Justice committee  In short, yes. There are people who do it for ideological reasons, because they want to encourage hate. There is now a growing cadre of people who do it just for profit. You see, this has never been about freedom of speech. This has been about social media platforms choosing certain kinds of speech to promote and other kinds of speech to not make as visible.

Justice committee  Yes. Look, white supremacists absolutely crucially understand that this is an opportunity for them to spread hatred against Muslims and Jews and to play them off against each other. I think what's been so dispiriting about the last nine months since October 7 has been seeing the way that platforms, algorithms and sometimes groups themselves have played the tune of white supremacists, who hate all of us, frankly.

Justice committee  There is some evidence that inoculation and education can have a limited effect, both in terms of how effective it is and how long it lasts, on reducing the transmissibility of hate. It gives people protection and a pre-existing set of understandings that help give them resilience against hate content and the lies that underpin hate, but that doesn't change the fact that they are being bombarded.

Justice committee  It's taking the lives of Jews, Muslims and others.

Justice committee  We did a study, when Elon Musk took over X, that went on the front page of The New York Times, which led to him lose $100 million—he claims—of advertising. I know this because Mr. Musk and the X Corporation then sued us at the Center for Countering Digital Hate for having done the research—for having had the temerity to do the research.

Justice committee  We're talking about social media platforms specifically, and what we're also talking about is what action they take when users report hate to them and that hate is banned under their rules. What we found was that when you report to them, you hold out your hand asking for help.

Justice committee  Social media, for better or for worse, has become the primary means by which we share information, by which we negotiate our values and by which we negotiate even the corpus of information that we call facts. It has become the main means by which we set our norms of attitude and behaviour.

Justice committee  Pass comprehensive transparency legislation that opens up the algorithms and opens up their content enforcement policies on how they take decisions, such that if content is taken down or left up, you know what rule they've applied and how they've assessed it. As well, create transparency on the advertising.

Justice committee  —and that all online hate has off-line consequences.

Justice committee  One, our research finds that social media algorithms promote and spread identity-based hate like Islamophobia. Two, it finds that financial incentives fuel the production of hateful content. Three, it finds that social media companies fail to act on hateful content when it's reported to them.

Justice committee  On one, algorithms and recommender systems are the functions that rank and organize content on social media platforms, and they present it in users' feeds based on how likely each individual is to engage and interact with it. That sounds innocent, but CCDH research has shown a strong relationship between these algorithms and the promotion of hateful content, because the design of these algorithms prioritizes attention and engagement, and incendiary content like identity-based hate is privileged [Technical difficulty—Editor] being broadcast to more people [Technical difficulty—Editor] than content about [Technical difficulty—Editor].

Justice committee  Madam Chair and members of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, thank you for the invitation to speak with you all today. My name is Imran Ahmed. I'm the founder and chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, CCDH. CCDH researches disinformation and hate speech on social media platforms.