Information & Ethics Committee on Oct. 22nd, 2024

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

From your perspective as a political scientist, is it not strange that, in today's world, we see the word “lie” every day in the national media and accept the fact that some people brazenly lie without consequence? Does that have an impact on democracy?

[Michael Wagner]

I think it does. Most folks don't know very much about what's going on in their country and around the world. Most people don't wake up and ask themselves how they will hold their government accountable today. Instead, they rely upon legitimate sources of information to create penalties for lying, penalties such as not being re-elected, censure or sanction from their colleagues or a public embarrassment for things they say that are not true.

We see a decrease in many western countries with respect to those kinds of behaviours, both from lawmakers and from news organizations, in some respects, over time. As societies polarize and divide, we see an increasing willingness in people to forgive the sins of their side and focus on the sins of the other side.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Villemure.

Mr. Green, you have two and a half minutes.

Go ahead.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you.

I want to explore some of those concepts, perhaps in English, for the good and welfare of the people who are watching.

We have had several witnesses appear before this committee in the context of the study to talk about misinformation and disinformation and how it can negatively impact Canadians' trust in public institutions. The current information ecosystem has seen an erosion in the trust that some people have in them, as well as in traditional media. Obviously, the same impacts are happening in the States.

Have you done research on the impact of misinformation and disinformation on public trust in institutions and traditional media?

[Michael Wagner]

Yes, but not in Canada.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

What are the main take-aways from the American example that we might be able to learn from?

[Michael Wagner]

One is that when ideological sources attack the referees, which is to say they attack legitimate news sources time and time again and then want to rely upon those sources to fact-check things that they care about, they learn quickly that their audience no longer trusts them.

We've seen very prominent people who've engaged in polarized communication on talk radio and cable television in the United States sow distrust in legitimate news sources, and then, when a candidate from their own party who they didn't like came along and they told their audience, “We can't trust this person because they lie all the time,” their audience said, “But you told us not to trust these sources.”

When there are no referees, it's very difficult to maintain the integrity of the game or the integrity of the—

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

In terms of ideological ecosystems, we know that that continuum ends in a place of ideologically motivated violent extremism.

We know that in the States, or at least it's been reported—and I'll leave it to you to comment, as a subject matter expert—that the two attempts on Donald Trump's life were in fact from ideologically motivated right-wing extremists. Is that not correct?

[Michael Wagner]

I am confident that at least one of those is correct, and I believe that the most recent reporting I've seen is consistent with your characterization.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

In that space, you quite rightly identified that when this ecosystem of political violence is unleashed in a world that is absent of fact and completely disassociated from basic civil norms, political violence will impact everybody. Is that a safe assumption to make?

[Michael Wagner]

It certainly could, and it's the case that individuals feel it. In survey research that we do, when we ask those who don't participate in politics why they don't, a non-trivial percentage say it's because there are too many dangerous people out there who are often believing some of the things that you're talking about that aren't true, which can often lead to political violence.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Okay.

In short, that undermines democracy at its foundation if people don't even want to engage because they're afraid of ideologically violent people.

[Michael Wagner]

You can't have a free and fair election if everyone doesn't feel safe to participate.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Green.

Thank you, Mr. Wagner. I want to thank you and Mr. Suelzle for being here today.

That concludes our first panel.

Going back to what Ms. Khalid had said earlier, I invite both of you to submit to the committee in writing any other thoughts you may have, because oftentimes you'll walk away and think that you should have said this or that. I invite you to do that through the clerk, who contacted you to be part of this meeting today. I would ask, if you're going to do that, doing so by Friday at five o'clock would be a good time to set as a deadline.

I'm going to suspend for a couple minutes before we move to our next panel.

The meeting is suspended.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Welcome back, everyone.

We're going to move to our second panel now, and I'd like to welcome our witnesses.

First, we have Samantha Bradshaw, an assistant professor in new technology and security, who is here by video conference. From The Dais, Toronto Metropolitan University, we have Karim Bardeesy, the executive director.

I want to welcome you both to the committee.

Ms. Bradshaw, you have up to five minutes to address the committee. Go ahead, please.

