Canadian Heritage committee  When I think about this, I think about classical social movement theory, where people are only going to be motivated to do something in this world if they feel that there is outrage and they hope for change. Often what we see online with rage baiting is this call to outrage that,

Canadian Heritage committee  I had been researching Facebook for a very long time, and YouTube as well. When it comes to the misogynistic hashtags, it's not just that someone is using a hashtag. What a hashtag represents is a content tag that allows the algorithms to connect different pieces of content with

Canadian Heritage committee  I think it's really important that we get these bills passed. Senator Ed Markey lives in my hometown, so I'm happy to be aligned in that way. What's concerning about transparency and algorithms isn't just that they can dump a bunch of code and you can parse it for years, but rea

Canadian Heritage committee  I have been researching YouTube for a decade now.

Canadian Heritage committee  I began my research on the Internet, networks and social movements looking at the Occupy movement primarily. As my attention turned to white supremacist groups online, I was able to use the same methods I used to look at online social movements in order to think about the formati

Canadian Heritage committee  I think it's really important that we hold these companies to account and make sure they understand that the consequences of deploying technology don't just come with the PR of innovation, but that the public and government are going to look deeply at these algorithms or malgorit

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you.

Canadian Heritage committee  Wow. I'm just taking it all in here. I'm taking a moment to reflect on Jaden and Molly. I'm so sorry for what has happened to them. If we think back 15 or so years to some of the problems we had with early social media, they revolved around what we now call cyber-bullying, or on

Canadian Heritage committee  Was that addressed to me? I'm sorry. I'm having trouble with the interpretation.

Canadian Heritage committee  In terms of the profitability of these platforms, they are in the fastest-growing industry. Once Facebook and others figured out that you could monetize the residue or data trails of users, they turned them into enormous profits. They have also developed strategies to undermine d

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you so much for the question. I think it needs to be investigated across the board. It's not just the case that Facebook is funding research. They are also providing contracts to researchers, not just at universities but also in civil society. It's an attempt to make acade

Canadian Heritage committee  They're already behaving like nation-states in their negotiations on Bill C-18. If you're a business that services the public interest and you understand that your role in society, especially for Facebook, is to share information with the world, then you have a public obligation

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you so much for being here and thank you for the invitation to testify at this hearing. I'm Dr. Joan Donovan, and I've spent my career studying harmful online campaigns, including misinformation, disinformation and media manipulation. I'm an assistant professor at Boston U