Information & Ethics Committee on April 30th, 2024

[Kathryn Hill]

We know that most of us have not received education on how to verify information well. Certainly, those of us who are beyond a certain age have not received any, ever. However, additionally, the information environment is changing so rapidly, as are the volume and velocity of information that we're receiving. What used to be a reliable source—and how you only went to one or two sources—doesn't exist anymore. There's a huge menu available to us.

We think that folks who work for government, parliamentarians and their staff, are as vulnerable as any of us are to being fooled, to reading something and not knowing how to verify well and easily, in both their personal lives and their professional lives. We know there are really easy skills that folks can learn very quickly that will help them feel confident about the information they're consuming, about knowing what's a reliable source and how to identify it, and then about sharing good information. That's what we really need to see happen.

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

What are your comments on the media strategy?

[Kathryn Hill]

Other nations in the world, we heard referenced earlier this morning, have had strategies in place, some for more than 15 years. However, certainly most countries in the world are adopting strategies that address this from a holistic perspective, appreciating that it's a complex problem.

There are so many factors that impact so many different government departments—all levels of government. We need to bring everyone together to look at how we're going to address this problem, because it's only going to get worse.

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

Thank you, Ms. Hill.

I cede the rest of time to my colleague Mr. Kurek.

[Damien Kurek, Conservative, Battle River—Crowfoot, AB]

Thanks very much, Mr. Brock.

Welcome. I appreciate the work you do.

Likewise, when we had a chance to have a discussion on developing a national strategy, I mentioned that under the Harper Conservative government there was a national financial literacy framework that I think would provide a great model for helping promote the sorts of things you're talking about.

I would simply ask this, for Canadians who might be watching: With regard to the resources that MediaSmarts has for parents, young people, teenagers and people who might have a little bit of snow on the roof, how would they access those resources through your organization?

[Kathryn Hill]

Everything we do is free. Everything is available on our website. In English it's mediasmarts.ca—thank you for letting me do this—and in French it's habilomedias.ca. Everything is always fluently bilingual and available to educators, trusted guardians and parents. There are even some resources for youth themselves.

If you have any questions about media or the digital space, please access our website. It's all there for you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Kurek.

Ms. Damoff, you have six minutes. Go ahead, please.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to all three of our witnesses for being here today.

Mr. White, I'll start with you. Ms. Hill mentioned “trusted sources”. I would argue that most Canadians would think that political parties are trusted sources, but there are conspiracy theories that are being actively promoted by the Conservative Party: that the pandemic was a plot by global financial elites trying to re-engineer our economy; that our climate policies are an attempt to limit movement and create 15-minute cities to limit personal freedom, even though 15-minute cities are a legitimate urban planning concept that's been twisted around; and even that the World Economic Forum is an elitist global conspiracy controlling governments around the world.

Just a few minutes ago at the finance committee, Yvan Baker asked “who the most dangerous dictator in the world” is. One after another, three Conservatives members said it was Justin Trudeau, to which Mr. Baker responded, “It's actually Vladimir Putin.”

When we have legitimate parties promoting this kind of discourse among the Canadian public, it leads to mistrust in our democratic institutions. I'm wondering if you could speak to how dangerous it is when we have trusted sources, or what should be trusted sources, spreading this kind of information.

[Patrick White]

The mistrust overall is targeting institutions, including the media and politicians. One of the other factors that we should also consider is the development and the increase of news avoidance from Canadians in the past few years, especially after two long years of the pandemic. I think news avoidance is truly a really big factor to consider.

How can we fight news avoidance? I believe that media literacy programs—compulsory, as Quebec has announced starting in September 2025—could be a solution, among others, to fight disinformation at the media level and also at the political level.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you.

Ms. Hill, MediaSmarts has been doing this work since the mid-1990s, so you've seen a lot of change over the years. I wonder if you can comment on how the landscape has changed and what impacts you're seeing on not only politicians but also society in general.

[Kathryn Hill]

I'll start, and my colleague may join.

How has it changed? Everything has changed, really. I think one of the pieces that's really helpful to think about is that each one of us used to receive information. We were at the receiving end of media. It was fed to us. We basically trusted it. As the Internet grew, our information grew. We're talking about information, not news, and it's important to make that distinction. We're also talking about each and every one of us being at the centre of a huge system and network. Those networks are vast and immeasurable, frankly. Something we put online can go to 10 people or 10 million people; we don't know.

