The real foreign interference threat is on your phone
Worrying about Russian or Chinese interference is so 2023. Today, the real risk of foreign interference in our democracy is coming from social media — and it's only going to get worse. Photo by Daniel Oberhaus via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
It seems almost quaint now. When the Hogue Inquiry was established on Sept. 7, 2023, many Canadians rightly wondered if foreign interference by state actors in our political system was a problem — and if so, how big. After 39 days of public hearings, dozens of panels and policy round tables, and testimony from more than 60 experts and over 100 active participants in our political system, Justice Marie-Josée Hogue has delivered her findings. They confirm what the last few months have made abundantly clear: the problem is far bigger in scope and scale than we dared to imagine.
No, the Hogue Report didn’t find evidence of any traitors in our parliamentary midst. "While the states' attempts are troubling and there is some concerning conduct by parliamentarians,” she wrote, “there is no cause for widespread alarm.” This essentially confirms what Green Party leader Elizabeth May said back in June after reviewing the classified version of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) that found evidence of “witting and unwitting” participants in foreign influence schemes but nothing that rose to the level of disloyalty or treason. As the Hogue Report said, "the phenomenon remains marginal and largely ineffective."
What it did find is proof — as if we needed more — that the real vector for foreign influence and meddling is the social media platforms we interact with constantly, and where we consume an ever-greater proportion of our news and information about the world. "The greatest threat, the one that I believe threatens the very existence of our democracy, is disinformation,” she said in a press conference announcing the report. “This threat is all the more nefarious because the means available to counter it are limited, and very difficult to implement.”
Foreign actors, be they Chinese and Russian governments or their domestic proxies, understand this clearly. “They are increasingly sowing disinformation, in traditional media but above all on social media,” she said. “Distinguishing what is true from what is false is becoming increasingly difficult, and the consequences are, in my view, extraordinarily harmful.”
They’re not the only ones who understand this, though. So do right-wing politicians and the tech billionaires that enable them. Elon Musk effectively weaponized his social media platform on behalf of Donald Trump and the Republican Party, using his power over its algorithms to boost or hide people, ideas and stories to turn it into a massive in-kind donation that helped transform the way American voters understood the election. He’s since turned his attention on voters in the United Kingdom and Germany, where he’s embraced Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and will almost certainly be looking to influence Australia’s elections in the spring.
This is a very different kind of foreign interference than what Justice Hogue was tasked with studying. There is no subterfuge, no quiet diplomacy, and certainly no operating in the shadows. Musk isn’t trying to hide his desire to interfere with other people’s democracies the way he did in America. If anything, he’s practically bragging about it.
Rest assured, Canada will be included in his list of targets. His disdain for the current government is palpable, and he now serves as the unofficial co-president in an administration that has repeatedly floated the idea of annexing Canada if it doesn’t get what it wants. This isn’t just mere foreign interference, then — it’s a campaign of weaponized digital propaganda that’s designed to soften up our mental defences and weaken our collective resolve. We would do well to start acting accordingly.
That has to begin with protecting Canadians from these sorts of hostile foreign incursions. As Justice Hogue wrote in her report, “to build resilience against foreign interference, misinformation and disinformation, efforts must focus on supporting a healthy information environment and on rebuilding and maintaining trust in our public institutions.” Those efforts have to include much larger investments in our intellectual and cultural defences, whether by bolstering the few remaining news organizations that still trade in facts or expanding and increasing our shared digital media literacy.
They might also need to include examining the role of foreign-funded or foreign-owned media in our political discourse, whether that’s obvious propaganda outlets like the Epoch Times or more mainstream publications like Postmedia. Forcing them to be fully owned by Canadians would, at the very least, ensure that the people pulling the purse strings weren’t conflicted by their own domestic political objectives — and that Canadians weren’t at risk of being sold a narrative about their country that actually serves the interests of a different one.
And yes, these efforts should include restricting the ability of social media platforms to spread disinformation and misinformation. I have no doubt that the self-described “free speech absolutists” out there would object to the idea of this sort of gatekeeping. But some gates need to be kept, especially when they have barbarians massing at them. Yes, they would call the government that did this socialist or fascist or communist, ideological consistency be damned. Let them.
More to the point, let Canadians see how others respond here. Would the leaders of all our political parties agree to support efforts to improve our informational ecosystem and prevent its deliberate pollution by bad-faith foreign actors? Almost certainly not. Would they embrace efforts to support the production of factual news, improve online media literacy and help Canadians better sort fact from fiction? I doubt it.