[Dr. Samantha Bradshaw, Assistant Professor, New Technology and Security , As an Individual]

Thanks for inviting me.

My name is Samantha Bradshaw. I'm an assistant professor in new technology and security at American University, where I also direct the Center for Security, Innovation, and New Technology.

For the past eight years, my research has examined questions around how state actors co-opt and weaponize social media for achieving political goals. Some of this research has focused on Russian interference, so I'll spend most of my time discussing this work here today.

There's no doubt that emerging and digital technologies have expanded the scope, scale, reach and precision of disinformation campaigns. State actors like Russia have learned to use these technologies to reach across their borders and influence individuals in ways that can undermine democracy and the expression of human rights.

Since 2017, platforms have been taking down multiple campaigns. It's in the hundreds now. We've seen state-backed disinformation campaigns removed by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These activities have also been documented across other kinds of platforms, such as chat applications like WhatsApp or alternative platforms like Parler. Disinformation and propaganda on these platforms, of course, are used to influence online audiences in ways that advance Russia's geopolitical ambitions.

Sometimes they rely on more covert tactics, such as the use of fake social media accounts, bots and online troll forums to spread false information or other harmful narratives discreetly. Other times, they rely on more overt propaganda strategies that come from state-sponsored media outlets like RT and Sputnik, which openly disseminate pro-Kremlin narratives.

Many of the strategies we see today reflect the longer history of Cold War strategies, wherein Soviet leadership undertook many efforts to alter audience attitudes, opinions and perspectives on events and issues around the world. Back in the day, in addition to promoting overt and attributable content on social media, Soviet entities employed news agencies and sympathetic newspapers abroad, and courted journalists as sources to spread unattributable messages. Today we're seeing a lot of these strategies play out in the development of fake websites and fake journalist personas, the development of front media organizations, and the co-opting of social media influencers.

Some of my more recent work looks at Russian state-backed media coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S. over the summer of 2020. We investigated elements of this Russian-affiliated media landscape and its digital presence. We found that a lot of these front media organizations often developed and tailored content to different segments of English-speaking users. A lot of this content was about playing both sides and emphasizing the racial divides in American politics, with some outlets expressing support for the Black Lives Matter protesters and others emphasizing support for the police and the Blue Lives Matter movement.

By tracking a lot of the ownership of these media companies, and the movement of staff and journalists affiliated with known Russian news agencies, we found lots of connections in the incorporation, funding and personnel working for media outlets that claim to be independent from the Russian government. While things like editorial independence can of course be subjective, funding and ownership relations are key criteria in any evaluation process.

A lot of strategies around state media, influencers and front organizations have appeared in information operations in other countries around the globe. This includes countries as far away as those in Africa and across the Sahel states, where I worked on platform data investigating Russian activities there. In those examples, we saw the co-opting of local influencers, who are often paid by Russian actors to generate this veneer of legitimacy around the content being produced and amplified on social media. While the specific goals of any influence operation will vary, many are designed with the intent of disrupting the social fabric of society. In the context of the Sahel, Russian disinformation campaigns often highlighted anti-Western and anti-colonial narratives that fed into localized and generational memory to amplify divides within and across society.

This brings me to my final point that I want to make in my opening remarks about contemporary Russian information operations, and it's that many don't really rely on what we consider, traditionally, to be disinformation. A lot of the more effective campaigns that we're seeing don't rely on false information, things that can be easily fact-checked, but on identity-based disinformation and tropes around racism, sexism, xenophobia or even who we are as political citizens. These tropes, really, are then used to polarize, suppress and undermine our institutions of democracy.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Ms. Bradshaw. The toughest part of my job is having to cut somebody off when they're on a roll, and you were on a roll.

[Dr. Samantha Bradshaw]

Honestly, I was right at the end.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Wonderful—it was an abrupt ending.

Mr. Bardeesy, you're up for five minutes, sir. Go ahead, address the committee.

[Karim Bardeesy, Executive Director, The Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University]

Thank you, Chair, for the opportunity to appear before you and for doing this important work.

