Canada's Election Laws Aren't Ready for Social Media Influencers

Executive Summary

Social media influencer marketing — where an influencer is paid or otherwise compensated to share certain messages — is increasingly popular in political campaigns around the world. In Canada, influencers have been enlisted to volunteer their voice during the COVID-19 pandemic and paid as part of government marketing strategies, while in the US influencer marketing is growing among prominent political parties and advocacy groups. In the US, the Philippines, India, Brazil and Nigeria, influencers are being strategically used in disinformation campaigns, to spread hate and harassment, and to secretly influence election outcomes. Their appeal lies in the trust and social connection their followers feel toward them, but these same qualities let them be used to evade transparency measures and spending limits or to distance a campaign from a message.

Canada's federal election laws are not ready for this shift. The Election Modernization Act, in effect for the 2019 federal election, mandated digital ad registries for large platforms, requiring a copy of partisan and election advertisements and information on who paid for them. But these registries only capture messages placed through platforms' own advertising systems and are built around the concept of a "placement cost" — a fee paid to the platform for a sponsored or boosted ad. This definition is rooted in a broadcast-era media environment, where placing and promoting a message were one and the same, and it ignores the many ways that system can be circumvented.

Campaigns are getting creative: they can pay marketing agencies to inflate engagement, or hire influencers to place and promote political content outside the official ad systems, skirting registries, spending limits and platform terms of service. Disclosure of compensation is inconsistent across platforms, compensation is often indirect (gifts, samples, paid trips) and hard to trace, and influencers may not even know they should report it. Complicating matters, some influencers genuinely express political views without any compensation, so their content can look like paid promotion when it is not. Dubois argues Canada must begin a public discussion now — ahead of the next elections — about how to identify and categorize influencers, close the loopholes, and set the transparency standards to which they should be held.