Media Ecosystem Observatory

MEO is a collaboration between McGill University and the University of Toronto that has tracked Canada's information ecosystem since 2019.

During the 2025 federal election, MEO ran the most comprehensive independent election monitoring operation in Canadian history: weekly public assessments of bots, foreign interference, disinformation, and deepfakes, a public tipline, and coordinated data-sharing with researchers and civil society across the country. It led to more than a hundred media interviews in six weeks and coverage in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times, and the Economist. More importantly, Canada now has real-time, independent election monitoring as a standing capacity, instead of the post-hoc inquiries that used to arrive years too late.

In April 2026, MEO identified a network of twenty inauthentic YouTube channels — nearly forty million views — pushing AI-generated content that normalized Alberta's secession and its annexation by the United States. We analyzed 4,474 videos, documented the network's coordinated behaviour, published a full public assessment, and called on YouTube to disclose what it knows about who is behind it. After significant public attention, including reporting by Canada's National Observer and the CBC investigative team, the YouTube channels were taken down.

That kind of finding comes from a consistent process: we collect, document, and analyze public content from major social and digital platforms, then publish datasets, dashboards, and an open API — so researchers, journalists, regulators, and the public can examine the information environment for themselves.

Much of our research doesn't ask platforms for permission first — and can't. It's called unpermissioned research. The platforms that now mediate political and social life have little incentive to open themselves to outside scrutiny, and access that independent researchers once relied on keeps narrowing. If studying these systems required their consent, the most consequential questions about them would go unanswered — by design.

We follow the case made by Ethan Zuckerman and colleagues: public-interest research on platforms is legitimate even when a platform would prefer otherwise. We observe what's publicly visible, document how we do it, and hold ourselves to research-ethics standards — minimizing collection of personal data, protecting individuals, and being transparent about our methods.

Our reports and commentary are published under the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy. If you want to browse our data, launch the MEO interface.

Through the Canadian Digital Media Research Network (CDMRN), funded by Canadian Heritage's Digital Citizen Initiative, MEO collaborates with researchers and civil society organizations across the country — sharing data, monitoring elections and information incidents, and serving as a single point of contact for journalists covering interference and disinformation stories.

Here are some publications on the information ecosystem released by some of our collaborators in recent years: