Twitter did not respond to questions The Logic sent to its address for media inquiries.