In 2021, the Centre for Media, Technology & Democracy worked alongside the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University and the Centre d’études sur les médias (Centre for Media Studies) at Laval University on a report analyzing the role of funding in the dissemination of mis/disinformation online across different news websites in Canada.
This event launched the report with a panel discussion to discuss the findings and their implications for the industry, as well as wider issues of mis/disinformation online and how they can be best addressed in the Canadian media ecosystem.
News websites have financial incentives to spread disinformation, in order to increase their online traffic and, ultimately, their advertising revenue. Meanwhile, the dissemination of disinformation has disruptive and impactful consequences. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a recent example. By disrupting society’s shared sense of accepted facts, these narratives undermine public health, safety and government responses.
To combat ad-funded disinformation, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) deploys its assessment framework to rate news domains’ risk of disinforming their readers. These independent, trusted and neutral ratings are used by advertisers, ad tech companies and platforms, to redirect their online ad spending in line with their brand safety and disinformation risk mitigation strategies.
GDI defines disinformation as ‘adversarial narratives that create real world harm’, and the GDI risk rating provides information about a range of indicators related to the risk that a given news website will disinform its readers by spreading these adversarial narratives. These indicators are grouped under the index’s Content and Operations pillars, which respectively measure the quality and reliability of a site’s content and its operational and editorial integrity.
The launch event will see panelists discuss the findings of the research, and discuss the impacts of those findings, before taking Q&A from the audience:
Ron Lund, President and CEO of ACA
Jean LaRose, former CEO of APTN
Michel Cormier from RSF/JTI (also Exec. Director of the Canadian Leaders’ Debate Commission)
Kathy English, Canadian Journalism Foundation Chair and former Public Editor at the Toronto Star
Clare Melford, GDI’s Co-founder and Executive Director
Aengus Bridgman, Research fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, McGill University
Introduced by Amy Harris, Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University, closed by Colette Brin, Laval University.