Information & Ethics Committee on Oct. 16th, 2018

[Tristan Harris]

Those are examples of how the design should work, but that's different from what we would legislate. I'm not saying we should legislate that. We shouldn't tell Apple how to design their products legislatively, but I think we need to make them responsible for the externalities that they generate in society.

We have a project called the ledger of harms. I don't want to promote it or anything like that, but we think we need to show the ledger of harms across the social fabric that are being externalized onto society, and that never show up on the balance sheets of companies. It's not because these are evil companies. They just can't see the harm they're generating, like any polluting company.

These harms are subtler. They're epistemic harms in how we know what we know. They're polarization harms. They're alienation, isolation, belonging, community, children, mental health, teen suicide. These are all things that are being externalized onto the fabric of society and we need more research, more funding of that research, to show what those harms are. We need more transparency, because often the only way to know about those harms is to get access to the raw data.

They'll skeptically call Claire and me and all of us “alarmists” because we're operating on the wrong data. We don't have access to the internals. Those are the kinds of things we can do.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith]

Going back to you, Ms. Wardle, you talked about content as a very difficult thing to police. I think that's right, but we do police content with respect to harassment. We do police content with respect to hate, but those mechanisms are insufficient to tackle the scale of the problem on the Internet.

When we ask Facebook and Google and these companies to police themselves, I wonder if that's the most effective solution. Do you have a better policy prescription for how we police the existing rules on the Internet?

[Dr. Claire Wardle]

You're right to make a distinction between illegal speech and legal speech.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith]

That's right.

[Dr. Claire Wardle]

I would argue that when we talk about this, everything gets lumped into legal speech.

Whether it's specifically false information or disinformation or a false piece of content around a particular politician—although that's very hard because a lot of this is just misleading, and it's partly how campaigns are fought—I think there is a sliver of false content connected to election integrity that should be put into illegal speech.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith]

Thanks very much.

Before I pass it to Mr. Kent, I just want to note, Ms. Krause, you'll be very pleased to know that in Bill C-76 the government will be banning advocacy groups from ever using money from foreign entities to conduct partisan campaigns. That should answer that concern you raised with us today.

Mr. Kent, you now have five minutes.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Following on the recommendations of the advertising registry, the source of funds and so forth, I'd like to come back to you, Ms. Krause, and the point you made regarding an Elections Canada investigation which was effectively stumped by the lack of CRA detail.

We seem to be dealing with silos in terms of how to better protect the Canadian electoral process from the vulnerability that we've seen, whether it's with a Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, AggregateIQ style of scandal, or the source of foreign funding or any of these other complications.

We have a Privacy Commissioner with limited authority in one silo. We have the Chief Electoral Officer in another silo, unable to effectively investigate. We have a Commissioner of Lobbying. Until we posed a question to the chief Canadian officer of Facebook, they did not have a registered lobbyist in Canada but had made many contacts with senior ministers and chief and senior decision-making officials in the government.

What would your recommendations be to at least reduce the vulnerability of the Canadian electoral process?

[Vivian Krause]

I can only speak to the particular area that I am familiar with, which is the use of funds via charities.

When you look at the reporting in the 2015 federal election, the top advertisers, the ones that were all funded as part of the tar sands campaign, if you grouped them together, they were the number one biggest advertiser. If you take those top six groups, they reported more than half a million dollars. That was more than even the United Steelworkers. That's why I looked at that. They weren't way down the list; they were at the top of the list.

In terms of recommendations, yes, ironically it seems to me that the problem and the solution start at the CRA, not Elections Canada.

A couple of other things would help, too. One of them is in the Elections Act, where there is a section that lists things a third party advertiser needs to report their spending on, and a list of things that they don't need to report.

Right now, for instance, the creation of websites is on the list of expenditures they don't need to report. My understanding is that this is because that part of the act was written more than 10 years ago, when expenditures on that were small and not very relevant. I think we need to update and remove that. It is now not a small part of the election spending budget, but in fact the main part.

