Public Safety Committee on Oct. 10th, 2024

[Rachel Curran]

I'm sorry. I can clarify. It's not 90 individuals. It's 90 different organizations doing fact-checking in more than 60 languages. For instance, in Canada, we have Agence France-Presse. We have had The Canadian Press previously doing fact-checking in Canada as well.

It's more than 90 organizations. That's not—

[Iqwinder Gaheer, Liberal, Mississauga—Malton, ON]

I'm sorry. I have very limited time.

Could you provide the committee with the number of individuals—not organizations but individuals—who are checking facts? It might be multiple individuals per organization.

The other thing I want to focus on is that your organization made $134 billion last year. That was up from $119 billion the year before. You just told the committee that you'd rather save Meta—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Mr. Gaheer, I have to cut you off. I'm sorry.

[Iqwinder Gaheer, Liberal, Mississauga—Malton, ON]

Mr. Chair, I need about 30 more seconds to make the point.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Mr. Fortin, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. de Eyre, TikTok has broadcast a lot of advertisements produced by Tenet Media, a chain that has become well known thanks to your platform. How much money has Tenet Media earned from ads posted to TikTok? Do you have a number you can give us?

[Steve de Eyre]

I don't have a figure on that and don't know whether they were advertising. I'm happy to follow up with you and look into that. As I mentioned in my opening statement, we did remove the Tenet Media account from TikTok following the U.S. Department of Justice allegations.

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Does TikTok conduct its own investigations before paying money to an organization, whatever it might be? You're telling me that the United States sounded the alarm, and TikTok closed Tenet Media's account.

[Steve de Eyre]

Perhaps I can let Justin talk a bit about how we investigate covert influence on the platform.

[Justin Erlich]

Thanks, Steve.

Thanks for the question. It's a topic we feel we invest a lot in.

We have several dedicated teams that work in this area, and they are always proactively seeking to detect and remove networks and deceptive accounts, like Tenet Media.

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Mr. Erlich, I only have a few seconds left.

If you conduct those investigations, how do you explain why you needed the United States to raise a red flag before TikTok closed Tenet Media's account? You didn't discover it on your own.

[Justin Erlich]

I would certainly not say that's the case. We have many internal investigations going on, and we take action without external intelligence. We also leverage multiple sources of external intelligence, both with our vendors and with third parties, and leverage government investigations.

As soon as we learned of the DOJ investigation, we launched a further exploration into Tenet Media, as we can't directly adopt the conclusion of any government; we need to explore our own on-platform evidence. Once we identified that, we promptly took action and removed both Tenet Media and its founder—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Thank you.

[Justin Erlich]

—for violation of deceptive actor policies and those on paid political promotion, both of which are clear violations of our community guidelines.

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Erlich.

Thanks as well to all the other witnesses.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Mr. Boulerice, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to go to the representatives of the three companies here present.

I'll be completely honest with you: I don't think the answers I got to my previous questions were very satisfying. I asked you what else you were going to do to improve the situation, and you mainly answered by telling me about what you're already doing. That wasn't the answer I was looking for.

I'd like to talk to you about something else. We've discussed manipulation, misinformation and disinformation, but then there's the whole phenomenon of echo chambers, where people keep repeating to each other the same, at times false, remarks, which can lead to the radicalization of certain individuals. You get the impression that the algorithms used promote the process, probably because they foster more interaction among people, which is good for business. However, we can see on the ground that this radicalizes people who are completely mistaken about science, for example, or other topics. These echo chambers make public debate a much more difficult proposition.

I'd like to hear your comments about that.

[Steve de Eyre]

For TikTok, I can let Justin talk about how we address unverified information.

[Justin Erlich]

Thanks, Steve.

We take the information integrity ecosystem very seriously. I've spoken to you before about some of our policies for what we remove, but we also embrace media literacy and labelling. For content that we don't fully remove off the platform but that may be unverified or inconclusive, we will provide a label so that the user has a better sense of the full context. We won't amplify it on the feed to make sure that we are restricting the reach of unverified accounts.

More generally, we also offer additional content, such as a STEM feed in some markets. We're rolling it out to help lift up content that we consider nutritious or informative.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Do the YouTube or Meta representatives want to speak to this?

[Lindsay Doyle]

I'm happy to weigh in here.

As it relates to YouTube, we take an approach that's similar to others'. Specifically for us, our recommendation systems raise authoritative and high-quality information and reduce the spread of low-quality information. We view our recommendation systems as one of our most effective lines of defence in combatting misinformation and preventing exactly the spread that you've referenced. Also, removing content at the source is really critical to making sure we stop the spread. That's obviously where our community guidelines come into place, as well as the content moderation policies that we do at scale.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Thank you, Mr. Boulerice.

That brings this panel to a close.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Mr. Chair....

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Go ahead, Ms. Damoff.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I have a suggestion that I hope the committee will agree with. It's based on the testimony we heard today, in particular Ms. Curran's comments about not sharing Canadian news. Tenet is still being shared on Facebook via Rumble, and I find it really disturbing that Tenet is still getting disinformation out. The Russian disinformation is still getting to Canadians.

I'd like to—