Taylor Owen: Canadians now see the US as the most serious disinfo threat

Taylor Owen, one of our hosts at “Attention: Freedom, Interrupted”, offers a brief and powerful talk on the Information ecosystem leading to the 45th Canadian federal election. He references a commission led by Justice Hogue which investigated foreign interference – particularly from China, India and Russia – in Canadian elections. Justice Hogue came to the conclusion that the threat to Canadian electoral integrity was not foreign interference but disinformation.

Owen and his team studied the Canadian elections in 2019 closely, fearing that Canadian elections would be much like the disinfo-plagued US elections of 2016. They weren’t – Canada had less polarization, higher levels of trust in journalism and higher consumption of journalism.

But it’s all gotten worse since 2019, Owen warns. In 2019, broadcast media like CBC had a moderating effect on misinformation shared online. But that moderating effect requires high consumption of journalism and high trust in that media, and both those are falling.

Additionally, Facebook and Instagram both turned off news for Canadian users two years ago. On a daily basis, links to news organizations have decreased 11 million a day, about half the traffic to those organizations. A quarter of local Canadian news outlets no longer share content on social media at all. Most disturbingly, most Canadians haven’t noticed – Canadians still tell pollsters they get their news from Facebook and Instagram.

Owen warns that Silicon Valley companies have changed their status. It’s not just performative alignment with Trump: major platforms are ending the ten year era of “trust and safety”, turning moderation over to crowdsourcing. These platforms are moving from minimal transparency to complete opacity. These US government as well as US platforms are participating in the persecution of disinformation researchers. And we’re no longer worried about ideological segregation within platforms so much as we are worried about platforms becoming tightly aligned with political points of view.

Conservatives in Canada are seeing increased political engagement on X, while Liberals and other parties see their engagement flat or shrinking. Owen tells us this might reflect differing willingness to engage on the platforms, or algorithmic boost. But there’s reasons to worry that automation is playing a role. Owen shares the “Kirkland bots”, an apparent manipulation campaign in which thousands of accounts wrote positively about a Conservative political rally in the small Ontario town of Kirkland. Liberals accused conservatives for running a bot campaign; conservatives accused liberals of running a false flag campaign.

Owen’s lab thinks that this was likely the action of a single person, trying out a new botnet. He points out that bots can be bought for as little as $0.20 and can be linked to powerful AIs to run disinformation campaigns at scale.

Influencers are worth significant attention as well. These individuals are only accountable to their audiences and their funders and their reach can exceed that of other actors. Regulations to oversee digital advertising are being subverted when foreign governments can pay influencers in an entirely opaque way. Owen references money given to Tim Pool, who advanced the narrative that Canada was a failed state and needed to be taken over by the US.

Owen concludes with a dark warning: Canadians now see the US as emerging as a more serious disinformation threat than other nations. We’ve seen the US forwarding Russian disinfo in the UK and Germany, and we know that the US and Canada have intertwined media environments. During the COVID pandemic, 50% of COVID disinfo in Canada came from the US. Canadians are now more concerned about covert influence from the US than from other countries

The post Taylor Owen: Canadians now see the US as the most serious disinfo threat appeared first on Ethan Zuckerman.