Canada’s minister of heritage announced the government would be spending almost $300,000 in taxpayer money to fund a university project to create a website and browser tool to combat online misinformation.
“Discerning fact from fiction in our online world has become an increasingly difficult problem,” reads a statement from Canadian Heritage. “However, with the growing sophistication of online misinformation, it can be challenging to trust what you read online.”
Minister of Canadian Heritage Pascal St-Onge announced that funding would be given to the Université de Montréal to develop a user-friendly website and a web-browser extension “dedicated to detecting misinformation.”
“The challenge of navigating for reliable information online and on social media only keeps getting more difficult. Canadians deserve better. Thriving democracies require informed citizenry, and Canadians deserve the right to trust the information they need to inform their choices,” said St-Onge in a statement on Monday.
“That’s why projects like this one play such a vital role in helping build and maintain that trust in Canadians.”
The university will apply AI tools to “detect and counteract” misinformation that is spreading online in Canada “across languages, modalities (text, audio, video, images), and sources.”
According to Canadian Heritage, the technology will involve “behavioral nudges” to quell the proliferation of fake news stories which will alert users to potential misinformation and reduce their “likelihood of sharing this content.”
The government believes this will enhance public knowledge and media integrity as Canadians will be able to “quickly verify online content.”
The Trudeau government will allocate $292,675 for the project through the Digital Citizen Contribution Program, which was created to provide financial assistance for research projects that fight online misinformation.
“The prevalence of social media platforms in our daily lives has profoundly affected how Canadians interact with their government, the media, civil society organizations and each other,” said Minister of Public Safety Dominic LeBlanc in a statement on Monday.
LeBlanc said that social media has allowed for citizens to spread false information while participating in the public discourse.
“While these new platforms have empowered citizens to participate in public debate, they have also facilitated the spread of false information,” said LeBlanc. “Through this funding, we are supporting democratic resilience by providing Canadians with tools to verify online content, thereby strengthening their ability to assess the quality of information they come across online.”
The Trudeau government tabled the Online Harms Act in February, which it purports will safeguard Canadians from “online hate and other forms of harmful content.”
However, a survey conducted in March revealed that many Canadians don’t support the government being the arbiter of what constitutes online harm, nor do they think it is even possible from a logistical standpoint.
Of the 1,527 survey respondents, 70% said they support the government’s plan to regulate the internet, while 25% said they didn’t.
Within the cohort of supporters however, only 41% believe that the Online Harms Act will actually make the internet a safer place with another 32% saying it won’t.
Even fewer believed that the government could regulate online hate without clamping down on free speech, with a minority of 10% of respondents saying that they “completely trust” the government.
