Information & Ethics committee  It seems like it will cost a whole lot of companies a whole lot of money and will be problematic for citizens if that is the case, but I don't know the specific details.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, I think that the ability to game algorithms is a concern when we are thinking, okay, let's create an algorithm to solve this problem and then just make it available for everyone to see. I think that kind of transparency is important, but we also need to have things like publ

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. I think there are two important pieces to this. One is when I was saying we should register bots, I meant specifically ones that are used to contact voters in the same way the voter contact registry isn't where you have to register every kind of communication a political pa

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. This is where it gets a little tricky. If Twitter, for example, wanted to eliminate all automation on their account immediately, they could, but that wouldn't be very useful writ large, because people benefit a lot from certain kinds of bots. Think of all the media organiz

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. In the work that Fenwick McKelvey and I have been doing on political bots, we identified these amplifiers and these dampeners as the two types of bots that are most frequently used to impact the spread of political information in a way that could be negative. One of those

Information & Ethics committee  Hello. Thank you for inviting me to speak today. I am an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa. I completed my doctoral work at the University of Oxford. My research focuses on political communication in a digital media environment. I've examined issues such as the pol

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think it's important to recognize that there are things that are kind of on the periphery. Is this appropriate or not? Is this legal or not? Then there are things that are very clearly not appropriate and not legal. I think the question of what is socially acceptable or moral

Procedure and House Affairs committee  People care, but they're constantly having to trade their own data for the things that they need. In terms of political parties being able to make valuable use of this data, I think that's true. I think there's a lot of value to political parties being able to understand the elec

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It can be suppression, or intentionally excluding certain voters who are maybe less likely to vote for you, so not worth your time.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  One of the problems is that we don't have strong, consistent data in Canada about Canadian Internet use because the StatsCan survey was cut. From other countries that are similar, we know that—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  There's going to be a new round of it, I believe, next year. I'm not sure. You'll have to check with StatsCan. It's unclear how much detail—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Whether or not they're equivalent in terms of their influence on people—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Right. In terms of advertising online, they should. It should be made technically possible through the platform's interface to say when an advertisement has been bought by a campaign, and to make it clear why you're being sent that message and who has decided to target it at you.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The idea of absolute security with any technology is not one that we are ever going to reach but getting closer is the best we can do. I think that because of the public pressure Facebook has been facing, they are taking steps, but not because of Canadian laws. At the end of the