Election Monitoring

We have monitored the information ecosystem around Canadian elections since 2019, tracking how Canadians encounter and are affected by misinformation during campaigns through real-time social media monitoring, national surveys, and rapid analysis.

The program began with the Digital Democracy Project — a joint initiative of the Public Policy Forum and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University that monitored the 2019 federal election, producing a series of research memos during the campaign, a final report on the resilience of Canada’s digital media ecosystem, and the Digital Ecosystem Research Challenge. It was the direct precursor to the Media Ecosystem Observatory.

Since then we have monitored the information ecosystem across federal and provincial campaigns — the 2021 and 2025 federal elections, the 2022 Quebec election, the 2023 Alberta election, and the 2024–2025 British Columbia election — including the Canadian Election Misinformation Project and the Quebec Election Misinformation Project.