The Current - Can you tell online fact from fiction in this election?

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

As the election campaign ramps up, what kind of misinformation and disinformation is spreading online? We talk to Aengus Bridgman, one of Canada’s leading experts on misinformation.

Whose take do you trust during this election cycle? I'm Rosemary Barton, CBC's chief political correspondent. At Issue is also where I listen and learn from the very best. Chantelle Bair, Andrew Coyne and Althea Raj. They are political heavyweights. They write and talk about politics for Canada's biggest publications and broadcasters, and they help shape the national conversation. So if you're looking for people who can connect the dots, cut through the spin,

check out the at issue podcast every week, wherever you listen. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. If you spend any time online these days, you will know how hard it is to tell what's real and what's not. On a good day, the amount of misinformation and disinformation is concerning. During a federal election campaign though, it's even more worrying. Just a week ago, an internal briefing note for Canada's elections watchdog was made public and it warned of AI being a high risk in the current

federal election campaign. Back in January, Justice Marie-José Hogue laid out her final report from the inquiry into foreign interference, and she said, information manipulation, whether foreign or not, is a massive threat to this country. The greatest threat, the one that I believe threatens the very existence of our democracy, is disinformation. This threat is all the more nefarious because the means

available to counter it are limited. And so almost halfway into the election campaign, how is election misinformation and disinformation spreading and how can you spot it? Angus Bridgman is one of Canada's leading experts on misinformation. He's director of the Media Ecosystem observatory at McGill University in Montreal, and an assistant professor in the Max Bell School of Public Policy. Angus, good morning. Good morning. How concerned are you about disinformation and misinformation in this election?

So I'm very concerned basically because if we live in a democracy, if we care about our democratic outcomes, and if there is even a democracy, if we care about our democratic outcomes, and if there is even a small potential that disinformation, information manipulation is capable of swaying enough Canadians' opinions that it changes the outcome of our election, then that puts the very essence of our democracy at stake. Fortunately, we're a few weeks into the election now, we're seeing a lot of stuff online, but there's been nothing that we would say is concerning for this election yet.

We're keeping an eye out though. Can we just talk about terms? I have said misinformation and disinformation. There's also this idea of information manipulation. What is the difference between all of those? What are we talking about when we use that language? Misinformation, untrue information, it's ubiquitous. It's everywhere online. When you go online, you can find misinformation very easily. Misinformation is troubling, but everywhere.

Disinformation is a little bit more narrow. So disinformation is really about somebody trying to intentionally use false or misleading information to confuse, manipulate, change people's opinions, to seek a particular political objective. One of the ways disinformation can function is through information manipulation. So manipulation can take many forms, but to give a couple examples might be a set of bots on let's say X who are amplifying certain content to try to make it seem like Canadians believe something that they don't actually believe. Or could be maybe paying off an influencer that you follow in order to get them to cover or provide a particular narrative around an issue. Again, trying to manipulate the information environment

to mislead, confuse, change opinions. There's lots of terms in this space, it's a crowded space, but generally kind of disinformation covers all of that stuff that's targeted trying to change sort of political outcomes by manipulating the information environment. What sort of disinformation campaigns have you seen thus far in the election and on what platforms have they surfaced? So we have this Coalition for Information Ecosystem Resilience, which is a set of civil society groups and research groups across the country. And what we're trying to do is to inform Canadians about what we see in the online space and

what we see in terms of information manipulation. And in that process, we have sort of different levels of severity. So far, we've just seen what we call minor incidents, incidents that are indicative of something that could really go wrong and it's something in the online space that doesn't feel right or it's a form of information manipulation, but isn't in any way threatening the integrity of the election. So, for example, a Facebook group that was repurposed from a buy and sell group to instead push Canadians for 51st statehood.

So it's a large Facebook group. A lot of the members were saying, hey, why am I part of this group? 18,000 members. And to make it seem sort of that this idea has more support. That would be one example. Or bot activity on X pushing, among other things, sort of an AI-generated Carney Epstein scandal.

So that would be kind of another small scale kind of information manipulation we're seeing online. You mentioned influencers and we are living at a time now where influencers, I mean the name is correct, they have a good deal of influence online. How does that complicate what people can or can't trust? What do you see as red flags around their role in this election? Because it's not all nefarious but but at the same time, people can push narratives because

they are being paid to do that. Influencers are kind of the emergent phenomenon in the online space is more and more people get their information from this sort of so-called influencer class, which are basically people who just have a large following online. They're not bound by any professional standard or commitment necessarily to the truth, but their audience can sort of kind of evaluate their behavior and what they say and make a determination. The challenges is that influencers become a greater and greater share of people's information

diet and particularly a lot of influencers that are not based in Canada have become enormously popular here. So they're pushed in part by the way the major social media platforms work. And so you have folks like Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, others who have a large following in Canada and Canadians pay attention to, but in the context of an election, aren't particularly well informed about our country and aren't particularly well informed about kind of what's going on and yet Canadians are paying attention to them. What about, I mean, and that's an example of somebody from on the other side of the

border perhaps having some influence here. What about the issue of foreign interference more broadly? CSIS has warned that China, India, Russia and Pakistan could interfere in the election. Global Affairs Canada said that Christie Freeland's campaign to be the liberal leader was targeted by in its words concentrated and malicious activity. It linked it to a WeChat account that was tied to the Chinese government. The Chinese government had denied any involvement in that. But when you take a look at foreign interference in this election, more broadly, what are you seeing?

