Information & Ethics Committee on Oct. 8th, 2024

[Dr. Heidi Tworek]

That was, unfortunately, something that we couldn't identify. We didn't engage in those kinds of investigations.

Sometimes it can indeed be very difficult. The example of Tenet Media shows us that, in that case, it actually wasn't about who was creating the content; it was about the financing behind it. That's why I made the recommendations about thinking about financing as well as looking at the content itself, because you can have, in a way, things that happen off of the platforms that are actually influencing what kind of content is being created.

We need to combine not just thinking about the content but also thinking about the actors and their behaviour.

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Do you think certain political parties in Canada are currently spreading disinformation for partisan purposes?

[Dr. Heidi Tworek]

That's a very difficult question to answer.

As far as we know, political parties are obviously going to be pushing for themselves to win, but we haven't looked into specifically assessing what political parties are doing internally. That's obviously something that's very difficult for us to get at.

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Thank you.

Mr. Boyd, I have the same question for you.

Do you think there are political parties in Canada that have spread disinformation in the past for partisan purposes, that are doing so now or that plan to do so in the future?

[Kenneth Boyd]

I'll give the same answer Professor Tworek gave, which is that it is very difficult to determine if political parties themselves are internally creating this kind of information. I certainly have no sense of what the intentions would be going forward, so I don't have a good answer for you. I'm sorry.

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

All right. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Trudel.

Mr. Green, go ahead for six minutes, sir.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

My questions in this round are going to be for Ms. Tworek.

In a 2023 conference briefing note entitled “Media/Digital Literacy in an Era of Disinformation”, you reflected on a presentation you had made in 2022; it was published in the Journal of Intelligence, Conflict, and Warfare.

During this presentation, you talked about the fact that misinformation and disinformation often overlap with online abuse—in fact, you referenced it in the previous round of questions—that is directed towards professional groups, and marginalized groups like, for example, women, as I think you referenced. You said it's the foundation.

Why do you think that is?

[Dr. Heidi Tworek]

Part of what we've seen in studies that we conducted since 2019 is that often these kinds of identity-based attacks and that kind of harassment can have disproportionate effects on people from racialized communities, 2SLGBTQ+ people or women. This can often overlap with some sort of disinformation about those individuals.

The distinction here is that, of course, you can have vigorous and rigorous discussion about issues, but we often see with these groups that is melded with attacks on their identities.

This has an influence on the political candidates themselves and also, I'd like to add, on their campaign teams. That's really important, because those are often people who are thinking about going into politics and potentially becoming candidates. They see the kind of online abuse and harassment directed at a candidate, and they think, “Maybe politics is not for me.”

If we're thinking about having a diverse legislature that represents the diversity of Canadians, we do need to address this issue.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

It's interesting that you raise that. I know, for instance, that this point was raised by one of our previous committee members, Ms. Pam Damoff, who talked at length about the way in which political violence expresses itself.

From your perspective, at what point do these campaigns cease being merely misinformation and disinformation and cross over into the rubric of political violence or, dare I say, a proto-fascist approach to dismantling democracy in the country?

[Dr. Heidi Tworek]

That's obviously a big question that political theorists can debate. I think I'd take it in a slightly different direction, which is to say that these are often actual threats against people's physical or psychological safety. There are all sorts of ways that we need to think about addressing this.

A report I co-wrote with Chris Tenove in 2020 gives a whole host of recommendations for how we can try to address these kinds of things so that we can continue to have a democracy and, hopefully, build on a democracy that has a diverse group of political candidates and representatives. I'd be happy to submit that report to the committee.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

That would be good, because my next question is how we look to minimize that type of online abuse.

The two challenges you highlighted during that 2022 presentation were the lack of explanatory journalism and the lack of social media expertise for some professional communicators trying to publish high-quality information online. Can you explain these two challenges and whether there are initiatives in Canada to meet them?

[Dr. Heidi Tworek]

In terms of the lack of explanatory journalism, another way of thinking about this is that we need to think about what journalism looks like in the 21st century, who can supply that information and so on. There are obviously a whole host of initiatives.

I'll just highlight one, which is The Conversation Canada, which was co-founded by a couple of my colleagues at UBC. The idea of that is pairing academics who are very bad at writing op-eds mostly with journalists who are able to edit. What we get there is academic expertise, but packaged in ways that most people can understand it. This can be freely reprinted. That's just one example of how we can amplify journalism and have it coming from experts.

In terms of social media expertise, this is quite a problematic area now because we see that social media platforms, even since 2022, have increasingly been shutting down the ability for researchers to access any data from platforms, whether it's CrowdTangle from Meta or X, which is now prohibitively expensive. It's made it harder and harder for us, as researchers, to be able to access the sort of data we need to answer a lot of the fundamental questions that this committee is proposing. That's why bills like Bill C-63 embed ideas around transparency for researchers within them.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

That's algorithmic transparency to understand how people are fed information. Is that what you're referring to?

[Dr. Heidi Tworek]

Part of it is algorithmic transparency. Some of it is also questions around getting access to posts at all, because we're not able to access large numbers of posts from many social media platforms. There were a lot of questions, for example, about X—then Twitter—that we could ask in our study on political candidates in 2019 but I can no longer ask because I simply don't have access to that level of data.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

What I'm getting here is the commodification of information. I know that machine learning and AI are able to go on and check the mood of the people on the platform in significant ways. Of course, this was referenced in the 2016 election under Trump in the way in which Cambridge Analytica and others targeted people.

From your perspective, what ways can we decommodify this kind of information capitalism to make it more democratic and transparent, as you suggested?

[Dr. Heidi Tworek]

It's a great question. I don't think there are any silver bullets, but researchers suggest a variety of ways.

Some are looking at antitrust. There's obviously a lot of that happening in the U.S. Others are suggesting things around data privacy so that companies simply don't have access to so much information. Others are talking about whether we need public AI. That's Mozilla's suggestion, for example.

I don't think there's one silver bullet, but there are a whole host of different potential options that we could explore.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Okay. Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Green.

That concludes our first round.

We have enough time for five minutes for the Conservatives and five minutes for the Liberals.

Mr. Trudel will have two and a half minutes.

We'll have two and a half minutes for you, Mr. Green, and that will take us up to the allotted time.

I am going now to Mr. Caputo for five minutes.

Go ahead, sir.

[Frank Caputo, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to thank the witnesses who are here in person, and Mr. Boyd and Professor Tworek who are on video conference.

I note, professor, that you are from UBC. As an SFU grad, I have to put in a friendly jab about the superiority of SFU.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

That's a "point of order", Mr. Caputo?

[An hon. member]

Oh, oh!

[Frank Caputo, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

In all seriousness, one of the things that has really bothered me about foreign interference, especially surrounding elections, is the amount of time it takes for the government to act. In other words, the people on the ground know exactly what's happening, yet there is a significant lag time between that information getting to security forces in Canada and action being taken.

Would either of you, Mr. Boyd or Professor Tworek, have any input on that?

[Dr. Heidi Tworek]

I'll just say briefly that one of the things I advocated for is thinking about transparency and how that can happen appropriately.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Mr. Boyd, do you have any response to that?