On March 6th, I published a Quillette article describing how Robyn Bourgeois, the newly installed vice-provost for Indigenous engagement at Canada’s Brock University, had been seeking to mobilize her peers against the anonymous operator of an obscure (and by then, defunct) Twitter account called @BrockCivis. On her social-media channels and at the university’s “Two Row Council” (a body tasked with managing Brock’s efforts at “Indigenization, reconciliation, and decolonization”), Bourgeois accused the account of operating a racist and “criminal” program of “cyber harassment” that targeted her in particular, and Indigenous people more generally. No one at Brock would feel “safe,” she said, in a world where @BrockCivis is still “allowed to dehumanize the highest-ranking Indigenous person at Brock” (by which she meant herself).

At a February 22nd Council meeting, a recording of which was subsequently made available to me, school officials brainstormed with Bourgeois about how they might investigate the nefarious account. The contents of @BrockCivis, one participant suggested, were a threat not just to Brock, but to Indigenous people all over Canada. Later in the conversation, another speaker said that this kind of racism might even propel Brock toward some Canadian version of the January 6th riot at the United States Capitol. On February 26th, Bourgeois announced publicly that an investigation into @BrockCivis was underway, and asked that members of the public should send incriminating screenshots of @BrockCivis tweets to her official Brock email account so that she could “pass these on to investigators.”

I have listened to the recording of that February 22nd meeting several times, and still find it surreal: These were senior administrators at a medium-sized Canadian university—including the school’s provost and its director of human rights and equity—strategizing for a full hour on the best way to take down an anonymous social-media account that had already gone off-line. What I found even stranger is that no one in that February 22nd meeting presented any proof that @BrockCivis had engaged in anything resembling “hate speech” (as several speakers described it). Bourgeois’s colleagues simply took her word that @BrockCivis had said “criminal” things—evidence of which, they seemed to assume, might be found in some remote corner of the web.