Information & Ethics Committee on Oct. 24th, 2024

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

To be clear, is the support provided to the person—in this case, Dr. Strauss—related solely to employment, and not political candidacy?

[Wifredo Fernández]

That's correct.

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

In this specific case, is it related solely to his forced resignation from Queen's University?

[Wifredo Fernández]

I don't have all the details of that particular case in front of me, but I'd be happy to follow up with more.

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

Thank you.

You were just talking about Community Notes, so it seems timely to reference a few.

This one is from the leader of the NDP, Jagmeet Singh, dated October 13: “Last year, Cenovus raked in $37 billion in profits. And a whopping $64 billion in 2022.” There is a Community Note on that, with a link to Yahoo! Finance news.

This is from August 17: “Justin Trudeau told Canadians things would be better, instead, they've gotten worse. Families are losing their homes”, and it goes on.

The Community Note says, “Justin Trudeau is in government because of a confidence and supply agreement with Jagmeet Singh.”

The community note goes on. Again on August 17, Jagmeet Singh said, “Justin Trudeau built people's hopes up, only to let them down.” Then he goes on to talk about rent prices, and there's a Community Note on that.

On March 18, he said:

BREAKING

The vote is in and we have forced the Liberals to:

Stop selling arms to the Israeli govt,

Support the ICC and ICJ,

Place sanctions on extremist settlers,

and much more

The Community Note says, “The motion in question does not 'force' the Liberals to do anything.” It goes on.

On March 7, there's another Community Note.

Then this is one from February 27. It's a very interesting one: “80% of the grocery market is controlled by 5 corporations...Sobeys, Metro—and you guessed it, Loblaws.” Then he goes on to say, “Both Liberal and Conservative Party campaigns receive donations from the three.”

It's very interesting that Metro is added there, given that his brother lobbies for them.

The Community Note says, “The claim in the post is false. Corporate donations to federal political parties have been forbidden by law in Canada for over 15 years.” It's similar to the Liberals saying, “assault-style weapons”, which have been illegal for 40 years, and they know it.

There's another one on conflicts of interest.

What do we have? We have eight Community Notes. Have you ever seen a political leader in Canada get this many Community Notes?

[Wifredo Fernández]

I'm not sure.

All of the data related to Community Notes is publicly available and accessible. It's uploaded every single day, going back to the inception of the program. This allows researchers around the world to study the system.

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

Not to be outdone, the Deputy Prime Minister.... I'm looking at August 23, 2021: “Great day. My anniversary.”

This is from the CBC, no less: “A video tweeted by incumbent Liberal candidate Chrystia Freeland”—the finance minister and Deputy Prime Minister now—“who served as deputy prime minister in Justin Trudeau's government, was given a label Sunday from Twitter, which marked it as 'manipulated media.' ”

Have you ever seen anybody this high in government “community-noted”, Mr. Fernandez?

[Wifredo Fernández]

Yes, I'm aware that there are, you know.... The @POTUS account in the United States has received Community Notes before.

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

Oh, that's interesting. Would this be on a par with things Donald Trump has stated, or is it Joe Biden? Is that where you're going?

[Wifredo Fernández]

The @POTUS account has received Community Notes before, yes.

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

That's interesting.

Okay. Let's go on now to—

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

You have 30 seconds, Mr. Caputo.

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

I apologize. I thought I was going to have a little more time here.

This can go to Mr. Fernández or Ms. Curran.

We've heard all about Russian disinformation. We hear in Parliament that it's far-right Russian disinformation.

Isn't it true that the greatest source of disinformation, particularly when it came to the 2021 election, resulting in Mr. Kenny Chiu losing his seat, was from the PRC? Is that correct?

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

We may have to come back. I'm going to give you a one-word answer—that's it.

[Rachel Curran]

Dr. Hundley, would you respond?

[Dr. Lindsay Hundley]

I cannot quantify the amount of disinformation in the 2021 election.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

You can circle back on that.

Mr. Fisher, for five minutes, go ahead.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to all our witnesses for being here today and making the trip.

My questions are also—no surprise—to X.

Mr. Fernández, does X collaborate with any partners, external organizations or professional fact-checkers to address disinformation?

[Wifredo Fernández]

No, we do not have a traditional fact-checking program. We have developed Community Notes.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

In your opening statements, you talked about about the desire of X to be forthright and honest. You said—and I sort of quote you, but I might have it wrong—“a critical platform as it pertains to elections”.

Your CEO, Elon Musk, has been trafficking disinformation on X as it relates to the 2024 U.S. presidential election coming up this November.

On October 4, he retweeted a false claim stating that as many as two million non-citizens had been registered to vote in Texas, Arizona and Pennsylvania. On October 19, he retweeted a post suggesting that the state's voter rolls were likely to contribute to widespread fraud. These were all debunked, and there are numerous other instances of election disinformation.

This is the CEO. Clearly your in-house fact-checking is not working.

My question to you is this: How can Canadians be sure that Elon Musk and other X employees will not spread disinformation about Canadian federal, provincial and municipal politicians, especially given that he's already opined on the platform X about Canadian affairs previously?

[Wifredo Fernández]

We have a particular policy, called the “civic integrity policy”, around elections, and it is specifically focused on violations that may provide misleading information about how to participate in elections or try and intimidate people from voting. That would be applicable in a Canadian election context.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Do X users play any role in reporting the disinformation? How does that work?

[Wifredo Fernández]

That is where Community Notes comes into play. We have a network of 800,000 contributors around the world, including over 30,000 Canadians who have enrolled in the program. In order to become a contributor, you need an account in good standing—an account for at least six months—and a verified phone number.

Then you apply, and we onboard folks every week in a fair and randomized process. They have the ability to start rating notes for their helpfulness, whether the note contains a high-quality citation, whether it directly addresses the post's claim, whether it's easy to understand and whether it contains neutral or unbiased language.

Then we use what's called a “bridge ranking algorithm”. For a post to have a Community Note, contributors who have historically disagreed on the helpfulness of Community Notes actually agree that this note is helpful, and that's when it ends up on the post.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you.

I'm going to go to either Dr. Hundley or Ms. Curran.

I first got into politics in 2009, and I ran against six other people municipally. I think that the reason I won was that I was early on Facebook. None of the candidates I ran against even had a Facebook page, and I had somewhere around a thousand friends on Facebook at the time.

In your opening comments—or maybe it was Dr. Hundley who said it; I can't remember—you talked about finding millions of fake accounts and deleting them. Is that a drop in the bucket? Are there billions of fake accounts? It seems to me that an aunt of mine has had about 700 fake accounts, and they're still there.

I've been an immigration lawyer, with my picture. I've been just about every possible profile out there, and that's just me. A lot of them are still there, and when we report them, they don't come down.

I agree that if you're able to take down millions of fake accounts, that's great, but do you need more capacity? Do you still see that as a problem? Are there billions out there?

[Rachel Curran]

I'll let Dr. Hundley speak to the specifics of this.

I will say that we have 40,000 people working globally on safety and security, and we have invested more than $50 billion in this since 2016. We are making considerable investments.