I'm Karim Bardeesy. I'm the executive director of The Dais, a policy and leadership think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University, working on the bold ideas and better leaders Canada needs for more shared prosperity and citizenship. We work in areas of economic, education and democracy policy.

I'll be drawing on my remarks from two studies we've done recently: one supported by the Privy Council Office's democratic institution secretariat as part of our annual DemocracyXChange summit, and another one supported by the Department of Canadian Heritage's digital citizen initiative, the "Survey of Online Harms".

I make three points.

First, the state of the threat of foreign or external misinformation and disinformation is real, ever-changing and points, as Professor Bradshaw said, at specific communities triggering specific identities. Canada's national cyber threat assessment describes online foreign influence activities as a “new normal”, and some of this is difficult to detect. For instance, disinfo and misinfo on private messaging platforms are more likely to reach specific cultural communities or identity groups, and they're harder, by their very nature, to study. The design of these platforms also makes it more difficult for the users, who are concerned that there may be misinfo or disinfo on those platforms...to be flagged for content concern.

There are also a number of new vectors, and some came to the public's attention only through judicial actions in other countries. Professor Bradshaw mentioned Russian disinfo, so you're probably aware that the U.S. justice department recently charged two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, not for its own content but in a U.S. $10-million scheme to create and distribute content with hidden Russian government messaging. Some of these payments, as you're probably aware, went to prominent Canadian YouTubers, but the extent of this deception was only revealed thanks to the discovery that accompanies criminal proceedings.

Prominent online actors can also play an important role in spreading foreign misinfo and disinfo. A recent study by Reset Tech shows that Elon Musk's personal engagement with content can amplify, 250 or morefold, the audience that a piece of foreign misinfo or disinfo receives out in the real world.

Another new vector are deepfakes, again, with some of the old techniques but now fuelled by powerful AI algorithms that are available to many at low or no cost. Our recent study of online harm showed that 60% of Canadian residents said they have seen a deepfake online, with 23% reporting seeing deepfakes more than a couple of times a week. That kind of exposure to deepfakes is correlated with the use of social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, X, TikTok as well as ChatGPT.

Second, how do we respond to the threat? It's real, it's coming in multiple forms and those forms are constantly evolving. On this, our report has a number of recommendations for policy-makers and institutions, civil society and individual citizens—and I'll be sure to table that report with you—although I caution this group, your committee, against expecting too much on behalf of citizens to equip them. They need to be equipped with media and digital literacy skills, but the power of these platforms and their ubiquity really require a policy response.

We at The Dais join dozens of other civil society and research organizations to urge timely passage of Bill C-63, the online harms act. Although misinfo and disinfo isn't an explicitly prescribed harm under the act, misinfo and disinfo helps fuel the harms that are identified in the act, and so we urge timely passage of that.

Third, I will address misinfo and disinfo, not foreign influence, as it relates to the Canadian media ecosystem generally. How Canadians consume media makes them more vulnerable to some of the...and those consumption trends make them more vulnerable to some of the phenomena that you are studying. We know that more Canadians are getting their news online, specifically from social media, and that fewer are participating in a shared space and consuming information produced by organizations that have strong or identifiable journalistic standards or standards of review, evidence, and context, to begin with. We also know that the effects of recent corporate decisions and policies can make the media ecosystem weaker. For instance, 25% of Canadians get news from Meta/Facebook—which is a source of news according to the Reuters digital study—and 29% get it from YouTube. Well, the recent decision by Meta news to throttle...on Facebook and Instagram, means that, in our study, 41% of respondents say that it has had a negative effect on their ability to stay current with the news.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you, and I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you both for your opening statements.

We're going to do two rounds of six minutes, starting with Mr. Caputo.

Go ahead for six minutes.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Bardeesy and Professor Bradshaw. I appreciate you both being here.

Professor Bradshaw, it sounds like you're currently a tenure-track professor in the U.S.

Is that right?

[Dr. Samantha Bradshaw]

Yes, that's correct.

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

Just out of curiosity—and this isn't bad or good or anything; I'm just wondering—have you lived in Canada, stayed here during an election campaign or anything like that?