Notice-and-Notice-Plus: A Canadian Perspective Beyond the Liability and Immunity Divide

This chapters discusses liability of online intermediaries for defamation, hate speech, and other speech-related infringements in Canada and other common law jurisdictions. After an introduction to the common law and statutory legal context, this chapter puts forward a reform proposal for online defamation. In doing so, first the chapter outlines the Notice-and-Notice-Plus (NN+) model, identifying the legal context for the proposal and sketching its main features. Secondly, this chapter explores the viability of deploying this model to other kinds of harmful speech, including fake news, terrorist content, and hate speech. All these typologies of harmful speech are discussed in detail in order to assess the optimal intermediary liability model for their regulation online.