A woman in distress reading social media comments

Don’t Read the Comments

“Okay, ma’am,” a crackling voice interrupts the caller. “Ma’am, can I talk?” Minutes into her report to the Ottawa Police hotline, journalist Rachel Gilmore feels exasperated. She is reporting a violent email sent to The Hill Times’ Erica Ifill—a name-dropping salad of verbal abuse such as “woke,” “cunt,” and racial slurs—including death threats.
An illustration of five Canadian media company logos sitting in a courtroom. The five companies are the Globe and Mail, CBC-Radio, Toronto Star, Postmedia, and The Canadian Press.

Big Tech, Big Lawsuit

“Big tech, again and again, shows itself to be an industry that moves with entitlement and lack of care,” wrote author Michael Melgaard in a contribution for The Walrus in 2023. Not long before the magazine’s interviews with Melgaard and other Canadian writers, The Atlantic’s Alex Reisner had exposed the contents of Books3, a text database used to train LLaMA, Meta’s large language model (LLM) for AI-generated text.