Front Burner - An election in a polluted media environment

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

With trust in journalism eroding, disinformation — once fringe — is now mainstream. Much of it is spreading on social media.Today’s guest today says the online media environment in Canada is more fragile and vulnerable to manipulation than ever before. A dangerous situation at the best of times — even more so during an election.Taylor Owen is a professor at McGill University, the Chair in Media, Ethics and Communication, the founding Director of The Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy and principal investigator at the Media Ecosystem Observatory.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Well, here we go. Canadians will head to the polls just over a month from now on April 28th. Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has been on the job for just 10 days now, asked the governor general Sunday to dissolve Parliament. She obliged. It's time for all of us to come together and be strong.

So I'm asking for your vote so we can be Canada strong. We are, of course, going to bring you lots and lots of stories over the next month about the race, about the candidates and the parties and what they're promising. Stay tuned tomorrow for example, we're going to discuss Pierre Poliev's Trump problem. For today though, we wanted to kick things off by zooming out and talking about an issue that will loom large over this election. Canada's online media environment and its growing vulnerability to misinformation and disinformation. A dangerous situation for our democracy at the best of times, not

to mention during an election. My guest today is Taylor Owen. Taylor is the director of the Center for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill. He's also the principal investigator at the Media Ecosystem Observatory, which will be monitoring the election. I actually saw Taylor recently give a talk on this topic during a conference that his center put on, and I immediately thought that this was something that we needed to put on the show. Here's our conversation. Taylor, hey. Hi. Nice to see you. It's great to see you too. Thanks so much for coming on. So, election incoming here. This is a time where people are obviously going to be going online and consuming a lot

of information to try and get a sense of how they want to cast their vote. So, disinformation, misinformation is a dangerous weapon here. Let's start this conversation with a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little to try and get a sense of how they want to cast their vote. So, disinformation, misinformation,

is a dangerous weapon here. Let's start this conversation by reminiscing about the good old days, I guess. Yeah. Way back when? Way back in 2019. Yeah. Two elections ago, your research found Canada's media ecosystem was pretty strong, pretty resilient. And how so? Why?

Yeah, it's funny. You know, we started studying the information ecosystem in 2019, 2018, 19 in Canada. Large, lose your reaction to what happened in the US in 2016, where we saw a ton of foreign interference and manipulation in the information ecosystem and a real disruption of that election. So we tried to look at the same thing here, really worried that in 2019, manipulation in the information ecosystem and a real disruption of that election. So we tried to look at the same thing here, really worried that in 2019 we would face something really similar to what happened in the US. But we actually didn't really find that. There were certainly cases of bad actors and bad information circulating through the Canadian internet and media ecosystem. But we actually found a lot of resilience

and not a lot of polarization, for example, that we were expecting to see, not a ton of foreign interference. And most critically, we found that the trust that Canadians had in journalism and traditional journalism institutions and the levels with which they consumed it was just totally different than

the US. And that we found played a moderating effect on some of these bad things that were happening online. Okay. So let us talk about what has changed and spoiler alert, it's not good, right? It's not all positive. Things have gotten worse. And let's start with that journalism piece because your research has now shown a major collapse in trust for journalism. How bad is it?

I mean, it's getting close to where it is in the US, which is to say pretty bad. And it's not just journalism. We're becoming more polarized. There's more toxic and hostile and manipulative information in our ecosystem and all of that. But trust levels in 2019 for the major media outlets, right, like the Toronto Star, the Globe Mail, the CBC, Global, the National Post, were really high all the way across the political spectrum. So it wasn't an ideological thing. It was pretty consistent.

Those have all cratered. So nobody or very few groups have the levels of trust they used to. And we're just moving to different kinds of information consumption. We're not going to the traditional journalism outlets anymore for our news. And those two things have made a major difference. But the other huge thing that's changed is that Metta turned off news. We begin with Metta's decision to end news access for Canadians on Facebook and Instagram. That's in response to the passing of the Online News Act. That new

law requires tech giants to pay news outlets for their content shared on their platforms. And so at the same time as our trust and our consumption was already cratering, the main source of news links in Canada or access to news in Canada went away. And that led, we found, to a loss of 11 million views of journalism a day in Canada. Wow. Which is pretty remarkable. I mean, that's 11 million times that people

would come across reliable information in their feeds and they no longer are. I see in your research you found that people actually didn't even notice this loss of 11 million daily views. Yeah. So. Wow.

