Front Burner - What an Omar Khadr Google search warns us about misinformation online

Episode Date: February 1, 2019

This week, a Google search result listing Omar Khadr as a Canadian soldier gained a lot of traction online, inciting anger from many people, including Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer. CBC technology reporter Matt Braga tracks how the former Guantanamo Bay detainee showed up in the search in the first place and how easily misinformation can become politicized.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. So here's a thing that happened this week.

On Tuesday, Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer tweeted out a picture of a Google search result that showed Omar Khadr listed as a Canadian soldier. Khadr was born in Canada, but he was accused of throwing a grenade in Afghanistan that killed a U.S. soldier in 2002, and he was detained in throwing a grenade in Afghanistan that killed a US soldier in 2002. And he was detained in Guantanamo Bay. The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that his human rights were violated there. The government of Canada was required to provide a remedy. We have apologized and agreed to a settlement. Our veterans now see Prime Minister Trudeau handing $10.5 million to a convicted terrorist

who fought against them. There are deeply divided views about Omar Khadr. Some see him as a murderer, others a child soldier who suffered torture. He was a victim. He wasn't a mastermind and a perpetrator of anything. Certainly almost rewarded in this way, I think, is a travesty. So as you would expect, the confusion about him being listed as a Canadian soldier made some people mad. Andrew Scheer was one of those people.

In that tweet, he called Cotter a terrorist and demanded that Google, quote, fix this. The incident made the rounds on Twitter, where Google was accused by one Twitter user of liberal bias. It even got written up in the Vancouver Sun. But here's the question. Why would a Google search say that Omar Khadr was a Canadian soldier in the first place? Today, we'll try and answer that question. Because the answers contain a warning about

election meddling, about how easily mis- or disinformation can serve a political purpose, and about whether Canada's new election meddling task force, announced just this week, is equipped to tackle this problem. This is FrontBurner. Matt Braga is going to be here in a second to flesh more of this out. But first. When this Andrew Scheer tweet started to go viral, Stephen Pumwasi was one of the many people who saw it. And right away, he thought something was up. The first thing I was thinking was, why would Google sort of make that mistake? The algorithms trained from a bunch of data sources.

Stephen is a data analyst in Toronto. And he thought that something must have been done to make Google think that Omar Khadr was a Canadian soldier. So Stephen did some digging. The first thing I did was I ended up searching to sort of see where Google would have mistakenly learned this. And I think it traces back to the Wikidata edit that was made in early December, which added to Omar's profile that he was a soldier. So he looked a little closer. Usually when you see a mistaken edit, you try to see if there's a reason that that edit was done. So in this situation, it was an account that was from Russia.

Their first language was Russian. So my first instinct was, this is a Russian troll. That seems like a fair reaction, considering what we know about Russian meddling in elections all over the world. So Stephen tweeted his Russian troll theory, and it went a bit viral. The prime minister's spokesperson actually retweeted it. That's where I saw it. Now, just to recap. Now, just to recap, we had the leader of the Conservative Party sending out a viral tweet demanding Google fix the fact that its search results say Omar Khadr is a Canadian soldier.

People get mad. And the prime minister's spokesperson wades in with a retweet that makes it look like Andrew Scheer got taken by a Russian troll. Two separate political parties, two separate messages, playing to two separate groups. All based on this one very weird search result. So Matt Braga is here, senior technology reporter with the CBC. Matt actually found the guy behind this whole mess. Hey, Matt. Hey, Jamie. So why would Google think Omar Khadr is a Canadian soldier? We heard Stephen talk about something called a Wikidata edit.

