Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you for the invitation to speak here today. I want to open by saying that my expertise is as a scholar of the information ecosystem and the overall information environment. I'm not an expert on children or youth. Nevertheless, I find our studies of influencers and the information environment very pertinent for this study and very pertinent for this committee.
Recently, we ran a study looking at the rise of influencers in Canada. We know now that amongst the youngest cohort we were able to survey, over four-fifths of Canadians, so 81% of youth, are getting their news typically from influencers now. They're getting their news, their political information and their entertainment content. That is the source of their political and social life. That is at its base. This has enormous repercussions for our political reality and for the training of youth in the political process.
I want to highlight two major findings from that recent influencer study that I think are particularly pertinent. The first is the way in which influencers spread and come to appear on the screens of youth here in Canada. The primary way in which influencers reach new listeners, new adherents, is through the recommendation algorithm. It is not through explicit preference. It is not through social relationships. It is through the algorithm. In your day-to-day behaviour on social media, it is the platform itself that is determining what you see, and not any intentionality. This reduction in intentionality, and the way in which particularly youth consume and think about information, is enormously important. We haven't really appreciated the consequence of it.
If we think back to 20 to 30 years ago, the way you chose to get your information and where you got your information was very much about a choice that you would make. You would go out and you would make a decision for a paper, for a TV channel or for people to talk to. It is not so today. For the youth of today, your choice is the platform. In some ways, that is determined by your social status and by your friend group. Then, once on the platform, your choices are much less important than your behaviours and your actions that you don't even know you're necessarily engaging in. That loss of intention is enormously important for political and cultural socialization.
Number two is that influencers are now central to the political conversation. They make up the majority of engagement. The majority of Canadian eyeballs that see political content online are now seeing influencer content. We have a system, a set of norms and rules, around speech, around disclosure and around transparency that grew up in an era when influencers didn't exist and when it was unimaginable that a private citizen with a telephone in their bedroom would be able to reach millions of Canadians, but that is the state we are in right now. Our regulatory approach, particularly during elections but outside elections as well, is completely unprepared and is ill-adapted to the new reality.
I have three recommendations for this study. First, this is what it is. This is not a phenomenon unique to Canada. Influencers and social media are now the primary sources of social life for youth. Any policy or approach that doesn't take adequate account of that is doomed to fail. We need to operate within that regime. We need to operate within this idea that youth like their social media. They want to continue to use it. We can better protect them, and we can better encadrer that space, but it is what it is.
Second, algorithmic discovery is the key mechanism and the key way this stuff is shared. That algorithmic discovery is not a neutral process. It is a process by which platforms have made a series of choices about what content gets amplified and shared and which influencers are seen. The idea is that they would like you to think that there is no decision, that it is some black box that has no control, but that is not the case. There are decisions behind that. That is one of the key levers available.
The last thing I want to leave you with is that, look, the line between entertainment, culture, community and political information has never been blurrier. For youth today, in their day-to-day consumption of information, politics, entertainment, culture and TikTok dances are all intermeshed and together. That creates an environment where they can become incredibly informed, but it also creates some dangers. Some of these dangers are that our media literacy training programs, the way we have taught people to consume news in this country, are completely ill-adapted for an environment where all of this is blended together. I urge this committee to reflect on and to account for that.
I'll leave it there.