I mean, that's wow to us too, right? So we study the information ecosystem. Actually, it's all through the Media Ecosystem Observatory. And we also survey people, right, regularly to find out what the effects of changes in that ecosystem are. And one of the things we expected to hear is that people noticed that 11 million views of journalism were gone from their Instagram and Facebook feeds, and they hadn't. And it wasn't just for general population, it was for people who said they get their

journalism from Facebook and Instagram. The majority of the people who say they get their journalism from Instagram and Facebook didn't notice that it was gone. Oh, and just what would have filled that void? That's the right question, I think. And in part, it is, I think, people conflating journalism and news with information about the world around them. And I think one thing that's happened is influencers and friends and family and individual voices have

provided that function instead of journalistic institutions. And so that's one big switch. The other is that there actually is still some journalism circulating. It's just happening through screenshots. So people are finding ways of circumventing the platform block of links, but that just happening through screenshots. So people are finding ways of circumventing the platform block of links.

Right, right. But that's in the margins. I think the bigger thing is that people in journalism and like to think that people equate news with journalism. But I just don't think they do. I think increasingly they see other actors as providing them with vehicles to information about the world instead of journalism.

And we have to ask what the cost of that is. There's some benefits to it. I mean, there's some great people doing that work, but there's also a lot of people not doing the kinds of things that journalism once did. Fact checking, reliable methods, ethics, all these other things, right, that come with journalistic institutions are now gone. I want to come back to the role of influencers with you in a little bit.

But first, I wanted to talk about this other major shift in our online media ecosystem, and that is how the platforms themselves are operating. And I know you think this is really associated with the vibe shift in Silicon Valley. And Facebook had previously made a big deal about hiring 30,000 content moderators, setting up an internal Supreme Court to help adjudicate issues, but Zuckerberg has since largely abandoned those policies. And just what does it mean that we've seen this complete reversal in how companies like Metta think about content moderation, about trust, safety, about fact checking? Yeah, I mean, I think there's clearly been this change and it's been a rhetorical one,

absolutely, from the CEOs of these companies. It's been a political one when we see Zuckerberg and Bezos and Musk around Trump and donating to his inauguration and standing beside him at inauguration. And I think it's been written off as more of an opportunistic move on their side, but I think that much more structural is going on. This isn't just a shift in rhetoric, it's a fundamental shift in how they have looked at this set of problems we're talking about. Missing disinformation, hostile and harmful speech online, harm to kids online, divisions that are emerging

in our society, the collapse of journalism, all these problems we associate with these shifts in the information ecosystem. For 10 years, these platforms have largely acknowledged the existence of these harms, in part, their role in them. Mark Zuckerberg returned to Capitol Hill as lawmakers grilled him for a second day about his company's failure to protect

the private information of 87 million Facebook users. It's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. Fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, and that was a big mistake. And if put in place, I would argue imperfect, for foreign interference in elections and hate speech, and that was a big mistake. And have put in place, I would argue, imperfect, but at least attempts to mitigate this problem.

And they've worked with governments to develop content moderation policies, as you say, trust and safety teams, which all of these companies had, providing access to information about their platforms, to researchers and journalists and civil society groups to help them understand the problem. And that has entirely changed. They're saying the opposite.

In fact, they're saying the things they were doing to mitigate this problem actually made problems worse and created other problems. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing major changes to its content moderation. Over the coming months, it's scrapping its US fact-checking program in place since 2016 and rolling out new changes across its platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Threads. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas. Most content, human content moderations, these platforms have gone away. been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas.