Yeah, so Omar Khadr, much in the same way that he has a Wikipedia page, also has a page on this thing called Wikidata. It essentially contains just raw data, raw information about places, things, objects, but also people like Omar Khadr. So his birth date, his siblings, where he lives, and also had a listing for a period of time for occupation. It listed him as a soldier. And so in the case of these Google search results we were seeing,

under certain circumstances, under certain scenarios where people were searching, using the term Canadian soldier, Google was pulling in the Canadian data from Wikipedia and the soldier data from Omar Cotter's Wikidata page and kind of marrying that together. And that's why he was showing up in these particular search results. Do we know what happened to make those search results appear now? So to understand how we got here, you have to go back to last July. So you can see one of the nice things about Wikidata and Wikipedia as well is you can see the history of all the modifications that people make to pages like Omar Khadr's on

Wikidata. And if you go back to last July, you can see that there was this edit made by a username Guron. Because Wikidata is like people driven. Yeah, exactly. It's all anyone can contribute. Anyone can kind of make changes. And so there's this guy and his name is Guran. And he is basically a software developer. He's this guy named Andrew Zakin. He's the chief technology officer for a software company in St. Petersburg, Russia, called Firstline Software. And what he does is he has this script that he runs. And what the script does is it tries to

make the data on Wikidata better. It kind of goes through all of the pages, all of the bits of information on Wikidata and tries to make sure that things are categorized more accurately. So, for example... And a script is like a bot? Yeah, it's basically just like sort of a bot. You know, and bots can be used for good, they can be used for malicious purposes. In this case, he's tried to create this, you know,

this sort of nice bot, right? This helpful bot that's supposed to make Wikidata data better. And so it goes through and it does everything from, you know, making sure that, you know, all of these Renaissance painters are properly classified as, you know, their occupation being painter. Or, you know, it makes sure that, for example, like the video game Street Fighter is properly classified as a video game. Right. It's it's it's essentially, you know, you're tagging bits of information or you're tagging people, places, objects, songs, islands, you know, on and on and on. Categorizing them, essentially.

With categorizing. Essentially, we have this guy in St. Petersburg, and he's really into categories, for lack of a better word. And he wants to make Wikidata better. So he writes this code, this script, and this script is burning through the Internet and adding categories to all these wiki pages. And then those pages influence the Google search. And that is what caused Omar Cotter to come up as a Canadian soldier. In this particular case, yeah, that seems to be the case. So if we look back at the edit history to Cotter's wikiata page, we can see one of those first edits being made in July.

People don't notice this until about September. They obviously give feedback to Google, say, what the heck, this is incorrect. Google fixes it. And then when you fast forward to December, Gurant's script, which is still running, it's still just categorizing reams of things on Wikidata. Still just burning through the entire internet. Or at least Wikidata specifically, right? And it's important to note that this is totally indiscriminate, right? The activity

isn't targeted at any particular people pages, ideologies, countries, political topics. I was going through the history and it goes after everything from Danish priests to the Faroe Islands to random video games. Like it is just trying to affix tags and categories just across the board to everything.

So there's no evidence that this is malicious or that it's politically motivated, these changes or anything like that that you can see? No, it seems pretty, pretty automated and pretty indiscriminate. and pretty indiscriminate. And I was actually able to talk with this guy, Garon Andrews-Akin, in some messages a little bit. We were kind of going back and forth, and he said, he's like, no, no, he doesn't approve of sort of the work that the Russian trolls do,

that this is just something that he does to try to make Wikidata better. And he said to put things into perspective, he has made more than 4 million edits to wiki data at this point. And so he kind of said, you know, my signal to noise ratio is like pretty good if I've only kind of gotten a handful of complaints given that, you know, I've made this sort of many edits to the data, right, trying to make it better. Does he know about this controversy that his wiki edits have ignited here in Canada? He does, actually. So he, after I contacted him,

saw some stuff that I had written, looked at what people were saying online, and realized that people were not happy with what his bot had done. And so he has since manually gone in and made sure that those sort of erroneous changes to the Cotter Wikidata page have been reverted. So all the information that we have in front of us right now, this guy is not a Russian troll. Does not appear to be the case. And he's just a guy who's made more than four million edits on Wikidata. And this is what caused Omar Cotter to be classified as a Canadian soldier. Another question I have for you is that after Andrew Scheer tweeted about this demanding that Google fix it, some people,