That’s the conversation we should be having right now. It’s time for Canadians to see who wants to protect our democracy from foreign interference and who is actually looking to benefit from it. And it’s time for us to understand that the real threat of foreign interference is hiding in plain sight.
January 31st 2025
Comments
Reading this and knowing it to be true why would our politicians stay on a platform like that? I find it deeply irresponsible to put our nation at risk by staying on a platform that is so dangerous. Same goes for those youtube videos made by slurping apple eaters that give themselves free reign to spout what they want without any questions from the viewers. That sounds like 1984 in action. Our politicians need to get off twitter (its for twits remember?) and go on Blue Sky where they keep the loons away. Let the loons spew and rant and rave and fantacize amongst themselves and let the calmly sane find the information they need to make life somewhat bearable in these times.
Strange that you state in the article re Elon Musk that "Rest assured, Canada will be included in his list of targets. His disdain for the current government is palpable, and he now serves as the unofficial co-president in an administration that has repeatedly floated the idea of annexing Canada if it doesn’t get what it wants."
Musk has ALREADY endorsed Pollieve and PP's response was to say it would be nice for Musk to open factories in Canada and create jobs. Did his endorsement come with funding??? Is that why PP has not summitted to a security check? How do you spell Quisling?
Quisling is spelled l-a-p-d-o-g.
Alternative proximate choices: l-i-c-k-s-p-i-t-t-l-e, t-e-r-g-i-v-e-r-s-a-t-o-r.
I don't know that foreigners get to be called "Quislings." We're not actually occupied yet, except for by O & G.
No one's asked how it is that Danielle's Big Tariff Wish came ... sort of. Nothing absolutely orgasmic about it: 10% won't keep Canadian carbon fuel stock cheaper than American.
And Danielle is crowing about a new Amazon data centre in what's left of so-far relatively unspoiled Alberta.
Today I checked produce labels, and for the first time ever was happy to see Mexican, Central and South American ones.
Buying Canadian is fine: but a lot of the time the Canadian product is (unfortunately, but I have to say it) inferior and with more crapp in it than the American products. I guess next on my list is to refresh my memory as to which states are "blue" states. Now that at last I can just remember that in the US, political color branding is opposite to what it is in Canada.
Good article. And very timely!
Absolutely bang on!
Very timely (Hogue Report). "The greatest threat, the one that I believe threatens the very existence of our democracy, is disinformation,” i agree, and i think all of us need to be aware of this when "consuming" information.
Probably not enough for those who find the facts to know: the people who actually bother to look for them (let alone find them) need to inform others. And it needs to be on an ongoing basis, with much repetition, because people's memories "in the digital age" have eroded so badly that what they know one day, they forget by the time the next tranche of lies rolls around.
If you have kids, start in the pre-kindergarten years, to teach them that their own observation means something, and what it means is not that they're wrong when the teacher or other kids tells them otherwise.
I think that women's attempt to claim their rightful place in the sixties caused a major social upheaval that's still very much playing out because of JUST how much it challenged the status quo of the patriarchy. But the fact that Trump got away with winning AFTER openly slagging women was our warning that in the primal battle of the sexes, ("bros vs. hos"), as ongoing and endemic as racism, a shift had taken place.
This is another example of the "hiding in plain sight" Max mentions because the generally accepted terms "post-racism" and "post-feminism" have worked to mollify most people, but probably women more than "non-white" people because after all, we imagined that by virtue of constituting HALF of humanity, AND with Mother Nature as our sweepingly powerful proxy in the context of climate change's existential threat, we were making real headway, right? Trump brushed that aside with that one locker room comment that broke our hearts all over again.
At a basic level, OUR fight feeling more sound became a proxy for much (Yoko Ono said it best, "women are the niggers of the world"), fueling what was dismissed by the right as "virtue signaling," but distilled down to one word, "woke," the current catch-all that taps into a lurking, Freudian male resentment of female power generally, starting with their mothers and moving on to sexual and then life partners.
I think this explains some of the enduring avidity and appeal of this world-wide cult of "Trumpism," but the overweening male ego driven to rule the world can't be ignored either, especially when it's so clearly personified now by Elon Musk.
