Social Media lights up election results blackout: Can they arrest all of us?

Even though I was at Net Tuesday, I was also very interested in the results of the election. Of course we really shouldn’t have been getting results until 7 PM PDT, because our polls were still open, but thanks to Twitter, the whole country knew results as they were being reported. Here is a twitter search for the popular Canadian election hashtags and if you are really bored you could page back to about say 6-6:30 PM PDT and see that the major networks had already called the election as a Conservative minority government.

Yep, I read this and told my friends in the room (all of whom had voted or it was going to be too late) and elsewhere. So I broke the blackout law.

Good thing I’m not alone—CBC.ca – Canada Votes – Blackout broken: Election results available early online—because I think arresting all of us would certainly be not only an effort in futility and a huge infringement on speech.

Yes, I know the Supreme Court said the law did not violate the Charter, but if you arrest people enmass for discussing information like this? Yeah that’s going over the line IMHO.

People in say Manitoba East had the information and could share it with their friends, so in the era of mass, rapid, internet-powered communications, is something like a blackout law feasible?

I don’t have good answers for this quandary. The point of the law is to make sure that people in the West still vote even if the election outcome seems to be a forgone conclusion and in this era of abysmal voter turn out I think we need all the help we can get. However, because people in the East do get the information and now have the means to share it far and wide instantly, is there a point in trying?

Should the ban only apply to TV and radio? How can the ban be enforced on the thousands of people using twitter last night? Should it be?

Tag, your turn…

Tagged as: blackout law, Canadian election, Citizen Journalism, election results, Social Media