including the prime minister's principal secretary, Jerry Butts, were tweeting that Omar Khadr was coming up as a Canadian soldier in Scheer's search results because of his personal search history. So is that true? So that's something that Google has pushed back on a lot in the past. They say that the Google searches aren't actually personalized as much as people think they are, certainly not to that degree. Instead, what we saw in this particular case, and we had Danny Sullivan, who I've sort of described as he's like the closest thing to Google search has to a public ombudsman. And he was going back and forth with CanadaLand's Jesse Brown on Twitter saying that, no, this is basically a result of improper information being fed into the

knowledge graph. Google hasn't explicitly said that the data came from Wikidata. But if you look at sort of the timeline of the changes and the reversions and when they appeared in the Google search and when they were removed and when they came back, it certainly seems to suggest that's where the data came from. And so Danny Sullivan basically said, yeah, there was inaccuracies. We got feedback letting us know that there were inaccuracies. And we should note that Google has now fixed this inaccuracy. Right. One aspect of this story that we're really interested in and wanted to dig into more is how this tweet made its way up to conservative party leader Andrew Scheer.

It's hard to track these things, but we contacted Scheer's office and they told us that once the info started circulating recently, several people reached out to Scheer's office to let him know. And then Scheer's office performed its own search to verify the search content and then posted a screenshot of the search. And that happened in the afternoon of January 29th. Right. So what we do know is that earlier on that day, January 29th, there's a Twitter account belonging to a guy who posts a lot of anti-Trudeau stuff and has about 26,000 followers. And he tweeted about the Omar Khadr Google search. And his tweet says that this is, quote, all the evidence you need of liberal bias at Google. And so this tweet got a lot of retweets, more than 550 right now. It now has more than 550. So it was like definitely making the rounds.

Yeah. And it's interesting because that also seems to have been fed by there was someone else who was tweeting at this guy sort of saying, hey, have you seen this? We don't know where that person initially saw this, whether they learned about it from another Twitter account or from Reddit because it's also floating around on Reddit as well. And the point is eventually it trickles up to this guy with 26,000 followers. Yeah. And then later in the day, Andrew Scheer tweets about it. And we should make clear here that Andrew Scheer pointed out the mistake that Google was making, but he didn't actually accuse Google of liberal bias or anything like that.

Andrew Scheer didn't do that. Other people have. I'll read Andrew Scheer's tweet. Omar Khadr is a convicted terrorist who murdered a medic and blinded another. He is not a victim, nor should he be portrayed in this way alongside real Canadian heroes. At Google Canada, fix this.

Now, this whole incident happened right as the federal government announced its plan to combat online disinformation and election interference in the October election. Right. Which feels, I don't know, ironic is, I think, the word I want to use here. Well-timed is how I would put it. Today we have with us Minister Ralph Goodale, who's the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, the Honorable Karina Gould, who is the Minister of Democratic Institutions. So Matt, what do they announce? Go over broadly what they announce. Sure. So first you have this critical election incident public protocol group. It's a bit of a mouthful. It's a little dry, but basically it's this group of bureaucrats that is formed during

the campaign period, and their job is to tell Canadians if there are any big, serious threats to the integrity of their elections. They don't need permission. They can just go out and tell Canadians what's up. And so they're supposed to be a bit of a check. And are they looking for big, coordinated, state-sponsored campaigns like that we saw in the U.S. election or in France? Exactly.

That's exactly it. Let me be clear. This is not about refereeing the election. This is about alerting Canadians of an incident that jeopardizes their rights to a free and fair election. If something happens during the campaign, Canadians will be able to trust that the right people have decided to make it public, that the information is accurate, and that the announcement is not partisan in nature. They're looking at the big stuff. And

then next we have a task force consists of the intelligence agencies. You have CSIS, CSC, RCMP, Global Affairs Canada, and they're calling it the Security and Intelligence Threats to Election Task Force. So they are basically responsible for really kind of trying to identify these threats on a technical level, on a criminal level. They're going to be providing support and security advice to the political parties and to Elections Canada. And to help ensure the political parties don't get hacked, for example, like what happened with the DNC in the U.S., Hillary Clinton's email. Exactly. And they're basically going to be running like, you know, war game type scenarios to plan and respond to potential threats. The RCMP is going to be looking at sort of ways to counter potential foreign interference and activity, and they're going to investigate criminal activity. Whether it's hacking, intimidation,