As the richest man in the world, and because of where he's been able to position himself, he's now our ultimate enemy, and as Max says, having control of the intellectual wing of a social media that has collectively captured so many of us in the tower of babble truly could ultimately seal the deal. We're halfway there.
The truth always hides in plain sight, waiting for us to find it, as this poem by Gwendolyn Brooks says:
"The toys are all grotesque
And not for lovely hands; are dangerous,
Serrate in open and artful places. Rise.
Let us combine. There are no magics or elves
Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must
Wizard a track through our own screaming weed."
Maybe. But don't forget Nellie McClung. My grandmother (like McClung, born in the 18th C) was still sputtering mad in the 1950s about having been deemed a "non-person" I can't say my grandfather was sexist: he was mainly self-educated, loved Shakespeare and wrote poetry some of which survived. One verse spoke of "sauce for the gander" being "sauce for the goose." Both of them were on title to their property, though I don't know how, exactly, that came to be, or why.
But when he wanted to sell the farm, she said No, and that was that.
When his mother-in-law (a product of the 18th C as well) wanted a turn driving his Model T, he laughed and told her she couldn't even ride a bicycle, so no, she couldn't drive a car. She was a determined woman, and in her late 60s or early 70s, learned in short order to ride her young grandson's bicycle, and arrived at her son's farm, conveyed in high style by a bicycle pedalled by her own self, to claim a turn driving. And got it. There was no such thing as "because you're a woman" much less "just a woman." I was born late in the first half of the 20th C, and never heard that I couldn't do one thing or another just because I was female.
I got that kind of BS the first time at UBC, from my math professor, who was in fact a Dean of the university at the time, and professor, and shortly thereafter became its president. His often vocalized opinion was that "girls" didn't belong in his class. I'd never encountered suchlike before, and had nothing in my experience to understand it for what it was. I felt demeaned and diminished. There's no mention of his well-known sexism, not to mention a lousey attitude toward Hispanics and other immigrant populations in the Wikipedia article about him. mentions his "sense of humor" ... I guess women and Hispanics "just couldn't take a joke, eh?"
The popular feminist movement at university at that time was all about burning bras. Not terribly productive, if I say so myself. I thought it was something that only "rich kids" would do, as they'd not had to work for the money to buy clothes. I could go to university only because of scholarships, fee reductions based on high-school final exams (written and marked by the BC government), and federal student loans, which were brand new at the time, came with no grant portion, no loan forgiveness, and no deferral or payment schedule based on income.
The earliest "system" feminists were all women of means, as well.
The feminism of the 60s mainly produced a lot of low-paid workers, and resulted in low wages for men as well. Families were not better off unless they were what was then known as "middle class" meaning belonging to a licensed profession. Before then, doctors married nurses, lawyers married secretaries, accountants married grocers' daughters. By the late 60s and early 70s, professionals married other professionals, while the working class found spouses also working class. That was before tradesmen were scarce enough that they could charge so much that they could command the incomes they do now.
Women still form a small minority of C-suite occupants, and still earn less than men. The shrinkage of the gap is mainly because men's wages overall fell, not because women's rose.
As for Freud, boys don't "hate" their mothers. Most of how Freud's been translated into English is a crock. I've never read him in his own language, so have no idea what he really thought. Or their sisters, or the girls in the neighbourhood, unless and until they're taught to.
Boys I've known who saw their mothers abused by their fathers not only try to defend their mothers, but try to take on a role as "defender of girls" as well, though they sometimes try to do it in illogical ways: they are still too young to have enough experience of the world to be very effective.
I think boys get pretty awful messaging in entertainment, especially digital entertainment, about what "real masculinity" is. Girls aren't any better off, in terms of what they learn about being a girl from social media.
Kids don't get much opportunity for actually *real* world learning. Social exposure, yes, through competitive sports. But knowing anything real about anything? Not so much. That goes for girls and boys both.
I cancelled my X account months ago and have not missed it. Try it, you might like it.
Justice Marie-Josée Hogue and Max are not only correct, but 20 years late in raising this alarm. Living in rural Alberta, the hotbed of extreme right Canadian conservatism, misinformation and social media rule. I encounter it every day with my fellow seniors or just listening to conversations any where. Even our local politicians are brainwashed. Gaslighting is named after a movie and means psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts. (Merriam-Webster).
Manipulation.
