Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, everyone.
My name is Aengus Bridgman. I'm an assistant professor at McGill University, where I direct the Media Ecosystem Observatory. We're Canada's leading research entity dedicated to understanding and addressing online harms. We also anchor the Canadian Digital Media Research Network.
I will focus my comments on two thoughts today. The first is around this idea that misinformation and disinformation are an existential threat, and that they are the existential threat facing democracies today. There's been some recent international polling that suggests people are very profoundly concerned about this, and for you as parliamentarians and, of course, for the study in question, this is a real concern.
Research over the last five years that I and my team and colleagues have done has really shown that misinformation and disinformation are part of the Canadian information ecosystem. They are there—and I'm really looking forward to hearing comments from the third speaker today about some of the impacts of it—but this is not something that is changing the outcomes of elections or dramatically altering Canadians' attitudes and behaviours.
There are a few reasons for that. First, most Canadians, most people are quite inattentive to politics. Individual stories, especially misinformation and disinformation stories, float by unheeded. Those who do hear them tend to already be predisposed to hearing that information, and maybe already have attitudes in line with that misinformation. What you're seeing there is this dynamic. Yes, it is occurring, but the actual systematic impact is relatively low. We studied that by looking at large-scale digital trace data coupled with nationally represented survey data. We did studies in the last two federal elections and the last Quebec election, and for all three we concluded that the role that misinformation played was relatively minor, although we did document numerous instances of it.
That gets to the second point I want to highlight, which is that there's this tendency to think of misinformation and disinformation from a harm perspective, from a securitization perspective, that they are something we need to protect against. There is value in that sort of thinking, but it's not the only way to think about it. I think it's very important to try to understand instead that misinformation and disinformation—false information—are a regular, consistent part of the information ecosystem and of politics, and their existence does not mean that we need to stamp them out or that we need to fight them. The mere fact that they exist does not mean that they are deserving of combatting.
Instead, we can think, “Okay. This is an information ecosystem. This is something that can be studied. This is something that can be made more resilient.” We can inform the population and do media literacy, of course, but there are other ways we can prepare our population. We can say, “Okay. This is the type of information you're going to encounter while you're using digital media and while you're trying to understand the political world. Here are some of the dynamics.” We can better understand those dynamics and better try to address them collectively as a society.
The first point is that misinformation and disinformation are out there. It's not that it's inconsequential—it does matter—but it is not existential, at least not yet in Canada to the extent that there is this pervasive feeling that this is deeply damaging. It matters. We need to study it, address it and think about it in a holistic way, but we don't need to stamp it out. Even the notion that it could be stamped out or addressed in that way is spurious.
I'm happy to talk about either of those points during the question and answer period.