Mis- and Disinformation during the 2021 Canadian Federal Election

Executive Summary

The Canadian Election Misinformation Project set out to document, evaluate, and protect against mis- and disinformation during the 2021 Canadian federal election. A team of researchers examined information flows in Canada during the election period across social and broadcast media and conducted a large nationally representative survey focused on misinformation attitudes, perceptions, and exposure.

The project found widespread misinformation across all social media platforms examined and all communities followed. COVID-19 misinformation played an important role in the campaign, with protesters opposing pandemic health measures and vaccination policies, in many cases fuelled by mis- and disinformation, hounding several candidates and pushing COVID-19-related concerns to the top of the campaign agenda; claims of widespread voter fraud also circulated, echoing narratives from the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Despite this, the overall campaign and election results were not driven by misinformation. Discussion of misinformation incidents was limited to a few discrete events, most notably Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland's tweet of an edited video suggesting Erin O'Toole wanted to privatize healthcare, and foreign interference discussion centered only on China. Canadians were similarly exposed to true and false stories during the campaign but were generally able to detect false stories, and truthful stories were more likely to be believed. Chinese officials and state media commented on the election with an apparent aim of convincing Canadians of Chinese origin to vote against the Conservative Party, and misleading information circulated on Chinese-language social media platforms, but the study found no evidence that this interference had a significant impact on the overall election.

Canadians are concerned about mis- and disinformation and believe it threatens Canadian democracy, but did not perceive misinformation as central to the campaign: most believe the election was safe from foreign interference, only a minority believed misinformation was a serious problem during the election, and a quarter of Canadians reported seeing misinformation, with few able to recall specific incidents. A strong majority nonetheless believe misinformation threatens Canadian democracy, polarizes Canadians, and threatens social cohesion. The project also observed the rise of a "big tent" of misinformation, in which groups holding false or conspiratorial beliefs about one topic tend to adopt similarly distorted views across a broad range of topics, including vaccines, climate change, and election integrity, while growing distrustful of authoritative sources and turning to alternative, ideologically narrow information sources.

The report identifies vulnerabilities requiring a collective public response: a fracturing of the Canadian information ecosystem into echo chambers, increasing difficulty detecting disinformation and coordinated information operations amid a growing landscape of minimally moderated platforms, a gap between the reality and perceptions of mis- and disinformation, and an emerging set of Canadians deeply distrustful of democratic institutions who are now networked into a global distrustful community. The report offers four recommendations: develop a coordinated community of practice to tackle misinformation in Canada; engage in strategic countering of misinformation based on origin, engagement, and potential damage; increase public resilience through more transparent government communication, better science communication, more diverse algorithmic news feeds, support for local journalism, and reduced toxic partisanship; and extend efforts to counter misinformation beyond election periods, including possibly broadening the regulatory regime.