Good afternoon, members of the committee.
My name is Kenneth Boyd. I'm the director of education at CIVIX, a national non-partisan charity that is dedicated to building the skills and habits of active and informed citizenship. We work primarily with K-to-12 teachers from every province and territory in providing free programs both in English and in French on the themes of democratic engagement, civic discourse and digital media literacy.
Members of the committee may be most familiar with our student vote program, which is our parallel election program for students under the voting age, as well as our rep day program, which invites MPs and other elected officials into classrooms to engage directly with students.
We approach digital media literacy as a necessary component of informed citizenship. Engaging in the democratic process requires that citizens be able to identify reliable and trustworthy sources of information and have the skills to determine the difference between fact and fiction.
We know that the effects of mis- and disinformation online can interfere with engaged citizenship in ways that go beyond being merely misled. For example, in a recent survey that we conducted with 800 teachers from across Canada, we found that 81% of respondents said they believe that mis- and disinformation on social media contribute a “great extent” to the spread of hateful rhetoric in their schools.
Lacking the ability to engage critically with content online thus has downstream consequences in terms of people's ability to have constructive and meaningful conversations about important issues.
To address these problems, we created CTRL‑F, our digital media literacy program that teaches empirically supported verification skills that have been proven to increase people's ability to determine the veracity of claims and identify the motives of unfamiliar sources online.
Since 2019, CTRL‑F has been used by over 5,200 teachers who have taught the program to more than 300,000 students from all across Canada. We are consistently updating our program to address new kinds of mis- and disinformation online, including those produced by artificial intelligence, and are currently adapting our resources for use by adult learners.
While digital media literacy skills are necessary for everyone, it is especially important that students learn these skills at a young age. There are, however, a number of challenges in teaching effective digital media literacy to Canadians. I will note that while we recognize that education is a provincial issue, it is worth highlighting the issues we have seen in our work in schools and with teachers, as they are indicative of problems that all Canadians face.
First, our research has shown that the resources that are available to Canadian educators vary widely in terms of quality. Provinces can mention educational resources but not mandate their use, and many outdated resources are still used in classrooms and used by Canadians nationwide. In some cases, these resources were developed before the widespread adoption of the Internet, and others have even been shown to backfire, making people less trusting of credible sources.
Digital media literacy is also not a singular thing. It is an umbrella term that encapsulates many different concepts and competencies. However, educators and Canadians in general are given little guidance about which resources are available to them and which are of high quality and grounded in evidence.
Second, there is an overall dearth of digital media literacy training. For example, it is a common occurrence to find educators in charge of digital media literacy instruction who have no specific training in the subject matter or who received their last training when studying to become a teacher. Even for those who choose to inform themselves about the latest developments in digital media literacy, the online world moves and changes so quickly that it is difficult to keep up.
In response to these issues, we believe there needs to be a national strategy to facilitate digital media literacy training. Through our work, we have found that in terms of scalability it is most efficient to train educators, as well as civil society organizations and community leaders, to reach as many Canadians as possible.
We also encourage the committee to consider approaching the problems of mis- and disinformation as being a widespread skills issue rather than simply an awareness issue. Merely making people aware of the need to critically engage with content they find online will not help us make any progress. Canadians need access to and training in digital media literacy skills, and that requires a sustained investment from the federal government to ensure high-quality resources are available and programs can continue to operate effectively.
Finally, informed citizenship requires access to high-quality information. In our resources, we say that the online information environment is polluted. Trustworthy information can certainly be found, but mis- and disinformation are mixed in. Disinformation also tends to be free and easily accessible. Indeed, it is in the interest of the purveyors of such information for it to be as easily accessed as possible, so there is a real need to take steps to limit the degree of information pollution online. One way to address this problem is to support journalists, especially local journalists, who are able to provide reliable information and give Canadians better options to find important information online.
I'm happy to address any questions the committee has, and I thank you for your time.