Information & Ethics Committee on Oct. 22nd, 2024

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you very much. I'd like to welcome both subject matter experts. It's nice to have subject matter experts here today, but I do know that you bring with you your own unique political experiences.

Mr. Bardeesy, I do know you from your previous life. Without putting you on the spot, I am wondering if if you're comfortable talking about your political experience in campaigns at all.

[Karim Bardeesy]

Yes, I'm here as an expert witness, but I do have that background, both as a political staffer and more recently as a candidate in the provincial election in 2022. Perhaps this is familiar to other members, but as I mentioned in the third part of my remarks about the Canadian media ecosystem more generally, I observed in a very acute way that my campaign—maybe like a lot of local campaigns—just didn't get any local coverage.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I actually have a more specific question, although I'm sure your local campaign was exhilarating. I want to go back to the Kathleen Wynne election from the outside looking in. There was the emergence of Ontario Proud under Jeff Ballingall, whom we know to be a Conservative staffer and who created Canada Proud and is an owner in the Post Millennial and has been at the centre of particularly egregious examples of misinformation and disinformation. I know there was a fervour, second only to what I would see from this recent iteration of the F*** Trudeau culture that has been created on the far right.

From your experience, can you speak in whatever way you think appropriate to this discussion about the ways in which you may have watched Ontario Proud use Facebook—I think it was primarily Facebook—and other avenues to spread misinformation, disinformation, and I would say malinformation, if I could.

[Karim Bardeesy]

I was the director of policy and the deputy principal secretary to the Premier of Ontario from 2011 to 2016. I was there for former premier Dalton McGuinty and former premier Kathleen Wynne. I was the platform lead on the 2014 campaign.

At that time, frankly, these issues were not as pronounced. There was a media ecosystem that was out there. There was online campaigning. People appeared to be getting information from a variety of sources. Mistrust and the toxic authoritarian populism that started to emerge in North America was not as apparent then. Primarily after I left the premier's office, I know that former premier Wynne faced a certain amount of personally-directed hate, as did caucus members, as did people from a variety of political partisan persuasions as elected officials.

While I wasn't involved in the 2008 campaign, with some of the events that you described, we actually did do a study in 2019 as part of the Facebook ad transparency work that we were trying to bring. We allied with a researcher who was bringing disclosure to whom was being targeted by Facebook ads. That, along with a website called Who Targets Me, is still a project that's under way with our collaborators over in the U.K. and Ireland.

We did a study at that time, not focused on the provincial election, which prompted, with other efforts, a pretty good Facebook political ad transparency registry to be created. The entity that you described and a number of others with either generic names or names that weren't quite reflective of what they were actually promoting were some of the main buyers of online ads on Facebook in the 2009 campaign.

The names of the organizations would not tell you, with much specificity, what they were actually about.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I do know that there was a National Observer story in 2022, I think, that linked phone numbers with people such as Angelo Isidorou, whom corporate filings identified as a writer for The Post Millennial. He made headlines when he resigned from Vancouver's NPA Party after allegedly flashing a hand gesture associated with white extremism; I would say that it was likely a Nazi salute. He has, through these findings, direct connections with Ballingall's company, Mobilize Media Group.

Can you talk a little about the way there is a threat of third party advertisers and social media, and about the ecosystem of misinformation and disinformation, as it relates to electoral politics, particularly given the consideration that we've just seen in an election in B.C.? We have them in the Prairies, and it's going to be coming to us federally. If you could just comment on that, I have about 45 seconds left.

[Karim Bardeesy]

There are a number of news outlets, or outlets that appear to be news outlets, that are primed and designed to appeal to a younger demographic. The Buffalo News was mentioned in Commissioner Hogue's initial report. There are a number of outlets.... With the Meta, Facebook and Instagram news ban, there are new ones popping up, and 6ixBuzz is a popular one among my students in the greater Toronto area. I'll observe that there are a number of sites that don't have the kinds of editorial controls you would expect, that masquerade or appear to be news sites, or that have an agenda, which are reaching larger audiences.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Ms. Bradshaw, I will come to you with that same question in my next round. It looks like I've run out of time.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Green.

That does conclude our first round.

We're going to do five, five, two and a half, and two and a half. Then we're going to conclude the meeting.

We're going to start with Mr. Barrett for five minutes.

Go ahead, sir.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

I'd like to refer to an ABC News article dated October 18, 2023, titled “US says initial independent review shows no evidence of bomb strike on Gaza hospital”. I want to read the first paragraph of this article.

A day after the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry claimed Israel had attacked the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, saying some 500 Palestinians had been killed, Israeli and U.S. officials, explosive experts, and President Joe Biden said Wednesday an available evidence shows the destruction was caused instead by a failed Palestinian terrorist rocket launch.

I'm going to end that quote from that story there. However, I would then like to refer to a tweet on October 17, 2023, posted on X by Canada's foreign affairs minister. It says:

Bombing a hospital is an unthinkable act, and there is no doubt that doing so is absolutely illegal.

Now, that was viewed 2.7 million times, and I want to draw to your attention the context that existed at the time. That goes back to this ABC article's opening graph that talks about that initial claim, and that initial claim was that Israel had perpetrated an attack on a civilian site, killing 500 civilians, innocents, in that war. That was reported by mainstream news outlets across the west, including here in Canada, and many, if not all, issued some form of correction.

However, with regard to the tweet that I read to you from Canada's foreign affairs minister, I just read that and wrote it down in the last five minutes, so that tweet is still up, viewed 2.7 million times. Now, how harmful is this? Frankly, it's recklessness from a government verified account. Now, on the platform X, there are different types of verification, and one of them is from a government official or an elected official. This has the gray check mark. Talk about the disruption that foreign or hostile state actors seek to create. It's not necessarily to favour one political ideology or another.

