Procedure and House Affairs committee  That's a great question. I think it's the key question. There's concern that this group is growing and that the online information ecosystem is making it worse. Conspiratorial beliefs have always existed. In some ways we are focusing new attention on a thing that has always exi

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'm sorry.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It's a great question. There are a few things. We have been tracking trust in mainstream media as well as in social media for the last four years. The good news is that most of our mainstream media, like CBC, The Globe and Mail, CTV and Global News, are highly trusted institutio

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That's a really good question. We did a study two years ago, specifically around messaging apps. We dug into WeChat, in particular. Private messaging apps tend to be a key vehicle for diaspora communities. For example, WhatsApp is heavily used in the South Asian community in Ca

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, absolutely. A feature that used to be on Twitter, whereby you could see the location of the tweet, was removed recently with the Twitter ownership change, which has been a slight setback in that kind of transparency that you described. Whether it's domestic or foreign is

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Absolutely. In fact, as one example, we find that French Canadians are less likely to believe in misinformation. It's been proposed that it is in part because in the English language media ecosystem, disinformation flows up principally from the United States to Canada, so the Fre

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That's a tricky question. I want to draw a distinction between the cut and thrust of domestic political actors who talk to their constituents and foreign disinformation. The appropriate response to those things, I think, is understandably different. I agree with the general prem

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'll start with your first question. In general, the use of messaging apps for news, things like WhatsApp or WeChat.... When people say they use that as a source of news, they are more likely to then also believe in misinformation. It is in the scheme of these types of media, wh

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Absolutely. I think, in general, automated content or bot accounts—which are sometimes called “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” by some of the big platforms—have been tactics used by foreign governments and state actors for quite a number of years. It's a form of automation. Th

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you, Madam Chair, for the invitation to address the committee today. My name is Sam Andrey. I am the managing director of The Dais, a policy and leadership institute at Toronto Metropolitan University, where we work to advance public policy solutions for the responsible g