Canada needs academic, industry collaboration to fix the internet, not rushed legislation

The Trudeau government is learning how difficult governing the information environment can be. Bill C-10, a move to amend the Broadcasting Act to include online content, has confused everyone, including a former chairperson of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. With no clear indication of whether or not the amendment will apply to everyone with access to the internet, Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault clarified little in suggesting it could target people with large online followings. While the bill was temporarily put on hold for a review amid free speech concerns, and then subsequently signed off on by Justice Minister David Lametti as clear of charter problems, its introduction raises the question of how to govern the information environment. Many countries have introduced legislation to govern aspects of the information environment, but few land well politically. More than 100 laws have been proposed or enacted that could counter misinformation, with a rapid increase since 2017. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic provided an excuse for authoritarian states to bring in repressive policies affecting the free flow of information. Introducing new laws for the information environment can put a country on a world stage, not in the best limelight. Australia experienced this after introducing changes to its media laws aimed at forcing social media companies to support Australian journalism, leading to Facebook pulling out of the country for a week. Getting legislation right to make the internet better is tricky because three key knowledge gaps leave regulators ill-informed. First, we understand little about how the information environment works as a system; how information flows between different types of online platforms, through influencers, and into the media. Second, despite their prominence in public discussions, knowledge about the effects of influence operations and disinformation is quite limited. The majority of academic research on the effects of influence operations has focused on traditional mass media, and studies on the role of social media all look at short-term effects. We just do not know how social media shapes politics over months-to-years. Third, research on the efficacy of the main countermeasures for addressing problems like disinformation is scarcer still. While there is a large academic literature on fact-checking, almost no one has studied the most important countermeasures enacted by social media companies, such as removing prominent bad actors. While social media platforms have steadily introduced new policies and experimented with interventions to counter influence operations, there is next to no publicly available information on whether those measures work. Efforts to fill these knowledge gaps have failed for many reasons. Frictions around data sharing and publication rights have stymied research collaboration on questions such as the effect and spread of influence operations, the impact of interventions against misinformation, and the monetization of misinformation. Shockingly, there is no reliable evidence on whether Facebook’s actions against the QAnon conspiracy from August 2020 onwards reduced the potential for violence by slowing the spread of ideas, or increased it by pushing potentially violent actors onto fringe platforms where they further radicalized each other. And mismatched incentives means that no one is taking on longer-term measurement efforts that are needed to accurately assess the problem and develop and track effective solutions and frameworks to do the same. Research collaborations remain ad hoc and small-scale, despite the costs to society and potential existential risk to innovation from uninformed policy-making, resulting in a deeper divide between research, policy, and practice. Further, even when data sharing challenges are solved, the fact that academic research is seldom designed with policy development in mind means that critical learnings are not being translated and used to support evidence-based policy development. A new institution to enable effective collaboration across industry and academia is badly needed. Social media platforms are on the front lines and possess a wealth of unique data and insights. Academics bring research methods, relevant theories, and their independence lends credibility to their findings. Work that spans these groups is critical to answering important questions about governing and addressing challenges in the information environment, such as how to effectively counter malign influence operations. If Canada was serious about making the internet a better place, it would take two steps immediately. First, it should articulate rules for data sharing that provide liability protection to social media companies that collaborate with the research community in a manner that protects the security of social media user data. Doing so would open the doors to innovative studies. Second, Canada should create a multi-national institute for studying the information environment, a CERN for the internet age. CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research and it works to help “uncover what the universe is made of and how it works… by providing a unique range of particle accelerator facilities to researchers, to advance the boundaries of human knowledge.” The institute was established in 1952 by 12 European governments that recognized that by creating shared infrastructure they could foster a new era of discovery. Not only has CERN contributed significantly to scientific knowledge, but it has also had economic benefits trickling down to the companies engaging with the institute. Canada does have a history of investing in innovation in research. The New Frontiers in Research Fund has committed $275-million “to fund international, interdisciplinary, fast-breaking and high-risk research.” Canadian Heritage is currently funding research to better understand the impact of disinformation and the efficacy of countermeasures to it, but on a much smaller basis of up to $100,000 per project. Why not pool those funds into a more strategic investment? Such a multi-stakeholder research development centre would enable cross-sector collaboration with an emphasis on facilitating information sharing to test hypotheses and design intervention strategies. The centre would provide an independent space to foster research collaboration between social media platforms and external researchers, integrating a policy focus in the research design, outputs and recommendations made. Canada, with its stronger privacy laws than some other democracies, is an ideal leader in this space – that is, if the current leadership can stop tarnishing that brand with poorly conceived regulation. Alicia Wanless is the director of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Jacob N. Shapiro is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and Managing Director of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project. The Hill Times