So, absolutely kind of the whole commission, the commission on foreign interference, really highlighted China, India, Russia. And we've seen repeated instances over the last few years of those countries trying to interfere in, trying to manipulate our information environment to seek a political a specific political outcome. We haven't seen so far in the election any kind of clear examples of this.

There's the typical kind of bot activity, which is again, kind of very common in online spaces, but we haven't seen anything like, for example, there was this attack. It's called the spam of flash attack, which was a series of bots sort of targeting liberal politicians a few years ago. And of course, you have the example with freelance. So we haven't seen anything like that. But absolutely, this is a concern. Just to sort of dig a little bit into that interference versus influence question, typically the interference idea is really about covert and hidden.

Somebody is trying to convince you of something without you having any understanding of where that idea is coming from. For example, last year there was a fairly major scandal in the online space where six influencers were being paid from a Canadian company and they were being paid essentially Russian money to continue to promote the ideas that they were pushing. There were these six influencers, $10 million, fairly major, not disclosed. And so that would be an example of an interference. That's covert.

Nobody knows that that's happening. Influence in politics is fair game. Influence is part of the way politics work. And if it's out in the open, people can make up their own minds, be informed. So what we're really trying to do and what really does need to be done is to have that transparency where that interference is brought out into the open. And so people go, okay, you're, you're being paid by Russia. That's great that you have that opinion, but I'm going to discount it because I

know you're trying to interfere. How was all of this turbocharged by artificial intelligence and what people can already do through AI tools? Turbocharged is absolutely the right word. So the forms that kind of interference and information manipulation can take haven't changed all that much. I mean, there's the ability to generate video, audio content that is more lifelike. But that was, to a certain extent, possible with Photoshop before.

The difference now is the scale and accessibility of these tools. So now it's actually very accessible to go into an online space and generate voluminous video audio text that appears to be real. And that enables all sorts of information operations that weren't necessarily possible. Have we seen any of that yet? That was the nightmare scenario, right? Is that there would be deep fakes of it looked like this politician would be saying this thing and it turned out

that the politician had said no such thing, but by the time people realized that, it had been seen by hundreds of thousands, millions of people. Has that actually materialized yet in this campaign? So we've seen some examples of generative AI, particularly some images circulating online. Typically these are called out by sort of more generally sort of the people who pay close attention to politics, but they do get a certain kind of attention and credibility within certain kind of like typically hyper partisan communities. So even if it's fake, there's a truthiness or there's a truthfulness to it. They feel like it's

real. And then it plays into that idea of confirmation bias, that people believe what they believe because they're already there. Absolutely. And so this is just one more piece of evidence why I'm voting this way and why I'm super jazzed up about that campaign, why I'm knocking on doors, why I'm committed to the cause. And so we have seen some of this generative AI content so far in this election and we kind of flagged that a little bit on the website and website and what we've seen and there's some details there.

Again, really want to, for now anyways, Canadians need to be vigilant and when they see this stuff they should absolutely call it out. We've actually set up a election tip line.ca for people to report this type of content. If it's just a generative AI image and there isn't sort of any coordinated mass amplification of it, people can look at that and go, oh, that's AI generated or somebody else in the information environment will call it out. It's that covert stuff again that is really concerning. Are you concerned? We just have a couple of minutes left. Let me ask you a couple of things.

One is, are you concerned that this is the first federal election in which Canadians don't have access to news from recognized news sources on Facebook and Instagram because of the online news act. It doesn't mean that stories aren't circulating on those platforms, but that they aren't from, as I say, recognized news organizations. Does that worry you? It absolutely worries me. We did a study last year that found that Canadians were receiving about 11 million fewer views of news stories a day, 11 million a day. And so that's in a non-election period. So during an election period, Canadians are still going to Facebook and Instagram and X to a certain extent to get the news. And across all three of those platforms, news is much less available and instead has been

replaced by this sort of like news light or these cultural accounts that share cultural content alongside the news and give the impression, give somebody who's using this platform the impression of being informed without actually having any idea of what's really going on because it's not the news and it's not that information. Now there are some content creators who take the news and take their own spin on it and then reshare it on these platforms and that does happen, but they're doing it with their particular perspective and it doesn't, and that does happen. But they're doing it with their particular perspective

and it doesn't allow Canadians that direct access. So this is truly concerning, and I've been saying, this election, our information space is really in quite a bad state in terms of data access and transparency, in terms of safeguards on the major platforms, in terms of news availability, and yeah, absolutely, the generative AI content. I have to let you go, but what is one bit of

advice you would give to people? I mean, it's hard to figure out what's real and what's fake out there. So what's one bit of advice you would have for people to help spot information that has been manipulated? Very simply put, take a look at the content creator or the account that you're looking at, um, that is providing you the information

and ask yourself, are they Canadian? Do they care about me and my community? If that answer is a vigorous yes and you are certain, then great. Consume that information, share that information even if you disagree with it. If the answer is not, you're not sure, then go, actually, maybe during an election, I want to make sure that we're having a national conversation and that I'm paying attention to Canadian voices and do that at least during the election and hopefully beyond. You know, we're buying Canadian at the grocery stores, spend some time consuming Canadian

content online. Angus, this is important. Thank you very much. Thank you. Angus Bridgman is director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory and assistant professor at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University, and he was in Montreal.