Evidence of meeting #19 for Canadian Heritage in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was children.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Bloc
Martin Champoux Bloc Drummond, QC
Let's put that off until a little later. Let's put it closer to adolescence. Maybe they're too young in elementary school, but in high school, they would definitely need some kind of guidance or education on the use of social media, because they're already fully immersed in it.
Would this be an attractive offer for them, but also useful for us as a society, as adults, and as parents?
Editor, Les As de l'info, Les Coops de l'information
I don't know if I have everything I need to answer that.
I get the impression that, unfortunately, what interests them is being part of the adult world, and that's also what plays tricks on them at the same time.
Bloc
Martin Champoux Bloc Drummond, QC
As for the world of adults in social media, I think we'll wait a little while. I'm not sure we want to send them there.
Let's go with Les As de l'info and the model you have put in place. I am sure you are not making much profit with Les Coops de l'information. It is an investment. A project like that is rooted in conviction.
If we want to talk about proposals and recommendations for the purposes of this committee study, do you think it would be a good idea to somehow require companies that produce information to create a module for young people dedicated to digital literacy and information literacy? Should this be part of our recommendations, in your opinion?
Editor, Les As de l'info, Les Coops de l'information
Actually, I don't know if that's necessary.
What is needed, in my opinion, is for the media to join forces. We are already collaborating with Réseau.Presse, the Association de la presse francophone, and all French-language media outlets representing minority communities in Canada. We already have a page in Le Devoir, which has joined forces with Les As and publishes a digital page and a print page for children every Saturday.
I feel that we need to encourage the media to work together for the good of children, rather than launching lots of initiatives that will cost a lot of money for more or less the same result. That's why we're trying to rally everyone around the project.
No, we don't make money from it, that's for sure. I've been creating content for young people for 35 years. We've never made money from content for young people, but it's still a first step into the world of information, into the digital world. If everyone gets together on a project, it already helps more children. The goal is to reach as many children as possible.
Bloc
Martin Champoux Bloc Drummond, QC
What you are doing is great. It's a nice web site, even for adults. Congratulations. I encourage you to keep going. I also encourage you to ask for and seek the necessary funding, because initiatives like yours deserve to be encouraged much more.
Thank you very much, Ms. Tessier‑Bouchard.
Editor, Les As de l'info, Les Coops de l'information
Thank you, Mr. Champoux.
Liberal
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
Tiana, I'm going to come back to you. I'm hoping you can provide a few comments with regard to the creation and use of deepfakes. I know this is something you have some expertise on.
On your website, you state that “over 90% of deepfake content online is pornographic” in nature, which is alarming, especially when it's often young people who are used to make these images. I would love for you to expand on what you're observing, the impact this is having on young people and how we might be able to avoid this in the future.
Chief Executive Officer, Center for Exploitation Education
I would say this is one of the largest trends we're seeing. These AI deepfake models have completely changed the game, from peer exploitation all the way to predation and sextortion. Millions of child sexual abuse materials are being generated constantly through these deepfakes. We're seeing, number one, peers now using AI tools to create deepfakes of other peers. Sometimes it's for blackmail; sometimes it's for entertainment, oddly enough. We're also seeing that grooming for sextortion has completely changed. The number of boys who are reaching out to us because some person they were speaking to was able to take just one picture they had on their profile, use it to create a deepfake nude and then sextort and blackmail them shows there's an alarming rate of that happening.
When we talk about prevention, number one is that certain tools should not be accessible. That's just number one. Number two is the education piece for young people. It's something we're missing. We can't just talk about digital literacy and not incorporate consent and healthy boundaries into that conversation, showing the parallel of what that looks like in person and online. I think we're noticing, because of the nature of what kids are exposed to on social media, that there is almost a normalization of using somebody's content against them without their knowledge and consent.
Those would be my two recommendations: If there's a way to do it, flag these platforms—because they're not on the dark web—and start to engage in prevention education for our young people.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
Thank you for that.
I'm going to take you one step back, just for the sake of this report and its content, and ask you to describe what a deepfake is and how it's created.
Chief Executive Officer, Center for Exploitation Education
A deepfake is essentially any kind of imagery created by AI that is not real. It's not the actual person; it's based on a person. When we say “deepfake”, we're talking about an AI-generated image, often of a real individual. When I use the terminology “deepfake nude”, I'm referring to an AI tool that is using a person's picture, a real picture of a person, to generate a nude image or video of them.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
I'm also hoping that you can talk about some of the research you've done with regard to AI and how it can be used to detect human trafficking online. I read some research you did within B.C. You did some research with regard to sex work ads in British Columbia, and you found that 40% of the ads pointed to sex trafficking or child exploitation. Maybe you can comment on that.
Chief Executive Officer, Center for Exploitation Education
AI is a powerful tool. Technology is a powerful tool. It can be used for good. Of course, when individuals like me and professionals in this space come to use it, it can have great effect.
