Public Safety Committee on April 28th, 2022

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

We can test that hypothesis. The gilets jaunes movement in France was directly driven by Facebook changing its algorithm after complaints that not enough voice was given to local views and local media. Facebook sort of cautioned about “be careful what you wish for”, and what we got was an overemphasis of local views, which then drove some of the local grievances and what people ended up seeing.

All of that is to say that you're absolutely correct. The algorithm that you have can have very real political consequences for the stability of our societies.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

Have you seen any countries or areas—

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

You have only five seconds.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

—that have done good measures to control this or to regulate this social media space?

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Perhaps we'll get a written answer—

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

Germany has legislation that requires a significant amount of material to be removed proactively by social media companies.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Thank you very much.

I'll turn the floor over to Ms. Larouche for six minutes.

Whenever you're ready, please proceed.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

I would also like to thank the three witnesses for their very interesting comments.

My first question is for Mr. Leuprecht.

Mr. Leuprecht, following the "freedom convoy" demonstrations in Ottawa, did the authorities misunderstand the power of dissenting ideologies, and the ability of the protesters to organize themselves and work towards their goals?

Do you believe we were given an accurate picture of the import of these groups on Canadian society?

How important is it to have a better idea of the circumstances surrounding these movements to be able to prevent more violent demonstrations and a rise in extremism?

Do you feel that it's important to commit to memory the convoy and what happened during the demonstrations in Ottawa?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

That, hon. member, is an excellent question.

I believe that the testimony given by the CSIS director to some extent corroborated the fact that for 20 years, the focus has been entirely on aspects of terrorism, violence and religious extremism. We lost sight of the fact that there is a wide range of extremist ideologies that are a challenge to our society.

I believe that CSIS indicated that the focus on different groups has been recalibrated. In our national security apparatus, we underestimated the extremist ideology that was on the rise in Canada alongside violent religious extremism.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

I'm trying to find concrete solutions to prepare for demonstrations of this kind. In your opening address, you also spoke of money laundering.

Can you briefly tell us a little more about this? To what extent does it provide such groups with the resources they need?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

The situation in Ottawa showed that our national security structure and apparatus are simply not aligned with the threats we are facing in the 21st century, ^xnot only in terms of issues surrounding extremist ideology, but also in terms of money laundering and other factors.

We need a more significant reform and critical overview of our national security apparatus. Rather than setting up a royal commission to conduct a broad investigation into what happened in Ottawa, controversial discussions are being avoided. There does not appear to be any interest in reforming our system, even though what happened in Ottawa was one of the most serious challenges faced by our national security system in recent decades .

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

All right. Thank you very much, Mr. Leuprecht.

My next question is for Ms. Inkpen.

In connection with your comments about learning from what happened during the "freedom" trucker convoy events, you said that it would be essential to be more alert to obtain a better overview of the situation and to prevent future incidents. You mentioned monitoring accounts and possibly sending out warnings.

Can you tell us a little more about what might have been done and what we have learned in order to do a better job of preventing other similar events?

[Dr. Diana Inkpen]

We could separate out messages that could be described as extremist from other messages, while measuring the intensity of the emotions that appear to be contained in them. If certain messages appeared to be too extreme, they could be checked manually. Because a single person couldn't possibly read them all, it could be helpful to focus only on the most problematic of the messages.

Thank you.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

So having a better picture of who is writing the messages and of the type of radicalization could be helpful to us.

I want to return to an issue that was mentioned earlier about algorithms and social networks. I'd like to talk about something that was in the news recently, about the purchase of Twitter by Mr. Musk, who suggested making the Twitter algorithm public.

How, in your opinion, would having the Twitter algorithm in open source code affect the spread of hate content?

Is this something that you have investigated? Have you had an opportunity to look into it?

[Dr. Diana Inkpen]

I'll answer in English.

Open source is a good idea. It depends on what kind of algorithm. It's important to know what the algorithm is. If it's a machine-learning algorithm, it has training data. Training data won't be made open source, because it's huge and it's complicated.

It's a good idea to have it open source, but more than that, you need to have some idea of what the algorithms are doing to explain the decisions. You need to have more emphasis on explainable algorithms, not only how they work and what they are but also what is learned. The model itself could be inspected. Of course, only specialists would be able to understand it, but still, you need to be as transparent as possible about the kinds of algorithms used.

