[distortion]
Adrienne Arsenault: Distortion is a certainty
and there's no point declaring it can't happen here.
It's already here.
[interference]
So what are we going to do about it?
About misinformation and those who would mess with our minds
and elections.
[interference]
We tapped those who've been tracking the threat
to democracies for years
for some solid advice on what to watch for.
[interference]
Taylor Owen of McGill University
studies the political impact of digital tech
the way a general surveys an advancing army,
and with equal angst.
What is different now in 2019?
A third of the world is in an election year.
In Canada, what are you seeing that looks different?
The digital and social infrastructure that we've built,
the Facebooks, the Twitter, the Google infrastructure
is pretty much the same as it was two years ago.
What's wrong with this infrastructure is that
it is calibrated for engagement
so that the more people are enraged and engaged
and ultimately divided on these sites,
the more they use them, and the more they post,
and the more they share, which is ultimately good
for the platforms and the business model of the platforms.
And that, turns out, is a highly manipulatable mechanism
for political speech. Right?
Which is inherently can divide us in very clear ways.
♪ [light]
Adrienne: Radio Canada's Digital Journalists
Jeff Yates and Roberto Rocha
have poured through raw data on Twitter and seen
clear patterns of fakery and interference.
They call their research Digital Archaeology,
searching keywords and issues unique to Canada,
discovering nefarious accounts targeting a Canadian audience,
always picking at seams of division.
The top tweeted tweet in English is this:
"Canada wants to take unvetted Muslim refugees", in quotes,
"detained at U.S. airports".
"Breaking: Canada will not allow
single Syrian men to seek refuge".
This is all untrue.
"Justin Trudeau booed at town hall
as polls show his horrific approval ratings".
There seems to be a certain slant to these tweets.
Yeah.
And the bottom line of what it told you was what?
Was that the two main topics, the two main divisive topics
that they think that they could use to divide Canadians
are immigration and pipelines.
But Iran, Russia, and Venezuela seem
quite active in talking about Canadian issues.
Why would Venezuela get marred in
conversations about immigration?
Well for Venezuela, we kind of think that
their goals aren't really political.
We think that it's just to make money.
A lot of the tweets that are anti-immigration have
links to web sites where people link to.
They show some very outrageous, very provocative,
probably fake news about it,
but there's a ton of ads on it, right.
People linking it, people share it.
They get ad revenue.
But it's still damaging because you're
once again amplifying really negative and outrageous
messages on social media, getting people riled up
for essentially falling for
fake information just for money, basically.
So Russia doesn't need the money.
This is not some kid sitting in St. Petersburg
trying to make a few extra rubles here.
What's happening there?
Well in Russia, a lot of these
were traced back to this troll farm,
very famous troll farm that, you know,
made the news, even got indicted by American prosecutors,
the Internet Research Agency.
These analysts believed that their role
was really to sow division among Americans.
So what the trolls are really good at finding are
the main points of division in a society, right.
They're quite good at studying
a country's internal debates, their political landscape.
So they spend a lot of time trying to find the fissures.
Like the default lines.
And you can compare it to,
let's say you like run your finger over like a
piece of fine china, right,
and find that one little crack, it could be very
small, but then they dig in, they dig in, they dig in,
they dig in, and they start increasing the division.
But if they're digging and digging and digging,
it'll fall apart.
That is probably what they're hoping to do,
and it's up to us to be aware of this and not let them.
OK, so does that then sound like 2017
was maybe a dry run for this election period?
That's possible.
People are still manipulatable by using
polarizing topics online. So could it happen here?
Yes it could.
[traffic din]
Adrienne: Eyes need to be wide open now because
whatever the motivation,
misleading information can be cleverly disguised.
That's certainly the case with the online news site
The Buffalo Chronicle out of Buffalo, New York.
A quick glance and it seems legitimate,
mostly American focused, truth to many of the stories,
and recently the site has been
dipping into Canadian stories and scandals,
even seems to get scoops.
But there are significant flaws and falsehoods.
We tried getting in touch with
someone connected with the site, even went to Buffalo
in search of its location.
You might think that wouldn't be hard.
So The Buffalo Chronicle lists its address as being
610 Ellicott Street in Buffalo, New York.
Well, the problem with that is the five hundred block ends
right at this intersection.
The building down there is 640,
so if 610 were to exist, it would be right here.
But this building has been abandoned for years.
Adrienne. Hi there. Alan Bedenko.
Really nice to meet you. Pleased to meet you.
Adrienne: Alan Bedenko is a Buffalo
lawyer who also writes on politics.
He says he knows all about The Buffalo Chronicle
and its publisher.
These are subjects that make him wince.
He doesn't identify the sources,
doesn't identify where they came from,
what their credentials are,
what authority they have to comment,
or even how they know the information.
You've marked this up like a high school teacher.
I have because it's -- well, it offends me stylistically
and it offends me substantively.
It offends me stylistically because it's poorly written.
But, you know, here it's
"Among Toronto area political operatives it's been rumoured
"that Iaccobucci may be one of three men in possession
of embarrassing information on Trudeau".
And I just -- it's garbage.
What rumours? From where? What are the sources?
What is the nature of the embarrassing information?
Personally embarrassing? Politically embarrassing?
Why put that there
if you're not going to pull the trigger on it?
♪ [dramatic]
Adrienne: None of this might matter
if it weren't for the reality
that some of these Buffalo Chronicle stories
have gained traction in Canada.
And lots of people have been entrapped by this, right?
