Evidence of meeting #29 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was online.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Arielle Kayabaga Liberal London West, ON
I want to ask the following: Are you aware of citizens' assemblies? What do you think of them? Could you just share, from your perspective, what you think of citizens' assemblies?
Volunteer, Vote16 Canada
I would need to have more information. I'm not particularly educated on them. I'm sorry about that.
Liberal
Arielle Kayabaga Liberal London West, ON
No worries, I'll go to another question.
What role do you think schools and student organizations can play in building civic awareness and participation?
Volunteer, Vote16 Canada
They play a major role. A good example is me right now. I would not be sitting here answering your questions if not for the student organizations I have had the chance to participate in. I'm in my student council. I'm a student trustee. All these experiences really cultivated a civic awareness and an interest in politics. They're extremely important.
From an education perspective, I learned so much more about politics through my civics class in grade 10, but I'm also taking politics now. Education and schools play a major role. They're so important for cultivating civic awareness with youth.
Liberal
Arielle Kayabaga Liberal London West, ON
I couldn't agree more. I had a similar journey. I started on student council, and today I'm a member of Parliament. I hope to see you take up a seat in the House of Commons one day.
Madame Broder, can you talk to us about your “Canada is Talking” campaign and how it tries to bring people together and reduce polarization online?
Chief Executive Officer, Digital Public Square
Absolutely. With the support of the Canada centre within Public Safety Canada, we were working on a program that was trying to counter polarization on two topics—polarization between political left and right in Canada in the last year and polarization about the topic of Israel-Gaza, specifically in Canada. Those were two easy topics, as you can imagine.
As part of the effort to deal with political polarization, we looked specifically at trying to engage Canadians online. Following the survey, to go back to some of the survey data I quoted, we saw the gap between perceived polarization and some positions that most Canadians held. I believe that in the engagement, we used protection of minority rights. Working with social psychologists at the University of Ottawa, we developed a digital intervention.
The idea there is exactly what I mentioned before. It's to get people to engage with this information in a thoughtful way, when nobody else is watching. You can engage with it in the privacy of your phone. We tried to demonstrate the gap between perception and reality in a very tactile, fun and engaging way. We had about 10,000 people at large engaged with it. This was not a significant enough number. I wish we'd had more time to get more people to engage with it, but that follows the idea I presented before of trying to create positive interventions in digital spaces.
Liberal
Arielle Kayabaga Liberal London West, ON
In the pre-election phase, when trust in the electoral process increased from 22% to 60% in completing one module, why do you think that was?
Chief Executive Officer, Digital Public Square
I would not attribute it to a two-minute intervention. We're not going to fix trust in the electoral process with a two-minute online intervention. What we try to do is illuminate ideas. In this context, first of all, we try to meet people where they are and not delegitimize their position. You have low trust? We understand. I'm not going to tell you not to have low trust and that you should trust.
We try to approach these ideas with understanding and empathy around the causes of the low trust. We try to share data in a way that's easy to consume.
Liberal
Arielle Kayabaga Liberal London West, ON
How do we get more people off their screens and connected in face-to-face engagement?
Chief Executive Officer, Digital Public Square
First of all, I want to say that I think the idea should be “also”. It should be both. They should not be mutually exclusive. Our lives are connected, digitally and in person. Ideally, we can reach people at scale with shorter interventions online. In the best case, we can then transition them into actual rooms for those who are interested. There are some people who will never get in a room. Then there are people like me, who will always get in a room. We need to—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Chris Bittle
I will have to interject.
We now go to Ms. Normandin for three minutes.
Bloc
Christine Normandin Bloc Saint-Jean, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My question is for Ms. Ghai Bajaj, but Ms. Broder may wish to answer as well.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on how to effectively regulate social media, taking into account the need to balance regulations and privacy. Data are often encrypted to protect users' privacy.
Shouldn't we focus on the platforms' own commitments to address hate speech? In many cases, they commit to providing users with a healthy space, but they don't honour their commitments. Should we tackle the issue from that angle, to make sure that the content posted to digital platforms and social media sites is not harmful?
Assistant Professor, Department of Defence Studies, Canadian Forces College, As an Individual
My thinking around this has shifted over the years. I guess I've become increasingly skeptical about the platforms' willingness to do the right thing and relying on their goodwill. Instead, I've shifted my thinking to these bottom-up responses.
If we can also disincentivize platform behaviour, through what individual users as a collective are demanding of their digital spaces, and if we do the groundwork of engaging civil society organizations, which are those trusted intermediaries to help promote greater levels of digital, AI, media and information literacy, we can have informed users engaging with these platforms.
It's almost like the way we can exert power as consumers. We can adopt some of these individual-level behaviours in the digital spaces. This can incentivize certain things for the platforms but also disincentivize certain kinds of algorithmic promotion, search engine optimization and the kinds of behaviours that may sometimes promote harmful online content.
Liberal
Conservative
Grant Jackson Conservative Brandon—Souris, MB
Thank you to the witnesses for your testimony today. It's been very interesting.
Perhaps, to start with you, Ms. Broder, we're talking a lot about civic resilience, and it often gets tied to the digital space. I'm curious; my question is, are you familiar with the work of the American author Jonathan Haidt and a book called The Anxious Generation? This is a work by a social psychologist with a Ph.D. He teaches at New York University right now. His work has just been shared with me.
His whole thesis in the book, if you have a chance to read it, is basically that the generation born after 1995, so starting in 1996 and onward, all—and I count myself in that, because I was born in 1997—got social media right when we were going into the high school era. This had a dramatic effect on puberty and brain growth. Haidt has empirical evidence in his book to show that, as a result, levels of anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide dramatically increased from 2010 to 2015, which were exactly the years when I was in high school. It has continued to get worse since.
