Publications

The Canadian news environment is being reshaped by platform decisions, shifting audience habits, and the rise of new voices in political information. This brief examines how Canadians consume news and define journalism, drawing on a national survey of 1,518 respondents and analysis of nearly 9 million social media posts from Canadian news organizations across multiple platforms during 2023-2025.

A technical audit of four widely-used AI chatbots (Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, Meta AI, and OpenAI ChatGPT), testing their responses to harmful requests. The audit found significant variation in safety measures across products, with roughly one in three tests across all four resulting in harmful content generation. Conducted in relation to Canada's Safe Social Media Act (Bill C-34).

A policy memo accompanying the Online Harms AI Audit technical brief, outlining recommendations arising from testing four widely-used AI chatbots for safety against harmful requests, in the context of Canada's Safe Social Media Act (Bill C-34).

A coordinated network of 340 Facebook pages, primarily operated from Vietnam, distributes AI-fabricated news stories targeting users in Canada, the US, the UK, and Europe. The network generates engagement through false narratives about politics, celebrities, and sports, driving traffic to fabricated-news websites monetized via advertising. Canadian public and private organizations inadvertently fund this operation through legitimate ad campaigns.

Scholars have suggested that we are experiencing a global crisis in trust in elections, with political polarization and misinformation often cited as reasons for distrust. However, empirical evaluations of perceptions of election integrity over time remain scarce. Using data from the Canadian Election Study from 2008 to 2021 and the Media Ecosystem Observatory from 2021, we show that trust in electoral management bodies, measured in terms of confidence, satisfaction, and fairness, has significantly declined since 2019 among Canadians with a right-wing ideology or who support right-wing parties. We find evidence that rising affective polarization, right-wing and social media consumption, and belief in US-based election fraud narratives are associated with significant trust declines in electoral integrity. The results identify key factors linked to the recent politicization of citizens’ perceptions of election fairness and have important implications for the health of our democracy.

A national survey of 1,306 Canadians found strong backing for platform accountability measures, including age-appropriate design requirements (84%), stronger legal accountability (82%), and an independent regulator with enforcement powers (72%). Canadians prefer design modifications over outright bans and support equivalent protections for AI chatbot services.

An examination of seven age verification methods recognized under the UK's Online Safety Act and their applicability to Canada. The analysis concludes that age verification is technically achievable and already deployed at scale, but that its effectiveness depends on broader governance structures rather than technology alone. Facial age estimation is found most viable for under-16 restrictions, though robust privacy protections and independent oversight remain essential.

A commentary on the redrafted Online Harms Act (now the Digital Safety Act), drawing on submissions to the AI Task Force and the Expert Panel on Online Safety. It sets out four design choices to watch in the new bill: amend rather than rewrite the C-63 architecture; pause rather than ban under-16 access; include consumer-facing chatbots with bespoke obligations; and build an independent, technically capable regulator.

This paper investigates how gender shapes online political communication during an electoral campaign by analyzing the 2025 Canadian federal election. Drawing on a novel dataset of 193,620 social media posts from 921 candidates, we employ transformer-based topic modeling and a linguistic gender axis to quantify communicative patterns. Our analysis reveals three key findings. First, a statistically robust stylistic difference exists between the discourse of male and female candidates. Second, this gendered linguistic gap is not merely an artifact of ideology; it persists systematically across all major political parties, demonstrating its robustness across partisan contexts. Third, thematic analysis shows that women more frequently employ community-action framing across a range of policy-related discussions, while men place greater emphasis on economic and industrial issues during the electoral period. While the magnitudes of these effects are shaped by Canada's electoral environment, the mechanisms we identify offer a transferable framework for measuring gendered discourse in other political contexts. By documenting these patterns at scale, this study provides a high-resolution portrait of gender's persistent role in contemporary political communication and a replicable methodological toolkit for its study.

When we set out to design Gen(Z)AI: Canada's Youth Assembly on Artificial Intelligence, we were animated by an urgent conviction: that young people, among the most exposed to and affected by AI systems, should not merely be subjects of this technology, but architects of its governance. The recommendations presented here are evidence-based, consensus-built, and grounded in the realities of how AI and online harms are actually experienced by young people.

Alberta secession is a prominent topic in Canadian news, driven in part by a petition campaign for a referendum in 2026. Online, Alberta secession inhabits its own distinct social media ecosystem. Social media conversations can be difficult for the public to navigate, as democratic discourse is often interspersed with financial interests and covert influence campaigns. This incident report focuses on a network of 20 inauthentic YouTube channels boosting Alberta secession and U.S.-annexation.

The internet is a vital fixture in how young Canadians live, learn, and connect. Yet as national calls for digital age assurance regulation on platforms and AI systems intensify, safeguarding youth online has become an urgent priority. This forum report captures youth perspectives on AI and age assurance from the Gen(Z)AI Halifax forum.