Slopaganda: The Inauthentic YouTube Network Selling Secession to Albertans

Résumé analytique

Alberta secession is a prominent topic in Canadian news, driven in part by a petition campaign for a referendum in 2026, and online it inhabits its own distinct social media ecosystem where democratic discourse is often interspersed with financial interests and covert influence campaigns. This incident report examines a network of 20 inauthentic YouTube channels, with nearly 40 million views, that target Albertan audiences by exploiting genuinely-held grievances and repurposing them to advance narratives normalizing secession and U.S. annexation.

These channels perform an Albertan perspective using a mix of human actors, AI-generated voiceovers, and AI avatars, but the analysis finds no evidence that any are genuinely Albertan. The AI avatars and paid American voice actors featured in the videos frequently mispronounce, miscontextualize, and misunderstand the politics they cover, and the videos contain frequent and obvious lies that draw on real news stories to reach exaggerated conclusions designed to exploit political divisions. The channels offer no identifying information tying them to real humans, organizations, or the Alberta secession movement; the only identifiable person associated with the channels is an American voice actor based in Pennsylvania, almost certainly not the organizing force behind the network. The report flags this as a potential covert influence operation, though it cannot confirm the network's origin or intent, with the available evidence inconclusive on both counts.