It works with neoliberalism politics and economics which is the far right, by promoting misleading information in order to protect their status and or profits and became influential with Reaganomics and Thatcherism in the late 1970s and jumped on by the fossil fuel billionaires Koch Brothers who spend millions yearly funding USA PACs political action committees
Their are many accurate sources, the most recent one being 2024 book The Invisible Doctrine, the Secret History of Neoliberalism.
The biggest threats to our Canadian democracy are Pierre Poilievre and Big Oil. Everything Poilievre spouts is exaggerated, misleading, a total fabrication or a lie. Much like Trump in the USA.
Now that billionaires control all major social media they are not interested in democracy but in profits and control.
We in Canada are on a fast track to plutocracy led by Manning, Stephen Harper and Poilievre
"There is no subterfuge, no quiet diplomacy, and certainly no operating in the shadows."
While I understand that the obscenely rich tech plutobros are happy to stand front and centre, kissing rings and behinds as needed, the operations of their platforms certainly fall into subterfuge and shadow-lurking, with "quiet diplomacy" being accomplished through "contributions" paid to various individuals seeking, or holding, public office; particularly in the U.S.
I maintain that the absurd valuations of leading tech companies is due to a near total lack of regulation and a lack of enforcement of existing regulation, such as anti-monopoly/trust and, it seems to me, product liability.
The harm these platforms cause to societies -- democracies, particularly -- is incalculable, as is the harm done to individuals -- and entire cohorts -- within societies. Not to mention harm done by these global, free-from-oversight monopolies to the existing, broader economy which they so proudly "disrupt". Autocracies weaponize the platforms to maintain control, and are, presumably, ever-so-happy to have them around. And, if a "Spring" should happen to erupt, the brief historical record indicates that they merely block the platform, launch a round of disinformation or create their own platform to serve their needs.
It's time liberal democracies also considered blocking the platforms until such time as a well-considered suite of regulations is brought to bear upon them. Of course, they will scream bloody murder (as will many users), and that behaviour would be entirely understandable; the platforms vacuum up, as single corporate monopolies, a huge chunk of global advertising dollars ("[Meta] reported revenue of $48.4 billion for the fourth quarter of 2024 [alone]" : Reuters).
Their greed is never satiated; they endeavour to continue wealth accumulation by maximizing the hours their users spend glued to their screens by provoking them, via content "suggestion" algorithms, to anger and, over time, intentionally stoking that anger until it becomes rage. Whatever keeps users glued to the screens in order to feed them more ads which increases revenue. Social cohesion be damned.
Just as standards for car bumpers are set by gov't institutions, so can there be guardrails that prevent the destructive designs that exist within this (still young) product class called social media. It's time we set and enforced rules that enforce accountability to accompany the free speech.
As a first step, a hearty, public discussion should be launched, I think, to consider if parliament ought to ban parliamentarians from holding or maintaining social media accounts -- at least on the known-to-be scurrilous platforms -- directly or by proxy.
I can't recommend too strongly that people read books that describe what goes on behind the companies that have hijacked the promise of the Internet.
Here is a short list to get you going:
1. The Chaos Machine (Max Fisher)
2. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff)
3. The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (Tim Wu)
4. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (Tim Wu)
Any number of others.
Just like in the grocery price enquiry, the necessary questions weren't asked.
Perhaps a question that needs be asked is where the social media BS comes from. Hint: it's the same place as the Covid disinformation and the ideas of the benighted "Freedom Convoy" came from. Who benefits when a country's populace is so divided, and its electorate keeps on voting against the interests of themselves, their families, friends and neighbours?
Who benefits from all the lies?
Hint: election campaign finance is involved, lobbying kickbacks are involved, revolving doors are ... unh ... continually revolving.
I.e., the answer is still "follow the money."
Did you mean the Hostage Convoy?
I am cancelling my National Observer subscription and put my money on X.com made for people who can tell the difference between signal and noises.
Max Fawcett just copies and pastes hate stream media nonsense disinformation noises about Elon Musk.
Oh dear: a real life example of the dynamics mentioned in the article and by commenters.
Don't take Max's word for it. Find out how Musk treated his first few wives. Find out how he financed his "successes" and how much success those businesses have actually had: and how many people have died as a result, or lost their shirts.
Find out about how he and Trump are idealogical brothers, when it comes to financing fraud and milking government. Find out how many millions he's got from six ... all different ... departments of the US government, largely by inflating the existing worth of his enterprises.
