It's a great question.
You don't have to take my word for it. Justice Hogue, in the long and thoughtful study she did, identified the information ecosystem as the primary threat to Canadian democracy, and that's because adversarial states are leaning into it.
However, the original sin is the business model of the platforms. They're commercializing and harvesting intention. They're using sophisticated behavioural targeting ads to persuade you. These are persuasion machines, and they're not broken. This is the way they were designed. This is the way they were built. We have individualized ad cocktails that are being served up, and this is breaking people's attention spans. It's actually making us generally stupider.
This is the thing. This is all set to get way worse. The trend lines don't look good, so intervene where you can. The problem we're going to bump into is large incumbent players with lots of dough and super sophisticated lobbyists thinking everything is just fine. They don't care about any of the stuff I just said.
Add to that the fact that we still have reptilian brains, so we're easy to persuade. Add to that the fact that we have charter protections. Freedom of expression is a real thing, so people are allowed to say stuff, and you also have the right to be wrong. It's a cacophony of issues.
I can't settle this in 45 seconds, because it's super complicated, but as a starting point for this committee, if we can get this registry thing sorted, it's one thing you can tick off your list that will be helpful.