Most human content moderations, these platforms have gone away. All of the access to data that we once had as researchers and journalists are now closed. So we're now at complete opacity essentially of these platforms, having to trust them entirely about what goes on on their platforms. They've started joining with governments to crack down on researchers. The Trump regime is actually threatening to prosecute researchers doing this work.

And they- If you don't mind, I wanna stop you there because I think that this is incredibly chilling. If you could just tell me more about the persecution of these researchers now. I know that there are talks about housing some of their research in Canada. Just tell me more about what's going on there. I mean, it's wild. I mean, there's a community of researchers who study the information ecosystem

and there's a lot of big labs in the US that do this work. And they've essentially been accused, beginning by Jim Jordan, the congressperson, Jim Jordan, who had a series of hearings into their supposed collusion with the Biden administration, beginning in COVID, to censor dissenting voices on social media. The censorship industrial complex was bigger than we thought. It wasn't just big government working with big tech to limit tweets and posts on Facebook. It was big government, big universities, and big tech all working together to limit

speech and it was disproportionately targeting conservatives. And it turned into a much wider investigation of these research practices generally. And Trump himself has called for the prosecution of these researchers. Universities who house them have been threatened with the removal of federal funding or the removing of their charitable status from the federal government, which would be disastrous to these universities. Stanford University, which housed one of the biggest labs doing this work, shut down the lab in the face of these threats and let go the researchers doing it. So I think it's a real

threat and it's one that luckily we don't face in Canada. And I actually think there's a pretty big opportunity for us to help the researchers in other countries who are facing this kind of persecution, but potentially housing their work here. I guess I'll just state the obvious here that it's really stunning to hear a Canadian academic talk about the discussions going on right now to house the research of Americans studying America. It's wild just on that. Every time I think our view of this problem from outside is being made worse by seeing it on social media or all the hyperbole that's stemming around the administration, it is resubstantiated and made worse by what we hear from the researchers in the US. I mean, it really is striking to hear it come from these kind of sober voices

in the American discourse directly. The following is advertiser content from Emirates. Private suites on Emirates first-class make the journey to your next destination something to remember. With a suite of your own, you can embrace the luxury of unmatched privacy and a serene space to relax and unwind during your flight. Shut your fully enclosed private suite door and sink into your luxurious seat, which you can convert to a fully flat bed at your convenience. Make use of the personal mini bar while indulging in world-class in-flight entertainment, all on your very own widescreen TV. Enjoy premium skincare products and designer

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With our flexible financing and advisory services, we help you adapt. Growing your business in the face of today's challenges and tomorrow's opportunities. Stepping up for entrepreneurs. We're on it. BDC. Financing. Adv advising, know-how. So we know that the information that we consume online has been and continues to be manipulated through campaigns as well, too, right? Like bot campaigns, for example, that try to hijack a narrative and spread it far and wide. I know we're talking about elections and politics in this conversation, but people familiar with the high profile Johnny Depp, Amber Heard case will know that there's lots of evidence of these

orchestrated campaigns using bots, like attacking Amber Heard. We did an episode about that a while ago, but we also have some recent examples of campaigns here related to our politics. And just tell me what happened with Kirkland Lake. So there was a case almost a year ago now where Pierre Polyov was doing a campaign stop in Kirkland, Ontario. And during his campaign visit and immediately after, hundreds of accounts online started saying congratulatory things, kind of fairly trite, but congratulatory things about the campaign rally and its success and the momentum that was building behind his campaign. And immediately they looked suspicious. I mean, this was hundreds of accounts all saying fairly

similar things. They looked like people, but they looked like they were coordinated. So what happened was the Liberal Party accused the Conservative Party of running a bot campaign and the Conservative Party accused the Liberal Party of running a false flag bot campaign. What we found is there was most likely just one person experimenting with a really powerful new combination of tools.

So we've had bots for a long time, but the ability to train and run bots using generative AI tools is a really powerful new combination because it allows them to scale and allows them to behave on their own out in the ecosystem and react to their environment. And so that's what looks like happened here. This one individual just deployed a few hundred bots which cost about 20 cents each, trained it on a news feed of Canadian news, and told them to go act in the world. And what they landed on was this campaign event that happened to be happening that day.

