• TikTok increasingly dominates news engagement.

• Elected officials lose trust. 

• Podcasts playing an increasingly important role in Canada, particularly for the politically interested.

• CBC surges in popularity, BlogTO enters the Top 5 and appetite for local news increases.

On September 4, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) unsealed charges against two employees of Russian state media network RT for conspiracy to violate the American Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The indictment describes a nearly $10 million USD scheme to create and propagate content that aligns with Russian political motives through an unnamed American company. 

Key findings:

• Canadians want the government to get involved in the fight against bots

• The ecosystem has become slightly more polarized

• Engagement with misinformation and concern about fake content increases

This minor incident was likely caused by a single entity or actor using a set of newly created bot accounts with posts composed by either a low-quality (cheap) or poorly prompted generative Large Language Models (often described generically as AI) [Incident Update (IU) 6]. This network of bots consistently posts about recent news topics and are only incidentally interested in Canada or Canadian politics content [IU6].

While we continue to study the bot incident related to Pierre Poilievre’s rally in Kirkland Lake, we also aim to provide additional context about bot activity in the Canadian information ecosystem. Specifically, we wanted to know to what extent bots were present in commentary directed at other politicians, and how these bots tend to engage across politicians and platforms. To do so we examine potential inauthentic coordinated activity on the Facebook and 𝕏 accounts of Leader of the Official Opposition Pierre Poilievre and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to better understand what bot activity looks like in regards to prominent Canadian politicians. 

To try and better understand how the Kirkland Lake bot incident might have happened, we investigated whether free generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Co-Pilot could be used to deliver this type of attack. We wanted to see if there are any safeguards in place to prevent commercial AI tools from being used in cases like this. We show almost all large free commercial AIs are not prepared to mitigate this kind of election interference.

• Canadians care equally about US news and politics

• More than one third of Canadians believe that the United States covertly influences Canadian politics

• Significant increase of attention paid to news and politics

• One third of Canadians report using print for news weekly

• Mounting awareness of and concern over foreign influence (FI)

• Lower appetite for news and politics in June

• Top Canadian news outlets are moderate and have broad appeal

• Small right-wing outlets punch above their weight on social media

July 2024 — In Spring 2024, DisinfoWatch and Canadian Digital Media Research Network conducted a survey of 2,127 Canadians to assess their exposure to several leading Kremlin narratives about Russia’s war against Ukraine and to understand the vulnerability of Canadians to these narratives.