Ready Or Not - Online Harms in Canada & Brazil
As digital platforms increasingly shape public life, governments around the world are working to enact legislation to mitigate online harms and regulate digital environments.
In Canada, online harms legislation is moving toward its second reading, signalling a major shift in platform governance. Meanwhile, Brazil is navigating its own intense debates over platform accountability, the attention economy, and digital well-being. Both nations offer critical perspectives on how to establish platform accountability and govern digital spaces to ensure user safety and well-being.
What is driving these regulatory approaches, what are the practical implications of enforcing them and should middle-power nations be uniting to influence global tech governance?
For Episode #8 of Design for Integrity, we will be joined by Dr. Emily Laidlaw from University of Calgary's and Dr. Anna Bentes from FGV Comunicação on Thursday, November 19 at 9AM PT/ 12:00 PM ET to discuss the evolving landscape of online harms legislation. Hosted by Renee Black.
About Our Speakers:
Emily Laidlaw:
Dr. Emily Laidlaw is a Canada Research Chair in cybersecurity law and Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Calgary. She is the Rovinescu Visiting Scholar on anti-hate speech at the University of Ottawa, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, an Associate Member of the University of Ottawa’s Centre for Law, Technology and Society, and a fellow of the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies. Beyond academia, Dr. Laidlaw contributes her expertise on the boards of the National Cybersecurity Consortium and the Canadian Internet Society. She practices law through her firm, Laidlaw Legal.
Her research centres on technology regulation, cybersecurity, and human rights, with particular emphasis on platform regulation, privacy, online harms, freedom of expression, and corporate governance. Dr. Laidlaw is the author of Regulating Speech in Cyberspace: Gatekeepers, Human Rights and Corporate Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and co-editor, with Florian Martin-Bariteau, of Security of Self: A Human-Centric Approach to Cybersecurity (Ottawa University Press, 2025).
Anna Bentes:
Anna Bentes is an Assistant Professor at the School of Communication, Media, and Information at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), Brazil. Her work lies at the intersection of Communication, Psychology, and Technology, focusing on the social impacts of digital technologies. Her research examines the relationships between technology, subjectivity, and power, with a particular focus on the attention economy and digital culture.
She holds a PhD and an MA in Communication and Culture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), where she also earned her BA in Psychology. Anna serves on the Steering Committee of the Latin American Network of Surveillance, Technology, and Society Studies (LAVITS) and was a Derechos Digitales Fellow (2022–2023). Her current research examines the intersections of social media, artificial intelligence, and mental health, with particular attention to the governance of digital well-being in digital environments.