I'm curious to know whether you have a comment. It's not a problem if you haven't read the book, but I'm wondering whether you've looked at the generational impact that access to social media, at such a young age, has had on brain development, and where that's leading my generation and all the ones that are coming after mine, in terms of civic resilience.
Chief Executive Officer, Digital Public Square
Thank you for that. I will pick up the book.
I definitely have an opinion, and this is also very evident throughout our work. I can't speak to brain development and exactly what happened, but there are many correlations that we see.
In the same survey that I'm speaking of, younger people were reporting higher rates of feelings of social alienation. There is self-reported lower mental health. I'm not part of that generation, as I came before, but I absolutely think that for the generation that grew up in this world, in which the main way that they engaged with the world was through online spaces, this has had a huge impact on them. The optimist in me wants to say we're going to figure this out over the next few years so that future generations are not, perhaps, going to carry that burden as much as this generation.
I'm fascinated by this space because what we are living and seeing is an interplay between our human tendencies—our most natural human tendencies toward community and safety—and online spaces incentivizing things that are not good for us. We thought they were going to be good for us. It was supposed to help us connect but, in fact, it's helping us....
In our data, young people, the ones who are reporting that they are more online and that they are spending, I believe, over a certain number of hours online, are also the ones who were most likely to say they feel the most disconnected. How is it that we created social media, and the effect of it is disconnection? We have to fix this system.
Conservative
Grant Jackson Conservative Brandon—Souris, MB
Yes, I think of what some of the latest statistics show. Many young people are reporting that the number of hours they spend per week on social media is equivalent to having a part-time job, and for many it's even higher than that.
I appreciate that. This is something we're grappling with as part of civic resilience, but I think it's a broader conversation that's going on. You've seen Australia now taking steps to remove social media for people under a certain age. These discussions are important for the civic resilience of future generations, which are going to be the leaders of this country.
I wonder, Dr. Bajaj, whether you have a comment on that topic as well.
Assistant Professor, Department of Defence Studies, Canadian Forces College, As an Individual
I'd like to emphasize that in our research, and in our focus groups, we often found that the younger users, who were all adult ages—I should add that disclaimer, 18 plus—were also active digital participants. What I mean by this is that they often displayed a high level of digital agency. They understood how the flow of information worked in these digital spaces. In chat groups in which there were older demographics, younger users would often volunteer for the function of correcting incorrect and inaccurate content; take the extra step of having an off-line conversation with, perhaps, a senior family member; negotiate tricky cultural dynamics by walking the fine line of being respectful to a senior but correcting the poor-quality information they were sharing; and flag in a group that this kind of content is inflammatory and shouldn't be shared.
We should absolutely recognize the kinds of harms that digital spaces create for these individual users but, for younger populations, also give them some credit.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Chris Bittle
I'm going to have to interrupt you there. I apologize.
Perhaps you'll have another opportunity with our next questioner.
Mrs. Brière, you may go ahead for five minutes.
Liberal
Élisabeth Brière Liberal Sherbrooke, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for being with us.
Ms. Banka, I commend you for your opening remarks and your commitment.
The subject of citizens' assemblies was raised earlier. I know you said you weren't very comfortable discussing the issue, but I do want to come back to it. I'd like to know how young people get together. How can we bring them together to discuss politics and civic engagement?
Volunteer, Vote16 Canada
Thank you for your question.
As far as citizens' assemblies are concerned, I'm going to make sure I do some more research. It's a very interesting area.
I think there are two options. We talked about student organizations earlier. I think they're a great way to reach out to young people. Events could be put on with youth organizations and schools, for instance. I think that's a very easy way of reaching out to students.
We just talked about social media and the harmful effects. When used properly, social media platforms are a very good tool for sharing information.
Speaking from my personal experience, I have a lot of friends who use Instagram to shine a light on causes or challenges in Canada or other countries. I think social media can help people find those opportunities. In my case, I found a lot of opportunities online.
In short, using social media and schools or student organizations are two very good ways to connect with students.
Liberal
Élisabeth Brière Liberal Sherbrooke, QC
Thank you very much.
Professor Ghai Bajaj, we've talked a lot about foreign influence and the threats we all face.
Could you talk more about the impact those various threats have? What are Canada's vulnerabilities, and how can we be better equipped?
Assistant Professor, Department of Defence Studies, Canadian Forces College, As an Individual
I often refer to the information space as being asymmetrical in nature in terms of information threats by foreign adversaries. The asymmetry arrives from a kind of authoritarian advantage that our adversaries often have, in the sense that they often have barriers—whether it's the great firewall in China or closed access and Internet restrictions in countries such as Iran and Russia. They create these physical barriers.
In comparison, the information environments of Liberal democracies are open. By virtue of our existence, we believe in freedom of expression, the right to information and the free flow and exchange of information. This is part of democratic discourse. It also creates a vulnerability for us.
This is also why, if we only chase technological solutions or legal regulatory frameworks, we will always be a step behind the threat. It is why, in our work, we often argue that the best defence is a strong offence. It is why I introduced the idea of civil society and civic resilience as a force multiplier. Because our societies are open, and because they are diverse, we almost have to create multi-level stopgaps for these information threats.
At the strongest level is the civic resilience. This is the most durable. This makes it harder for poor information, influence campaigns and FIMI activities to stick and gain traction in our democratic societies.
Liberal
Élisabeth Brière Liberal Sherbrooke, QC
Thank you so much.
Madame Broder, would you like to add something to that?