I think, Professor Bradshaw, you talked about a very contentious time in 2020 in the U.S., the BLM riots, and the same hostile states were sponsoring or fomenting both supporters of BLM but also supporters of Blue Lives Matter, trying to create discord between two groups in a very tense situation, a tense time.

So, with regard to this example here, do you believe that this type of failure to act after a hot take, which can happen on social media, enables hostile foreign states to create the kind of division that, frankly, we've seen in Canada in the face of this ongoing war in the Middle East?

I'll start with you, Professor Bradshaw.

[Dr. Samantha Bradshaw]

I don't remember the fact-checked story or anything like that, so I'm going to focus my response mainly on the role that I think influencers can play in the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation when we're looking at things like COVID misinformation, for example.

It's really a small number of people who tend to generate the most engagement around the conspiracy theories. Thinking about the role of people who have large audiences on social media, you'll find that there's almost a greater incentive or a greater reason to—you know, with great power comes great responsibility—kind of take more steps to ensure that fair, accurate and good information is going out to audiences. However, forums in particular have not traditionally taken that path. There have been a lot of whistle-blower documents that have shown specific kinds of white lists of accounts from people who are influencers who have large followings and can get past a lot of the moderation systems because it generates engagement.

For me, I think the problem is really there, and we should not be so worried about a Russian Twitter account that's not generating as much engagement and not reaching mainstream public attention. However, we should also be thinking more broadly about the role of influencers.

I also think that's why we see a lot of Russian information operations pivoting to hiring and co-opting local voices and people who already have audiences. If we're thinking about policy responses to, you know, generating that kind of trust, building a culture for influencers to do some defending of democracy could be a potential positive route, but you also don't want to be paying them to do that kind of stuff. You know what I mean.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you.

I'm sorry, Mr. Bardeesy. We didn't have time to go to you.

Mr. Housefather, you have five minutes in this round.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much to the witnesses for being here.

Professor Bradshaw, I read the paper that you co-wrote with some others about the 2020 election. One thing that struck me was the way that different platforms, and you looked in particular at X and Facebook, dealt with disinformation related to the election. Could you just walk us through the issue where 30% of the posts were not treated consistently by the platforms and why that was?

[Dr. Samantha Bradshaw]

Yes. This was a paper that used a really interesting data set of misinformation narratives that we had identified and reported to the platforms. We then assessed whether or not they did or did not take action against the content that was reported to them and checked by researchers to see whether this was a misinformation narrative or not. Some of the things that explained the differences were really simple technical fixes. For example, if we had reported a narrative of things that were on a certain date, things that were published before weren't necessarily backdated with a label, but things going forward were. We also noticed differences across the different kinds of media. If things were screen grabbed or cut or edited slightly, the automated detection tools didn't always do a great job identifying similar kinds of misinformation narratives. You have to remember that a lot of this kind of content takedown is done automatically by automated systems.

So there were a couple of problems there, but for the most part, we saw about 70% of the content being enforced. A lot of the decisions to not enforce were relatively arbitrary, based on these small technical problems or problems with the automated systems that I think could easily be fixed.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

[Technical difficulty—Editor] the allegation that there were prefilled ballots. When you had a picture of the prefilled ballot, you would then have the content noted as being misinformation, but you wouldn't necessarily if they put up a video saying this. Is that kind of correct?

[Dr. Samantha Bradshaw]

Yes. It really depended on the particular narratives that we were looking at. I don't remember if that was an exact example, but that is a good characterization of some of the differences we were seeing.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

The Americans put together the election integrity type of approach from the different social media companies in 2020. When we're looking at the outcome in Canadian elections, what lessons should we learn that the Americans did right in 2020 or that the social media companies did well as they applied it to the 2020 election? As well, what did they do wrong?

[Dr. Samantha Bradshaw]

In terms of really great lessons, I think a real success was lot of the partnerships with academic institutions. It not only led us to be able to detect and brief the public in real time on misinformation narratives that were occurring; it also allowed us to do really interesting and novel research on the back end to audit platform content moderation, something that's really, really difficult to do.

In terms of things that could be done better, I think there was so much public and far right outlash against those kinds of initiatives, and universities didn't do well at necessarily protecting the researchers and the groups who were doing this really important work. I don't think the platforms really did a lot too to protect those partnerships. They're taking a step back from doing those kinds of collaborations now. I think that was a real, real harm, and something that we could protect and create a more positive multi-stakeholder culture around.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Do I have any more time, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

You have 30 seconds.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

I'll pass that on to my Bloc and NDP colleagues, if anybody wants to take it.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

I actually may take that time at the end, Mr. Housefather.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

That's fine. I'll pass it on to you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Housefather.

Mr. Villemure, over to you for two and a half minutes.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Housefather.

Mr. Bardeesy, I'd like to draw on your experience, which you mentioned a little earlier.

You said that Bill C‑63 and Bill C‑70 were very useful measures for countering disinformation and foreign interference. However, as you know, Bill C‑63 hasn't been passed. Bill C‑70 is not yet in force.

A federal election is expected in less than 12 months. What can be done in terms of those measures since they may not be in effect by then?

[Karim Bardeesy]

As Ms. Bradshaw mentioned, partnerships between companies and researchers do not depend on bills. Right now, companies can connect with researchers and give them information about their algorithms or any other information that can help to keep the public in the know. That's what's happening right now. You might think that's misinformation, but it's not. The truth is that it's important to be able to have institutions outside government and social networks that people trust or can potentially trust. That's the first thing.

Second, we need standards. Members seeking election or re-election must be able to tell the people in those ridings that their local media in whatever city are not the enemy. It is very important that, as community leaders, you tell people that media that rely on principles and standards are there for everyone, even if certain people aren't as aligned with those principles and standards right now.