Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to both witnesses for joining us today.
Professor Wark, I'd like to start with you.
I appreciate your opening remarks about the rapid-response mechanism, and I guess it's in the name. It's a response; it's after the fact. I'm always trying to look for more proactive ways that we can effectively deal with this issue. You may have heard my earlier interventions with Mr. Scott from Reset Tech, just lamenting the fact that so much of our public discourse today is held on platforms that are controlled by a handful of billionaires whose main motive, of course, is to enrich themselves. We can see the way their social media platforms operate.
I think Mr. Scott said that if we were back at the height of the Cold War in the mid-1980s and a number of Canadian media companies were running an hour's worth of Kremlin propaganda, they'd be hauled before a committee right away, and action would be taken.
I guess from your perspective we've talked about how we can confront the power that these social media companies wield. I know it's difficult from a Canadian perspective because they're largely based in California and in Silicon Valley, and they are subject to U.S. laws. However, doing nothing is not an answer. We have already seen the corrosive effects that their platforms are having on what people in Canada are thinking about and the effect it's having on our democratic norms.
Do you have any thoughts that you can share with the committee on how we proactively deal with the platforms that are hosting a lot of this misinformation and disinformation that is, in some ways, directly linked to what Russia is trying to do with its strategic objectives?