In that research project, we were training web crawlers to detect situations and instances of human trafficking. My role, as an expert in the space, was to come up with the content that would train them. In black and white terms, how would we determine if a post on these common escort sites is indicative of somebody being trafficked or of child exploitation and trafficking? Yes, we did find that 40% of them were definitive instances of trafficking. It would have been a much larger percentage if our threshold for “definitive” was not being in at least three different categories that we had outlined to be indicators of trafficking, if that makes sense.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
Yes. Thank you very much. I wish we had more time, but unfortunately I have to cut it off there.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Lisa Hepfner
It's very disturbing testimony today.
Mr. Myles, you have the floor again for five minutes.
Liberal
David Myles Liberal Fredericton—Oromocto, NB
Thank you very much.
I'll continue on.
Dimitri, maybe you could take a shot at answering the questions we were discussing before about some of the regulatory challenges.
Director, Research, Civix
Sure.
I appreciate the point you brought up about the difference between the web and social media. That's an important nuance. It's one that is continually conflated in how these things are actually used by young people. That's one thing we've noticed from a media literacy and education perspective.
Even communicating what that difference is to young people in itself can be important, especially with younger kids who, in our work and studying with them, don't really know the difference between a social media platform and a search engine, for example. They are all places to get your information. They all intertwine, and one leads to another and leads in and out. I don't think you can silo them in the same way. We appreciate, especially in terms of regulation, that we want to do that, but it's important to think about how they are also intertwined.
On some of the broader issues, especially the algorithm, one thing comes up a lot when I think about regulations and age restrictions. One of the questions I always have is this: If there's going to be an age restriction, what else is going to happen alongside that policy? As we all know—I think we can all point to people in our lives on this—if we're talking about the personalization algorithm, turning 16 or 18 doesn't make one magically immune to the effects of that algorithm. Alongside any types of age restrictions, is there anything happening to address some of these larger underlying issues in terms of both the content of social media and the infrastructure of social media? That's something I would want to consider if I were thinking about that, and algorithmic personalization is central to it.
I also want to reflect on some things that were said before. I completely agree that not every issue we're talking about is an education issue. Certain things are media literacy issues and certain things might be regulatory issues. Parsing those things is one of the major challenges for the committee.
Liberal
David Myles Liberal Fredericton—Oromocto, NB
That's exactly the challenge we're facing right now. This has been such a great conversation, because the digital literacy piece is so important. As we've all said, there's a generation of us who didn't have it and we're catching up on it, but there's also the regulatory piece, and I fear it might not be enough.
A lot of it comes down to transparency as well, especially when we're talking about the infrastructure. Can you chat a bit about what your experience has been in social media infrastructure and algorithmic infrastructure regarding transparency? What are the possibilities there?
Director, Research, Civix
From an educational perspective and a media literacy perspective, we return to that as a key piece of the education for youth: understanding why they're seeing what they're seeing, how what they're seeing is not necessarily natural and that there is some kind of infrastructure underneath. It's about making this thing that is invisible more visible. That is continually a struggle. It's a struggle because we don't know, and researchers don't know and don't have access to, what's actually going on, so we can only ever talk about it in abstract terms. We have this mythic figure of “the algorithm” when we talk about digital media and digital media literacy, especially with young people, and it can sometimes seem like this constant, this entity, that can't be addressed, can't be understood and can't be regulated.
There's something happening strategically when that happens, but it does make educating about it difficult, especially because it can also become a scapegoat where everything gets blamed on the algorithm when there might be other underlying causes of some of the effects we're seeing.
Liberal
David Myles Liberal Fredericton—Oromocto, NB
For me, on transparency, that's exactly it. It came up in the AI conversation. Many of the questions we were asking on AI came down to the fact that we're fishing in the dark a bit, not knowing where we're going because we don't know what the infrastructure actually looks like under the hood. That's what I'm a bit challenged with.
Last week, we had a witness who spoke about the ads. I thought that was a really interesting way to get at it from behind, because it's all about the monetization of attention.
Ms. Sharifi, maybe you could speak to the commodification of attention in ads and whether that's an effective way to address some of this.
Chief Executive Officer, Center for Exploitation Education
Could you clarify what you mean by addressing this through ads? Are you talking about educational ads?
Liberal
David Myles Liberal Fredericton—Oromocto, NB
No, I mean being able to advertise on accounts that are owned and directed towards children.
Chief Executive Officer, Center for Exploitation Education
I think that's one of the harms we are seeing. That's why one of my requests for regulation is that we should not be able to have ads targeted to minors, especially because, in my experience, I've seen certain ads that are completely inappropriate that would come across a child's account. I've reported them, but I've not received any kind of response or follow-up there.
Again, it's about holding the platforms accountable for their ability to allow anybody to create an ad and target it to specific populations that shouldn't be targeted to. One example I'll give is Seeking. The company Seeking used to be Seeking Arrangements. It is now doing tons of ads, and those ads have come across the burner minor accounts we made for research purposes.
December 8th, 2025 / 5:35 p.m.
Liberal
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Lisa Hepfner
Mr. Mason, I'm sorry you haven't had any questions so far today. Do you have any thoughts or reflections on the conversation we've had at the table?