Thank you, Mr. Chair.
A few years ago, a few [Technical difficulty—Editor] in United States and elsewhere were de-platformed from mainstream social media, like Facebook and Twitter, including former President Trump and many conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and so on. This actually led to what they call a “migration” to new, alternative outlets, including the ones you mentioned, Telegram, Discord, and a few other ones. Some of them unfortunately are even based in Canada. What we have today is platforms that are dominated by conspiracy theories and disinformation.
In our study about the convoy protest, we found that Twitter contained very few conspiracies in relation to the protest and that the dominant discourses or conspiracies were actually elsewhere, specifically on Telegram.
The major problem I am seeing is that the big search engines like Google have indexed Telegram. When I search for a message posted by Alex Jones on Telegram, I can't actually find it. I think that's the major problem. I do not think we can moderate these small platforms because it's like playing whack-a-mole—if you try to silence one of them, four others will emerge, because this is a thriving business for them. They are actually profiting by probably billions of dollars, not millions.
I don't think there is a way to completely stop these smaller social media platforms. What we can do is pressure the big search engines to index these sites less so that searching for a specific comment will be hard.