The disinformation call is coming from right next door

Canadians are already alarmed by attempts to sway our elections by China, India, and other foreign governments. 

Now, with industrial-scale disinformation campaigns ramping up from the U.S., the call is coming from inside the house. 

With a president in the White House who is threatening to annex the country through economic warfare, Canada’s next Prime Minister will be in the difficult position of having to exert some form of control over the largest companies in the world, including Meta, X, and Google. 

All of the major social and digital media companies in the Western world are owned and operated by US companies — with the exception of China-owned TikTok — meaning a US government hostile to Canada poses a far greater risk to our democracy than any other nation. 

While the US remained a steadfast ally the risk of direct interference was low, but even then, social media platforms like Facebook and X were widely used by disinformation networks. 

But now the threat is much greater than outside groups using the platforms: it has become very clear since Donald Trump took office that the platforms themselves have bent the knee to the new president.  

Elon Musk, the owner of X, wields immense power within the Trump administration, and has been particularly aggressive in attacking Canada, while Meta quickly bowed to MAGA orthodoxy and fired most of their fact checkers. Google’s CEO appeared at Trump’s inauguration, which he helped fund, and shortly thereafter took an axe to the company’s progressive internal policies, and changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

This raises the nightmare scenario of Canada being targeted by highly sophisticated and well-funded disinformation campaigns, hosted on Facebook, X, Google and similar platforms, with their tacit permission, or even wholehearted participation.

The Canadian government is very aware of the threat, and the public should be too. 

Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said in January, while defending funding of the CBC, that Canada faces a very real threat of election interference from foreign social media platforms. 

"What we've been witnessing in the past few weeks is a guy, a billionaire that owns a very influential platform, meddling in other countries' elections and politics, and he's doing it in Canada," St-Onge said. "We know and all the experts know that with everything happening online on social media, we know that we cannot trust these platforms as sources of information.”

The Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions released its report on Jan. 28, identifying several “state actors” that have been involved in disinformation campaigns and attempts to influence elections or party nominations. 

The inquiry’s commissioner, Marie-Josée Hogue, argues that disinformation by social media networks and other technologies, like generative artificial intelligence, pose the single greatest threat to Canadian democracy and sovereignty.

“The goal is to sow mistrust in our society,” Hogue said. “Disinformation is difficult to detect and, above all, to counter since the technological means available evolve at breakneck speed.

“In my view it is no exaggeration to say that at this juncture, information manipulation (whether foreign or not) poses the single biggest risk to our democracy. It is an existential threat.”

That existential threat is now manifest as Big Tech dominates the global media landscape. Traditional news media, the only reliable source of vetted news and information, are fighting a valiant rear guard action in defence of truth in the news, but they have been gutted by a near monopoly on global advertising by Google, Meta and Amazon, which together take in more than half of all digital advertising globally.

Adding to the threat is the fact that all of these platforms act as corporate surveillance systems. Their business model is based on harvesting data from users, so they know what you say, what you buy, what web pages you look at, and they can read your emails and text messages. 

In February, the privacy tech firm Proton released a study showing that Google, Apple and Meta shared data from 3.1 million accounts with US security agencies over 10 years. 

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act data requests to Meta have increased 2,171 per cent, while those to Google have risen 594 per cent. Apple reported a 274 per cent increase in such requests between 2018 and 2023. Many of the data requests involved users from other countries, like Canada.

As long as one lives in a democracy, it was thought, perhaps it doesn’t matter if companies have access to all your data.

But when those companies start sharing their data with a potentially hostile government, information can become a weapon. Canadians who openly resist trade tariffs or annexation will now have to worry about the United States seeing them as security threats. That could result in, just for example, Canadians being put on a no-fly list, being banned from doing business in the US, or being permanently denied entry to the US or allied nations. The US has also recently shown itself to be eager to arrest legal residents on visas for expressing views it disagrees with.

As Canada braces for an ugly street fight, it’s clear the call is indeed coming from inside the house — and it’s being made by the neighbour next door.

In the long run, protecting Canadian sovereignty means we must reclaim our digital sovereignty from Big Tech, as was proposed in December by the Democratic and Ecological Digital Sovereignty Coalition. 

That would include enforcing laws that prevent the spread of disinformation and corporate surveillance. A second is breaking up the monopoly, or in this case the “triopoly” over the digital advertising technology that allows Google, Meta and Amazon to dominate ad sales, and a third is to finally tax fairly Big Tech companies that operate in Canada.

It may be necessary to ban hostile digital media giants from the Canadian space altogether, and replace them with an open and accountable social media platform, like the one put forward by Free Our Feeds which envisions “an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.” Individuals can already start toward such a future by disconnecting from the Meta and Musk-owned walled gardens like Facebook, X and Instagram and moving toward Bluesky or other apps predicated on their users’ ability to connect seamlessly across apps.

Whatever that end solution looks like, it is very clear the status quo of having our public square controlled by unaccountable foreign oligarchs and monopolies can no longer be tolerated in a functioning democracy.