So I think it in and of itself is inconsequential. It made no difference to Canadian politics, to our election, anything. But it does show a new capability and I think we do need to ask of what would it look like if there were thousands of these perhaps purchased by a foreign actor. Do we know how to hold these accountable? Are we allowing them at all in our politics? Should we? So I think it opens up a whole bunch of questions about the integrity of our political process more broadly. Let's come back to the influencers here.

As you said, people are turning more to non-traditional sources of information. Some are good, but as you said, some are not. Some of these influencers are not. And there's been lots of questions about backers, et cetera. And you point to the Tenant Media case as an example. That was where millions of dollars were funneled, allegedly, from Russia to Canadian and U.S. influencers, some of whom portrayed Canada as a failed state.

And just tell me more about the threat that you see from influencers. So I'm not sure if it's a threat from influencers. I think it's a vulnerability with influencers that could be manipulated or capitalized on. First and foremost, it's worth recognizing that influencers in the Canadian ecosystem, that their audience and their reach now exceeds all other actors combined.

So these are the dominant actors in the Canadian ecosystem. There are some Canadian ones but obviously there are some big prominent American political influencers obviously as well. These influencers though are largely unaccountable. We don't know who funds them, we don't know how they're coordinated, we don't know what processes go into the ideas that they're generating, right? So we don't know what processes go into the ideas that they're generating, right? So we don't know what if they're connected to political actors. So all the things that we used to put in place to hold the actors in our country that had major access to audience and

reach, the broadcast media companies, journalists, aren't present on influencers. And so we've given this huge reach and power over to an actor in the ecosystem that operates in entirely opaque and untransparent and unaccountable manner. So we saw this play out in the Tenant Media case. One of the greatest enemies of our nation right now is Ukraine. A US federal indictment says those opinions were bought and paid for by the Kremlin, in the Tenant Media case. One of the greatest enemies of our nation right now is Ukraine. A US federal indictment says those opinions were bought and paid for by the Kremlin, which funneled $10 million in part through Romine Millennial, a Quebec company belonging to Canadian influencer Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, who then used her Tennessee

company Tenant Media to pay MAGA influencers to spread the Kremlin's pro-Trump anti-Ukraine messages. We looked at the content that was the things that these influencers were saying and what's interesting is that it doesn't look like this money changed their rhetoric but it amplified it. So these people were already aligned with Russian propaganda around Ukraine for example, and the failure of the Canadian American state and all these other narratives. But this money just allowed them to do more of it and to hire people to help them and to pay for marketing campaigns and to amplify their reach. So it was a pretty inventive strategy from the Russian government if this is

indeed the case of what happened. And we looked at what they said about Canada and over a thousand times on these podcasts, mostly American, they spoke in highly derogatory way, not just about Trudeau, but characterizing Canada as a failed state, and as a undemocratic state and a corrupt state, and a kind of narrative that is really pernicious and toxic. And I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of. Continuing with this foreign interference stuff, obviously this has been a major topic of interest in Canada.

We had the whole Hogue inquiry looking into it. Justice Hogue, who led that inquiry, talked about how she believes disinformation is the greatest threat to our democracy. Foreign actors are no longer content to use traditional means to interfere. They are also using sophisticated technological means and increasingly sowing disinformation and the consequences are, in my view, extraordinarily harmful. Though, Taylor, the focus has often been on China, on Russia, on India, but I know that you argue that interference from America is a real threat.

And just talk to me a little bit more about that. Yeah, I mean, one is striking that just her final finding there that you quoted, right? She began this commission over a year ago looking at discrete acts of interference from states, right, into Canada. And she ended up saying that really the health of our entire ecosystem and the vulnerability of it

is the biggest threat to Canadian democracy. So I think we should put a point on that. It's pretty critical, I think. Our vulnerability to the US is directly related to the interconnectedness of our information ecosystem to America's. And this has always been the case. Every 20 years we have a big societal debate about how vulnerable we are, how connected we are to American content and the American ecosystem. And it's the case now too.