bribery or whatever, they have the tools and the skills to identify the interference and its source. So that's what you've got going on on that side of things. OK, what else is announced? Then you have seven million dollars going towards digital news and civic literacy programs. So basically, like, how do you teach people, teach Canadians to identify misinformation, fake news and understand how people can use social media to sub misinformation, fake news, and understand how people can use social media to subvert, you know, democratic processes, right? They will help Canadians critically assess news reporting and editorials, know how and

when malicious actors exploit online platforms, and acquire skills on how to avoid being susceptible to online manipulation by malicious actors. And then as part of that, the government is also trying to have more of a dialogue with these social media platforms themselves. Like Facebook and Twitter. Exactly. Basically saying, look, all of this stuff that you've been doing for other countries for their elections, bring that here.

Do that for us. Help us curb the misinformation and other challenges that we're going to be facing. We see that the social media companies, while they're starting to take some responsibility, still have a ways to go. And I think for their consumers and their users, they want to know that when they're interacting on those platforms that they can have confidence in the interactions that they're having. Okay, so a bunch of different prongs. Yes. Okay, so a bunch of different prongs. Yes. Sounds like there's an effort to deal with these big state actors, like what we saw in the U.S. election or the French election, to deal with the social media companies themselves, and then also to deal with news literacy.

Exactly. I'm interested in your thoughts about how all of these efforts announced this week could conceivably help what happened this week, where there's something online. In this case, it looks innocuous, but in other cases, it could easily have not been, where it gets blown up and used as political fodder by both parties. And there's all of this disinformation

and misinformation swirling around it. Accusations that Google has a liberal bias, that Andrew Scheer got taken by a Russian troll, that his personal search history generated the cutter result. And no one fully understands what actually happened in the first place. No, and I think, you know, in a perfect world, right, you'd have all these media literacy campaigns, you'd have education workshops,

you'd have things that would help people better understand how social platforms work and how the Internet works and how malicious actors attempt to subvert the way that we use these platforms. And I think that's the perfect world scenario. But I think the reality is that, you know, it's really hard, I think, even for the best of us, like even for people who spend their days trying to understand how social media platforms work, I think it's really difficult to even get a handle sometimes on how these things spread and how, you know, why we see the things we see on Twitter or Facebook or Google. And so, you know, I think if so, quote unquote, experts have such a hard time, right? It's like what hope do sort of average people kind of have, right? It's like what hope do sort of average people kind of have, right? The more that we can kind of slow down and really kind of take stock at what people are saying and why, the better. But also that's just a small part of the puzzle, right? Like it's not all on users, right?

There's also a role that technology companies have to play. And I would say there's certainly a role that the media can play too. Absolutely. And I know, you know, this is an election year coming up and as we've been talking about, the potential for election meddling is very real, but also just the spread of disinformation, malicious or not, is very real.

And this is an issue that we at the podcast care very much about. And we know that you, Matt Braga, do too. And so we're going to keep on it throughout the year. And if any of our listeners are planning on meddling in the upcoming election, send me an email. Send Matt an email.

But also, let me know if you have any thoughts or tips. You can find us on Twitter at FrontBurnerCBC. Unless you're a troll. Matt, thanks so much. Thanks, Jamie. That's it for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. FrontBurner comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcasts. The show is produced by Chris Berube, Lane Chow, Shannon Higgins, and Robert Parker,

with help from Aisha Barmania. Derek Vanderwyk does our sound design. Our digital producer is Eunice Kim. Special thanks to Philip Ling, Sarah Sears, and Jen Barr. Our music is by Joseph Chavison from Boombox Sound. The executive producer of Frontburner is Nick McKay-Blokos. Thanks for listening. See you Monday. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog.

She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now.