The Technology of Political Communication: R. v. Bryan and the Knowledgeable Voter in the 21st Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper examines the recent case of R. v. Bryan, in which the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the constitutionality of section 329 of the Canada Elections Act (a provision that prohibits the premature transmission of election results from one electoral district to another before the close of polling stations). The Court found that the provision breaches the freedom of expression right contained in section 2(a) of the Charter, but that it is saved by section 1. The paper argues that the decision ignores the practical realities of new media and technologies, and the Court’s own appreciation of these trends contained in some of its recent precedents. It the n explores the nature of section 1 analysis in this context, suggesting possible reforms of the Oakes test to address the influence of technology on legal rights.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".