So during COVID, for example, we found that over half of all anti-vax content or COVID disinformation came into Canada from America. And so we've always been deeply connected. America. And so we've always been deeply connected. But now when we actually have a government and a political movement and a whole constituency of influencers and political actors and media actors in the US literally threatening the future of our country, this takes on a slightly different tone, I think. The last puzzle piece I want to talk to you about today is something that we've been talking about for a long time. Sort of the increasing siloing of social media, how we all end up in echo chambers. But what we're seeing now is entire platforms shifting ideologies. People might think of X

becoming more conservative or right wing, but there's rumble, there's true social. Based on your research, how widespread is this ideological shift? What are the ramifications and what does it mean for our election integrity if the communication platforms we use are becoming far more ideologically slanted? Yeah. Part of this is a function of these, the feeds being highly centralized to these platforms now. It used to be that depending on our behavior and how we, what we liked and what we shared, um,

we could all go off and find things within platforms that aligned with our, our views and our interests. Now, partly because of tick tock, there's these highly centralized feeds where everybody's seeing pretty similar things. Um, the majority of content that's seen by most people is from a fairly small pool of content. They're highly centralized. And that means that the ideological character of the entirety is very easy to shape and manipulate and centralize. And we've seen this certainly with X in Canada. I mean, I think, as you say, a lot of people, I think have felt that the platform feels different since Musk took over. But we found that it's seen a 50% increase in engagement around conservative political content in Canada in the last five months. So it's a

pretty major change. And that change is irrespective of the amount of conservative activity or the amount of conservatives on the platform. It's sort of a, a net increase. And that might be a readjustment from where it was before, but I think it's a pretty major change. And alongside that, we're seeing platforms that are being built and designed to just speak to one constituency.

You mentioned rumble, but I think Blue Sky, for example, has emerged as sort of a competitor to X that's more progressive. Is that good? Do we want to all be off in our entirely different platforms speaking to each other? It's kind of an amplification or a ratcheting up of this problem of echo chambers and filter bubbles that we were worried about in the past. I find this one a little complicated because in a way I can see the value. I understand the value that people see in engaging with information that's transparent about how it sees the world, right? Whether that's an influencer or whether that's, you know, a source, right?

I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. I think the key though is that the concern about filter bubbles and echo chambers was always kind of the wrong one, I think. And it is probably now here in terms of platform ideological swings or even movements away from journalism and towards influencers. That in and of itself is not a bad thing. The challenge I think, and the overall challenge we face is about the reliability of information in the ecosystem. Like do we have

filter processes and filters for us to know as consumers whether we can trust something. And I just don't think we do anymore. I think that's really broken down and that leaves us vulnerable to false information and those who might want to spread it. So look, I don't want to make you repeat yourself too much here, but give a shot at putting this all together for me. The creeping collapse of journalism, the Silicon Valley vibe shift, the rise of bots and influencers, our integration with US media. Where does this leave us? Yeah, I think we're in a precarious moment. I think a lot of these issues are certainly not unique to Canada. There are trends that have been happening in the information ecosystem more broadly. And I think there's some things we could have done to better protect it over the past few years, we largely didn't.

But you combine the increased vulnerabilities and realities of this ecosystem with the fact we are under direct threat from our neighbour, to me makes us very vulnerable. I don't think we have the systems in place to protect our information ecosystem and the place in which we have the discussion about our election from the actions of hostile actors. And I sure wish we had taken this problem a little more seriously earlier. But on the flip side of that, I feel and I think this conversation and others is representative of it that there's a new awareness in this country about just how important protecting information in our society and in a democracy is and Justice Hogue pointed it out and I think it's now the topic of mainstream

conversation. What are we going to do to ensure we all have access to reliable information that isn't being manipulated by foreign or domestic actors? And I'm glad at least we're having that conversation now. Taylor, I appreciate that you tried to land that on a positive note. I tried my best. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Likewise. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.