Find out how well he pays his people, how well he treats his employees, and how readily he fires them for no real reason at all.
Don't take people at their word: check out how true their word *is*, first!!!
Check out @Pierre Poilievre on YouTube ... and what he has to say about what Mark Carney said just hours earlier. But first listen to what Mark Carney actually said: it was live-streamed.
Trudeau didn't do much of anything about the sorry mess of things left by his predecessor, who was instrumental in forming, and currently heads an international organization promoting far-right, anti-democratic politics (which he himself practised).
Oh dear. In fact I do follow Elon Musk, and I judge him by his accomplishments, words and actions that are very much inline with his Master Plans Part 3 now, and his mission to accelerate the transition to a sustainable future for humanity. Have you missed parts 1&2?
https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pd
Look closely, he does things for the benefits of humanity, and that includes you and me. And you know what, I don’t care if his farts may or may not stink more or less than yours or mine.
Do yourself a favour, listen to him directly instead of the disinformation peddled by the Press agencies and the hate stream media that can’t even tell the difference between a sign of ‘love to you all’ with you-know-what the ignoramus are peddling today about his so-called far right. This is a fabricated reputation by ‘les médias menteurs.’
I agree that it is hard to reconcile his association with Trump, but I understand why. Let’s remember that Elon Musk was Democrate before and even voted for Biden, but the Dems have weaponized government agencies and the justice system against Elon and his companies. I don’t remember Biden ever pronouncing the word Tesla and never acknowledged what SpaceX has done or any of his companies.
I don’t think that Elon that paid the highest amount of income tax in the world ever ($13B) needs to feel guilty about being part of the political system. I hope you don’t believe that other wealthy people are not intervening in the political process. Elon does it openly and transparently for everyone to see and even invites critiques, which make him an easy target for the hate stream media.
Elon has a fiduciary responsibility to protect his companies, so you can imagine his joy of being part of a political party that will not try to destroy him like the Dems did for the last four years. Would you not feel the same? I would.
I listened to Musk directly. Back in 2015, Musk gave the most succinct (±15-minute) presentation on the climate emergency out there. Now he's supporting, hanging out with and doing the dangerous bidding of the world's biggest climate change denier.
How do you (how could I) jibe those two direct observations of Musk?
p.s. C'mon. You have to admit that his alleged "love to you all for loving me" was an awkward one (bless him, Musk is an awkward fellow) that looked an awful lot like a "you know what" salute. Given that T**** is literally practising fascism, it was hard to see the love for for all the symbolism.
p.p.s. I can tell you from experience that Twitter can be an extremely nasty place, especially for women who know anything about the climate emergency. You wouldn't believe the names I've been called for trying to share empirical evidence and the relevant laws of physics with climate change deniers. I've recently left the platform.
Well, Julie, I agree with you that it is hard to reconcile this association of Musk and Trump; they are so different; Elon does things according to Tesla’s Master Plan. This is the best way to understand Elon. He is wide open like an open book, transparent like no one else I know on this planet.
But there are only two options. If you followed how the Dems have smeared Elon and his businesses for the last four years, I cannot blame Elon for joining the party that will not try to destroy his enterprises and compromise his Master plan.
P.s. sorry, I have trouble with people that cannot distinguish between a sign meaning ‘my love to you’ and one that the hate stream media is peddling and copied and pasted by the ignoramus crowd.
p.p.s I became a member of Xtwitter because of Elon and because it is aligned with his mission to accelerate the transition to a sustainable future for humanity. You cannot achieve it with lies and disinformation. I am leaving the mainstream media exactly because of all the lies and disinformation I heard about climate change, renewable energies, electrification of transport, EV and, of course, in all the nonsense written about Elon and Tesla by clickbait journalists.
Of course you can read extremes on X too, but I find more space in between for common sense and humanity than MSM and I can get on with life with what I believe in. My life is like a jazz song; it is improvised until it sounds good, then I adopt it. I adopted X.com.
I lived in US for decades and was super-disappointed when I escaped back to Canada to find that Canada had become Americanized while I was gone. They seem to admire the US like a big rich brother, but there is no social safety net, education is only for the rich, you pay $800/month for health care (and that's a bargain), and mass shootings practically daily. And people keep voting to keep it that way. So, rich get richer and poor spend their whole lives waiting for a crumb to fall in their laps, not knowing better because they can't afford to travel and realize they are living in a third world country.