A 21-minute COVID-19 conspiracy video shared in a small student Facebook chat does not constitute hate speech or discrimination, British Columbia’s Human Rights Tribunal has ruled, clearing a student of any wrongdoing.Blacklock's Reporter says Adjudicator Ijeamaka Anika wrote that while the video was “offensive” to some, it did not meet the legal standard for hate speech and was unlikely to cause the societal harms the Human Rights Code is designed to prevent. The video, posted in 2020 in a University of Northern British Columbia student union chat, claimed the pandemic was engineered to impose “technocratic and totalitarian government worldwide” and referenced vaccines, Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum, and Western leaders.The complaint was filed by the Chinese-Canadian executive director of the Northern B.C. Graduate Students’ Society, who argued the video targeted Chinese people. The Tribunal found the video mentioned China and Maoism only twice and did not single out Chinese individuals or leaders as perpetrators. .“Specifically it references Maoism in the context of discussing global governance models. However the vast majority of the video focuses on other actors and theories,” Anika wrote.The Tribunal noted that breaches of the Human Rights Code require calls for specific discriminatory effects rather than general commentary. Hate speech, it said, must “expose or tend to expose any person or class of persons to detestation and vilification” in the view of a reasonable person.Federal guidelines issued during the pandemic had advised Canadians against blaming any ethnic group for COVID-19, urging compassion for all victims. The tribunal’s ruling reinforces the distinction between offensive content and legally actionable hate speech, highlighting limits on regulating expression in small online communities.