That would be one thing that could be done.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

To your knowledge, when the CRA began the audit of the charitable organizations, were they looking at not only foreign funds that were coming into organizations like Tides Canada, the Dogwood initiative and Leadnow, but how that money was then converted and transformed and eventually spent in the variety of ways that it could be spent in an election campaign?

[Vivian Krause]

I have no knowledge of how the CRA conducted any of its audits. The only thing I can tell you is that the charity at the centre of the fuss was Tides Canada. In their financial statements for 2016-17 they state that yes, the foundation was audited, but only for 2008-09. If true, it means, as I understand it, that in fact they weren't audited for any of the relevant years.

I think that the place—

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

You say “relevant years”. Would those be election years?

[Vivian Krause]

Well, it would be for any of the years wherein evidence was brought to the attention of the CRA about violations of the Income Tax Act.

Just to sum up, the CRA did 42 audits. The recommendations were to shut down at least five—some say seven—of those charities. Why hasn't that happened? The CRA got more than $10 million specifically earmarked for doing that. Why were those audits not followed through on?

As one concrete, easily actionable thing that the government can do, just ask why this hasn't been completed.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith]

Thanks very much. You were just a few seconds under. Excellent job.

Next is Mr. Angus for five minutes.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

It's okay. He's gifted his few seconds to his left-wing colleague.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith]

Just use them.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Yes. Thanks.

Mr. Harris, I was interested in your comments that we have to move beyond this whack-a-mole approach, so I'll ask a question about the size of these platforms.

You said you were in a start-up that was purchased by Google. Is that correct?

[Tristan Harris]

Yes.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Okay. Then you mentioned you had friends who worked for Instagram, which is now owned by Facebook.

[Tristan Harris]

Yes. They just resigned from Facebook.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Yes.

The antitrust issue is at the edge of our study, but to me we keep coming back to it because of the massive power of these data-opolies that is beyond anything, in terms of a corporate size and power, that's ever been dealt with before. The power of these companies to manipulate or to be manipulated by third party actors to me is a serious question. They talk about the “kill zone" of innovation that has now arisen around the big data-opolies—

[Tristan Harris]

Yes.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

—because of just even their AI power to anticipate potential, competitive threats and to put them out of business.

Based on your own experience, having been bought out by Google, what do we need to look at in terms of the competitive market to ensure that these companies are not able to shut down competition? Do we need to go to some form of antitrust regulation?

[Tristan Harris]

Actually, this is an excellent area that we probably won't be able to get too deeply into in the limited time we have. I recommend my colleague Roger McNamee, who's been doing a lot of active work on that in the Open Markets Institute in the United States.

You're absolutely right. We were a tiny start-up company, so we're not really so relevant to that conversation. But the point is that if you were trying to build an alternative to Facebook, YouTube or Twitter, it would be very hard for you to succeed because these are built on network effects. In Senator Mark Warner's policy paper that came out on his policy prescriptions, he talked about the need for interoperability. You need to be able to move interoperably between these networks. This actually happened in the late 1990s with AOL Instant Messenger. It used to be that AOL had the most popular messaging application, AOL Instant Messenger, and it was locked in. The reason everybody had to use AOL is that they had to use AOL Instant Messenger. Then they were forced, with legislation, to make that interoperable, and that helped loosen the monopoly that AOL had at the time on essentially these Internet services.

I think we need to look at similar things like that. What's harder with social networks is that you can't just move my data off to something else because my data is connected to all the posts I've made in other people's profiles and they have privacy settings so that I can't simply migrate over onto some new platform. I think this is a really important area, and it does have to do with the consolidation of power and the ability for them to quash competition.

One last thing is that Facebook has a thing called Onavo, which is a VPN tracking service. They can actually track rising competitors that are using their platforms. By knowing which ones are up and coming, they can basically start to steal their features or shut them down. There are different competitive tactics they can use.