LawBytes Podcast – Episode 29 was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the latest audio-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors. Sonix is the best way to convert your audio to text in 2019.
Michael Geist:
This is Law Bytes, a podcast with Michael Geist.
CBC:
Distortion is a certainty and there’s no point declaring it can’t happen here. It’s already here. So what are we going to do about it? About misinformation and those who would mess with our minds and elections.
CPAC:
Are you concerned with fake news and disinformation in Canada?
CPAC:
Not really. It really comes down to are you willing to look into the information you’re trying to feed yourself in, the information that you’re trying to project out into the world? Right. If you’re constantly being told what to believe in, what to think and what to say, that’s more of a you thing than a Canada thing. So I don’t blame Canada. I blame the person or the people.
CPAC:
Absolutely. I think it’s a very important issue. It’s important to have reflective and accurate information and such. I think fake news is definitely misleading and can often construe mis interpretations of reality.
CPAC:
Well, I am concerned about fake news because there’s so much info out there already. With Wikipedia leaks and everything going online. You never know what kind of source is true. Like I’m in school and just source checking is a big thing. Like you have to check every every source that you have. So it’s fake news makes it harder now to know what’s true and what’s not.
Michael Geist:
Coming into the 2019 federal election, there were widespread concerns regarding disinformation campaigns, the prospect of foreign interference, social media advertising and manipulation and fake news. In fact, the federal government enacted legislation designed to foster greater transparency on political advertising. But on the heels of elections elsewhere, the prospect of online harms during the election appeared very real. Taylor Owen, the Beaverbrook chair in media ethics and communications in the Maxwell School of Public Policy at McGill University, set out to find out what was actually taking place online. He led the Digital Democracy Project, which studied the media ecosystem in the run up to and during Canada’s Oct. 2019 federal election by monitoring digital and social media and by conducting both regular national surveys and a study of metered samples of online consumption. The project released reports throughout the campaign on how social media was being used political advertising trends, the role of fact checking and the presence of misinformation and fake news. He joined me on the podcast shortly after the election to discuss.
Michael Geist:
Taylor, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast.
Taylor Owen:
Hey, my pleasure. I’m a fan.
Michael Geist:
Ok, well, that’s great to have you on it. You know, there’s been a few people that have been incredibly active during this election campaign beyond, of course, the leaders. And I think you’re one of them because your digital democracy project has put an enormous number of new reports and ideas out into the public sphere. So what do we start there if can explain a little bit with the project is about?
Taylor Owen:
Yeah. I mean, so the genesis of it was a sort of observation that in many of the other countries that have had big elections since the 2016 U.S. election, where there was substantial foreign interference, there was a community of scholars and sometimes non civil society and even for profit actors who were monitoring it, monitoring the information space during the election. And we didn’t see that community existing in a robust way in Canada in the lead up to this election. So we saw the that’s the genesis of the project. Was this in our perception that we could add something by doing some pretty wide scale monitoring of the media ecosystem during the election. So the way it kind of came together is we have a team at McGill that’s being run by a computer science professor, Derek Ruths, and they are they led and are still doing a fairly large data collection project on of the media ecosystem. So they’re collecting as much Twitter as possible. Facebook, public posts, all of Reddit, all news published and distributed during the election. So really just looking at all. What are the ways in which we can capture the public discourse during an election. Where we think maybe we added some mythological capa