How we all communicate, then, is very, very different. An added challenge is the volume and the velocity of the information that is overwhelming people and contributing to that news avoidance. The biggest change is that we no longer have the luxury or the privilege of just receiving. We have to actively engage. We have to be educated. We have to be critical thinkers. We have to verify. We have to determine for ourselves what's reliable. We need to build the resilience of our citizens so that they can also learn those skills and know how to do that for themselves, because that is the best way to combat this.

We need regulation, absolutely. There's no question. We need all sectors of society participating in this, but from our perspective, our expertise is on what works and what will help at the individual level on the ground, and we know that education will do that.

[Matthew Johnson, Director of Education, MediaSmarts]

I would add, too, that the most recent major change has been the use of recommendation algorithms and sorting algorithms that curate our information ecosystem.

We have moved on from an environment in which most of the information we consumed was curated by humans. Even if we didn't necessarily have access to the rooms where it happened, those processes were documented. They were understandable.

We're now in a situation where that is being done in a way that is not knowable to the consumer and, in many cases, is not knowable even to the people who operate the platforms. These are artificially intelligent, machine-learning algorithms, and they frequently make decisions based on data or proxy data that may be inaccurate, that may be discriminatory and that may, in some cases, lead people who have already begun consuming some conspiracy- or disinformation-adjacent information down rabbit holes.

However, in the even broader sense, it makes us alienated from our information ecosystem, because we don't know how these decisions are being made. We know from our own research and research that's been done elsewhere that this is not inevitable, that people can take more control over their information diet, and that people who have a self-curated media diet are more resilient to disinformation.

That's the latest major addition to our digital media literacy approach. It's something we're constantly iterating on the basis of changes in the environment and new research.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Johnson.

Thank you, Ms. Damoff.

Go ahead, Mr. Villemure. You have six minutes.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Hill, you spoke about critical thinking: Is that something that has disappeared from society?

[Matthew Johnson]

I certainly wouldn't say that critical thinking has vanished from society. It's a difficult thing to measure, but what we do know is that, as Ms. Hill referenced, the heart of critical thinking is intellectual humility. It is being willing to recognize that we might be wrong. It is being willing to set standards under which we would change our minds.

We do know that, in general, the English language media environment and, insofar as I know, the French language media environment have become more polarized. That remains less true in Canada than in the United States, but it has become more polarized than it was in the past.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you.

Mr. White, thank you very much for coming today. In view of your reputation, you were the right person to invite. However, I missed the beginning of your address. Could you send your notes to me?

[Patrick White]

I previously sent the notes to the committee, along with all my sources. I'd be happy to send them to your office.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you very much.

I have a few brief questions to fire at you, followed by some more general questions.

The Computer Research Institute of Montreal developed an algorithm capable of identifying deep fakes before they can do any harm. Is that credible?

[Patrick White]

Yes, definitely. There are also tools, like CrowdTangle, that can identify whether information is viral or not, but Meta is unfortunately going to block access to them for researchers and colleagues.

So it's possible with that kind of technology to identify something that could become viral very quickly. It's been around for a few years now. The media often use it to make decisions about their home page, or to decide on what news they are going to release quickly to Internet users.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Do you think an application like TikTok can condition some segments of the population?

[Patrick White]

One of the current dangers of TikTok is that it gets used as a search engine by 10 to 30-year-olds, when it's obvious that TikTok isn't a search engine. There are also clearly serious risks of sending data about Canadian users to the Chinese Communist Party government.

The United States set a 270-day deadline before it will be blocking TikTok at the beginning of 2025, and Canada needs to consider doing so as well. TikTok has become a major source of information among young people. It has also become a search engine used by many young people instead of Google. This might give rise to serious concerns about the future.

Of course, TikTok is primarily used for social networking and entertainment, and it is not a news network.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you very much.

Do you think that over time, with false news, alternative facts and so on, that lying has become socially acceptable?

[Patrick White]

It's true that amplification by social networks, together with political polarization and a loss of confidence in the media are contributing to it. But I wouldn't go that far.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Previous studies have noted that the truth isn't available to everyone, and that it's been replaced by the plausible.

[Patrick White]

Yes indeed. That's why I'm arguing this morning for the establishment of a compulsory media and digital media education program in Canada's elementary and secondary schools. Digital education could also be provided to seniors.

Did you know that when you publish something on social networks, it could end up on the front page of the National Post the next morning and be read by 10 million Canadians? If everyone knew that, they would think far more than twice before publishing information on social networks. By the way, I never use the expression “social media”, because they're not media.