First, on how it changed, during the Cold War in the 1990s everyone was alive to Soviet propaganda—maybe in the period of glasnost less so, but it was a real issue. There were real measures to counter it. There was no access to Russian television. There might have been some shortwave broadcasts that you could get at home, but not on your television set, radio and so forth.
When the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union broke up, we discarded those defences and decided we were all going to work together to build up free media and cover the world. CNN went to Moscow and we got rid of Radio Canada International. We didn't think those Cold War institutions were necessary.
Then the social media platforms came along, and I don't think there's been a greater gift given to malign actors, particularly to states but also non-state actors, to influence our publics than those platforms—especially X, which is totally unmoderated now, but the others as well.
You heard from some of them. They don't do enough. They don't know.... Things have to reach a certain threshold for them to act, so our defences are weaker. Social media is what we call an “attack surface”, which these malign actors—Russia, China, Iran and others—are using in ways we still don't fully understand, and then everything else supports that.
They will get an influencer whose video will go on all these platforms. They will throw stones into the millpond to see which one creates the most disruption, gets traction and goes viral, and then they use their assets to spike that up. They will try to target—“astroturf”, as Justin Ling put it—certain individuals because they don't like them.
What has been the impact? I think it has polarized our politics and destroyed the moderate middle that used to be the glue that held together our political debates—not destroyed it but weakened it.
I haven't mentioned them all, but look at the G7—not Canada but our colleagues and allies in the G7. Every one of those countries has a political party or parties that are co-opted by Russia to some extent. Look at Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland, Sahra Wagenknecht's party: She spouts Kremlin propaganda all the time, and the SPD quite often does so as well. I could go through all of them.
It's a disaster. That would not have happened without social media, without the investment of tens of billions of dollars from Russia and others, and if our defences were not so weak.