Evidence of meeting #116 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was going.
A video is available from Parliament.
Professor, School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, As an Individual
I'm not a politician. I'm a Canadian. I'm happy if any government is able to implement a solution to this, but our trust is being attacked. Our trust in the election process is being attacked. We need to somehow fix this.
Conservative
Larry Brock Conservative Brantford—Brant, ON
During the Prime Minister's appearance at the inquiry on foreign interference, he voiced frustration over intelligence leaks to the media, which he felt were sensationalized and taken out of context. He claimed that his government had implemented—his words—robust mechanisms to detect and combat interference, but that the government was “painted as negligent in the media”.
Do you believe this critique is justified, and do you think the government's efforts are sufficient? I put that to you, Mr. Frank, and I put the same question to the other two participants.
Professor, School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, As an Individual
Given that there were leaks, whatever measures were put in place obviously weren't enough. I'm not privy to the details of what was implemented, but I trust that they did the best they could.
Director, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, As an Individual
I think there's an inherent challenge, Mr. Brock, in that there's a mechanism set up for very good public servants to have a finger on the alarm bell, so to speak, but the politicians to whom they report have conflicts of interest. In the heat of an election it's very hard for a party leader to say, “I want to tell everyone that my candidate has benefited from foreign interference.” I think fixing that conflict of interest is of serious concern.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Brassard
Thank you. Perhaps you can get to Mr. Al-Rawi in the next round, Mr. Brock.
Mr. Bains, you have five minutes. Go ahead, please.
Liberal
Parm Bains Liberal Steveston—Richmond East, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our guests for joining us today.
I go first to Mr. Frank.
On the defence piece, can you elaborate a bit more? You talked about no defence. You talked about introducing AI. How would that work? What kind of framework would be put in place? Can you also talk about your tool and how that can help in some way?
Professor, School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, As an Individual
In the world I foresee in the next couple of years, whatever disinformation content we've seen so far would become AI-generated and would escalate by a factor of 10 or 100, so the solution I foresee is something similar, using humans: Domain experts in whatever community would start to identify disinformation attacks and from that, within that one specific community, AI could be trained to detect such content. That's the research and that's the model we've been working with, through different grants and funding opportunities.
I think this solution will help us detect and model what is happening. We were able to create charts saying, “This person is very heavily linked to another. Disinformation is coming from this person, but these people are also linked.” That helps us figure out where the disinformation is coming from, for example.
Liberal
Parm Bains Liberal Steveston—Richmond East, BC
Are you able to detect what region disinformation is coming from? Can you get as far as that?
Professor, School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, As an Individual
We can infer the actor behind it, the government, based on the messaging, but sometimes Canadians themselves will be either tricked or paid to disseminate messages. An idea takes place in a conspiracy community, and they start parroting the same message, which is disinformation.
Liberal
Parm Bains Liberal Steveston—Richmond East, BC
As candidates, we're all subjected to misinformation and disinformation, whether it's flyers or candidates going door to door and trying to influence people in that manner.
What about domestically? How do you see misinformation and disinformation? Is it on the rise domestically here?
Professor, School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, As an Individual
We know of some groups that do spread disinformation domestically. They are very likely linked to foreign actors, though.
Professor, School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, As an Individual
I can look it up for you. I don't have names handy.
Liberal
Parm Bains Liberal Steveston—Richmond East, BC
Maybe I will go to Mr. Loewen as well.
I know you talked a little bit about AI maybe not being the best approach. What sort of alternative means do you think are appropriate?
Director, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, As an Individual
It depends on what problem we're trying to solve, Mr. Bains. AI and high-dimensional data tools are going to be very useful for figuring out the ecosystem and understanding how much misinformation and disinformation is spreading, but I think we have to recognize that at the core of this are human beings who want to spread disinformation. When people hear something that is salacious and perhaps untrue, but also very damaging to their political opponents or politicians they don't like, if they're citizens, they have incentives to spread it.
The problem here is we overweight the degree to which this problem is foreign. This problem is as domestic as it is foreign, in that the technologies we have allow people to spread lies in ways that are hard to detect but are easy to spread, and that old analogy that Mr. Frank alluded to is correct. Before we can catch up with these lies, they have made their way halfway around the world.
Liberal
Parm Bains Liberal Steveston—Richmond East, BC
Yes. There's so much information out there. We heard from an expert, Ben Nimmo. He's a threat investigator. He talked about how certain Russian campaigns were extremely effective, but there was another one that had put out hundreds of thousands of messages but didn't really make an impact.
How can we detect how messages are being received and what the impact is in terms of how they're being received?
Director, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, As an Individual
I would say there are methods for doing this, and academics have spent a long time thinking about how to measure the effects of information. I wish I could tell you that it's easy to say definitively whether a message has worked or not, but really, to Justice Hogue's point in her report, it's hard to know precisely what effect a message has had because we're not running large-scale controlled experiments.
All of these campaigns and these instances of misinformation are happening in the context of very noisy campaigns, so in some ways I think the way to think about this is not to think about effects but to think about how much you can inoculate your system from it, because if you're concerned about foreign interference, then even if it had no effect, it's still a bad thing if Beijing thinks it had an effect, and it's a bad thing if MPs think that foreign actors had an effect.
In terms of what effect it actually had on Mr. Chiu, it's hard to know precisely what happened, but there's reason to believe something bad happened. That reason is enough to try to inoculate ourselves against foreign interference as much as possible. It's not that if there was no effect, there's no problem.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Brassard
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Bains.
Mr. Villemure, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.
René Villemure Bloc Trois-Rivières, QC
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I am going to start with Mr. Loewen.
It is often said that the decline in local journalism promotes disinformation because people are seeking information elsewhere. A number of witnesses regularly tell us that we need education to counter the effects of disinformation, but when a large segment of society finds their information on TikTok, what can we do as parliamentarians to provide that education?
Director, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, As an Individual
Part of what you're identifying is a huge credibility problem, which is that we don't know who's an expert anymore. We don't know who's credible anymore. I would just say very respectfully that members of Parliament don't help themselves in this process, because voters have come largely to the conclusion that they cannot believe what members of Parliament say.
I think that one way of starting to re-establish that credibility is to be very clear about why you disagree with your opponents, but to very explicitly shy away from the spreading of rumours or falsehoods, or the suggestion of falsehoods, and bad intentions of reporters, and spend some time over the next couple of elections trying to elevate the way that politicians engage in discourse. That might give politicians a bit more credibility against a plethora of sources that are trying to claim that their credibility or authority equals that of politicians and other experts.
Professor, School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, As an Individual
Aside from educating students in school, some aspects of the disinformation campaigns that I've alluded to would imply going into TikTok and other sources where people are getting disinformation and specifically countering it somehow through the same style of messaging, same style of videos, et cetera.
Bloc
René Villemure Bloc Trois-Rivières, QC
Okay.
I lost my train of thought.
Mr. Chair, that will be enough for me.
Conservative