Canadian Heritage Committee on Dec. 14th, 2023

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Again, thank you to the witnesses for being with us.

I want to ask a little bit about online rage farming and the role that platforms can and should or should not play, as the case may be, in trying to figure out how to be helpful.

I'm very reluctant. We've heard Mr. Palmer talk about this issue of how far you go and how far you do not go, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand how easily and quickly misinformation, particularly when it comes to angry misinformation, can spread—with deadly consequences in some cases.

We have seen people on the left and on the right. We have seen Liberal politicians and Conservative politicians in the country whose families are being attacked by folks as a result of what they've read or seen on the Internet as people build this sense of rage and anger.

I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about where you see it particularly, and maybe we can start with Mr. Hatfield and then move to Ms. Donovan.

Can you talk a little bit about where you see this rage usually coming from? What are the tendencies and the trends? How do the platforms advantage that and why?

Mr. Hatfield, you can start, and then we'll go over to Ms. Donovan.

[Matthew Hatfield]

It's a great question.

I think, in many cases, it's not that the algorithms are built to amplify rage, necessarily. It's that they're build to amplify engagement, and rage is one of the most powerful drivers of engagement.

I do think we need to look at what might need to change in algorithms to discourage those kinds of dynamics in some cases. I think we need to be very careful about not translating that into censoring people who believe they have a very legitimate social grievance, at this particular period. Having the government in the position of deciding that people shouldn't be expressing themselves that way is actually quite dangerous.

That's why I think having platforms obligated to explain how they manage content and, really, to report to their users and to a regulator what they're doing and the risks they think they're mitigating, and actually seeing some competitive pressure between different platforms to learn how to manage some of this better, would be good.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

Ms. Donovan, I'll go over to you.

[Dr. Joan Donovan]

When I think about this, I think about classical social movement theory, where people are only going to be motivated to do something in this world if they feel that there is outrage and they hope for change. Often what we see online with rage baiting is this call to outrage that, in some instances, people are hoping will change ordinary citizens' behaviour.

If we think about the United Nations documentation on the freedom of expression, we have three rights with the freedom of expression. Of course, we have the right to speak; we can saying anything whenever we want. We have the right to receive information. Let's say a forest fire is happening. Then we would hope that an information intermediary like Facebook would serve us news about how to be safe.

The last part of freedom of expression that we often forget, and it matters so much for how we understand social media and algorithmic amplification, is that we have the right to seek the truth. We have a right to the truth, and this comes from post-Holocaust political theorizing about what it means to seek the truth, about who has purchase on the truth and about how we arrive at truth.

Algorithms do not care if what you're posting is true or false. They also do not care if what you're posting is incitement to violence, because that's going to drive the rage, which is going to drive, as Matthew just said, the engagement. We have to really concentrate on rewarding platforms, and also journalism, that protect the right to seek information.

The last thing I'll say about that is what we need are roles that make sure people have TALK—which is timely, accurate, local knowledge. Those are the building blocks for democracies. Having an informed citizenry who is educated and who has access to our own heritage and histories is paramount in this moment. What social media has done, really, is inverted that need for society, commodified it and then mixed it with entertainment and rage bait.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

In the last—

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much.

Taleeb, I think we've come to the end of this.

I will now thank the witnesses for coming and spending two hours with us.

Thank you very much. You were very informative and insightful.

I would like to entertain a motion to adjourn.

Mr. Shields, do you have a motion to adjourn?

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

I have a motion to wish everyone a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.