Public Safety committee  Yes. I think certainly they have a huge role to play. In fact, if you think about why we are talking about this now when we weren't talking about this 20 years ago, it's not that radical people didn't exist, but that social media companies and their algorithmic amplification en

Public Safety committee  Do you mean do legislators have a role to play in this? Absolutely. I think that's where the most important levers are, frankly. It's become crystal clear that these companies aren't going to act of their own volition, and the role of legislators around the world is what's going

Public Safety committee  Sure. There was also a question earlier about what is at stake here. I would say exactly what my co-founder and I outlined in that blog post. What we're seeing is the convergence of all of the different specific narratives that we've been tracking into this larger anti-democrat

Public Safety committee  Yes, absolutely, and I don't think it's a monolithic answer. Certainly financial considerations are part of it, although one of the lessons I've learned in the last few years of doing this work is that it's only a part of it. If you imagine the amount of money that GoFundMe was

Public Safety committee  Yes, it's a fantastic question. I will be honest: I'm not a lawyer so I don't know that I can give you a perfect answer. I don't know the details of how liability laws in Canada, say, would apply to platforms that are headquartered in the United States. I would say that Canad

Public Safety committee  It's an excellent question. Thank you. You said “carrot and stick”, and I think there are two elements that can help industry tackle this better. One is for better definitions. That's a place where industry has a lot of trouble. In the U.S., a lot of these groups, unfortunately

Public Safety committee  We tend to identify disinformation by a specific narrative rather than just a—

Public Safety committee  Thank you. That's a fantastic question. I feel like all of these phenomena are the result of these larger issues with the modern tech business model, one of audience attention capture and monetization. When you look at the sale of these goods, it's all about different strategie

Public Safety committee  That's a very interesting question. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about that, only because our organization tends to focus on the business model side of things, the tech industry change that we advocate for. As a general statement, I would say that politicians, like othe

Public Safety committee  Thank you for the question. It's a great question. We spend a lot of time at the GDI thinking through how we define the problem. I think so many of the mainstream or common definitions of disinformation lie in a sort of false dichotomy of true and false. People say that disinfo

Public Safety committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, members of the committee. Hello, and thank you for the opportunity to appear before you to discuss the funding mechanisms of ideologically motivated violent extremist groups. I am the co-founder and executive director of The Global Disinformation Index, a