Yes. So if we look at the latest one,
this was the most popular.
So we can see here who shared it online.
So you can see it was shared 1,900 times
and generated, you know, 7,400 interactions.
So that's likes, comments, and shares.
So who have we got here? We've got Trudeau Follies.
Yellow Vest Canada,
National Conservative News Network,
The Buffalo Chronicle shared it, of course.
Doug Ford for Premier of Ontario.
So basically most of these people were roped in.
Adrienne: Lots and lots of yellow vest.
So you have political commentator
Warren Kinsella shared it.
He actually corrected the information later.
He said, "OK, this is a bogus site".
So, once again, if you're going quickly,
this might look legitimate if you're not
asking yourself the right questions.
But if you take a couple seconds
to actually think critically about this,
it doesn't stack up, it doesn't make sense.
Adrienne: So who's behind it and why?
We finally reached the editor.
We're arranging for an interview
when a supposed contract arrived with demands.
That the interview be live, unedited,
with lighting being 20 per cent softer than is typical,
and a prohibition on certain words including
"fabricated", "fictitious", "forged",
"fraudulent", "phony", "sham", "crook", "culprit"...
It went on and on.
There was a threat of a quarter of a million dollar fee
if the contract was breached.
We said no thanks.
Craig Silverman of BuzzFeed was one of the
first journalists to recognize fake news masquerading
as the real thing.
And he's come to realize that
just pointing out the falsehoods
doesn't tend to erase them from people's minds.
Somehow they stick, even if they're untrue.
It takes effort to track these things down.
It's easier to just sort of look at it,
and even if you don't necessarily decide that's true,
it still becomes part of the furniture of yourself up there
and over time as, you know, we read similar things and are
exposed to the same information, just the fact that
we're familiar with it makes us
more likely to think that it's true.
Do readers and viewers respond well to being told that's fake,
or is there a little bit of
pushback, because people are maybe made to feel
like they've fallen for something?
Nobody likes to be told that
the thing you shared, you believed, is fake.
It's embarrassing,
and it also may go against some deeply held beliefs
that that piece of information aligned with.
And so we absolutely see people giving us blowback
when we say, "Listen, that's actually not true".
They don't really want to hear it.
♪ ♪
Adrienne: Part of what plants seeds of doubts
in a voter's mind, that salacious information
might be true, even when told it's not,
is the bombardment of falsehoods.
Once you engage with it, more shows up.
The algorithms on social media platforms make it so.
And the more the posts trigger anger within you,
the more they spread.
Anger is like internet wildfire.
The most vulnerable platform is, of course, the biggest.
The behemoth Facebook.
Roger McNamee was an early Facebook
investor and adviser to Mark Zuckerberg.
Now he's a forceful critic,
certainly was outspoken at recent parliamentary hearings
on data and the implications of its misuse.
At the end of the day though,
the most effective path to reform
would be to shut down the platforms,
at least temporarily, as Sri Lanka did.
Any country can go first.
The platforms have left you no choice.
The time has come to call their bluff.
They didn't take that seriously.
Isn't Facebook a bit too big to pull?
You can't pull Facebook off a shelf, can you?
No, but they could easily have made
changes in their business model so that
sociologically inappropriate content does not get promoted.
You see the problem with Facebook,
people think about it like a freedom of speech issue.
You know, you can't censor speech.
That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the fact that their algorithms
amplify the most negative voices, and they do it because
the business model is based on predicting human behaviour.
The fundamental underlying problem with Facebook,
with Google and YouTube, with Instagram
is that their business model
depends on exposing the worst in each of us.
♪ ♪
Adrienne: It would be wrong to say Facebook just doesn't care.
It's well aware of the criticisms, at times
has tried to stem the tide of lies.
Craig Silverman had early exchanges with the company
when he was sounding the alarm about the U.S.
election and falsehoods back in 2015.
In 2015 I was running a research project tracking online rumours,
and I warned Facebook that I was seeing
100 per cent false stories created by people to make money
going really viral on their platform,
and what they were hoping was I had some kind of a program,
computer programming or machine learning solution to say,
"Yes, in our research project we've been able to identify them
at a very high rate and here's all you would have to do".
They want to be able to put something into their systems,
program it in so that it can scale out
to the 2.7 billion people that are on the platform.
But a journalist working
manually was not of interest to them.
♪ ♪
Adrienne: It's possible then that we're on our own.
These platforms can't or won't fix this for us.
Maybe it takes being aware that where there's tension,
there's emotion, which is likely to make us react
before we really question if we're being played.
So that's the emotion,
as a news consumer, you need to watch for is anger.
Not inspiration, not hope.
Not things that make you happy, but it's -- or even sad.
It's when you're angry.
That's the red flag that there might be something up.
So in an election, the anger mechanism is the most powerful
because we know that anger is the most motivating emotion.
Now, if you see something,
you also need to question things
that confirm exactly your view of the world.
If I am also seeing things that reinforce
what I know are my biases,
that clearly show that my view is absolutely correct,
then that is also probably being provided to me
by someone who wants to torque my emotion.
I worry most about the anger one though,
because I think, particular with the foreign actors
that are trying to delegitimize democracy,
the most effective way of delegitimizing a democracy
is to make the election itself seem illegitimate.
To make the other side seem illegitimate,
and anger is a very effective tool to do that.
♪ ♪
Adrienne: The best advice? Don't let it happen.
Ask questions, demand answers, check sources.
Like it or not, it's on us.
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