It's a tough question, open source. Companies don't always like that, because they want to make money off of those algorithms. There's a balance here.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Thank you very much.

Mr. MacGregor, I will turn to you for the last block of questions for this panel.

Whenever you're ready, sir, the floor is yours.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Dr. Celestini, I'd like to start with you. Thank you for your testimony on conspiracy theories and all of your research on that. I can very much relate. I think every member of Parliament can.

To give you an example, in previous years I've tried to confront the conspiracy theory of chemtrails. You try your best to provide factual information to people who bring up these conspiracy theories. The problem is that we know that emotionally provocative content that reinforces what someone already believes almost always seems to win out against factual information. I was trying my best to provide all of the facts, even with links to scientific papers on what causes contrails and why they exist in certain atmospheric conditions, but that just would not convince people.

Do you have any thoughts on that? How do we get back to a place in Canada where factual information can have a hope of going over and winning when it's against emotionally provocative content? Do you have any thoughts on that and on what strategies might be able to work?

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Clerk, we were having technical difficulties before. Are we still?

Dr. Celestini is definitely frozen.

What other witnesses want to take a crack at that?

Go ahead, Mr. MacGregor.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

If she comes back on, maybe the clerk can give me a signal.

Dr. Inkpen, I'll go to you. It's sort of related to the same subject. When COVID-19 first appeared back in March 2020 and everything was starting to go into lockdown, that's when we started to see a lot misinformation spread about vaccines and what was happening. I did notice that large social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, whenever there was a subject or a posting on COVID-19, would put a disclaimer that would link you to the Public Health Agency of Canada. People weren't necessarily seeing a post censored, but they were also seeing a link to where you could go to get verifiable, factual and scientific-backed information.

Do you think it's possible for social media companies to do something similar when we're talking about ideologically motivated extremism? When it comes to anti-government conspiracy theory stuff, should social media companies be using the same thing? Is that quite easy for them to do?

[Dr. Diana Inkpen]

It's a good question.

I do think social media have research groups that can develop such tools, and they could have this warning. I think it's okay to show messages and warn people to pay attention.

It could be flagged with a certain degree of confidence, and maybe another thing they could add is whether people agree or not: “Thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Do you agree with this?” Maybe having people's opinions: “This seems like fake or disinformation.” People agree or not. Maybe have users label that. Some of them might not be saying the truth, but still the number of users who vote that this is correct or not....

There are ways. It is difficult, but there are ways. I think they could do more.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you for that.

Dr. Leuprecht, I'll turn to you for my next question.

I appreciate your imploring our community to differentiate between ideologically motivated violent extremism and extremist violence.

We had testimony from the Ottawa Police Service. Before our committee, Interim Chief Bell said that there were documented hate crimes and there were many examples where residents of Ottawa, whether they were workers or owners of small businesses, were subjected to a lot of abuse. Of course, violence is a subjective term. What one person may not find violent, another person most definitely will.

You've been quite scathing in how all levels of government failed in their response to the illegal occupation of Ottawa, and I believe you called for a royal commission.

Could you maybe expand, related to the subject matter, on what we're dealing with? What would you like to see that royal commission cover in specific reference to what our subject matter before this committee is right now?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

Mr. MacGregor, the fundamental failure in Ottawa during the illegal occupation was an absence of the rule of law in a democratic G7 country for the better part of three weeks. That is absolutely inexcusable. The state was absent. We were not able to enforce the legislation that we have on incitement, hate crimes, sedition, on whatever else you might want to include here. I think when we have that fundamental of a failure of the fundamental....

The first obligation of the modern state to its citizens is the safety and security of all citizens. When the state cannot provide for that, then we need to understand what happened. Police services acts have a clear measure of that: adequate and effective policing. Adequate and effective policing means meeting the needs, values and expectations of citizens.

Mr. MacGregor, you ask Canadians whether the policing that we saw in Ottawa, and the response by the state, was adequate and effective. If the answer to that by a majority of Canadians is no, then I think we have good grounds for a royal commission to understand what happened to make sure we never have a recurrence of that sort of situation.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Thank you.

Colleagues, that takes us to the end of our allotted time. I want to thank the witnesses for their patience and for adjusting to the changing schedule of Parliament, and thank colleagues for doing the same thing.

It was a fascinating couple of hours. I'd like to thank everybody for their contributions.

I wish everybody a happy and pleasurable weekend. This meeting is adjourned.