Canada's Information Ecosystem Is Weakening
In the shadow of the 2016 U.S. election — an era marked by concerns around disinformation, filter bubbles, and foreign interference — at the Media Ecosystem Observatory we began studying Canada's information ecosystem during the 2019 federal election. To our surprise, Canada was remarkably resilient to those threats: polarization was low, trust in journalism was high, and news consumption remained strong.
Fast forward to 2025, and things are very different. Almost everything that gave us resilience is getting much, much worse.
What changed? Three major shifts have fundamentally weakened our information ecosystem:
1. The collapse of journalism. Trust and consumption levels have plummeted, and Canadian journalism is banned on Meta platforms, resulting in the loss of 11 million incidental views per day.
2. An ideological shift in Silicon Valley has changed platform dynamics. The era of platforms pursuing trust and safety and content moderation efforts is over. Minimal transparency has turned into complete opacity, and platforms are retreating from regulatory and legal obligations.
3. There are new methods of information manipulation that are much harder to regulate. The combination of AI and bots have made information manipulation more cheap, accessible, and scalable. And the rise of influencers — whose reach now exceeds that of all other actors — poses a new vulnerability, as they are accountable only to their audiences and funders.
What's also new in 2025 is the emergence of America as a global disinformation threat. Canadians are now more concerned about covert foreign interference from the U.S. than the three countries that were at the centre of the foreign interference commission report: China, India, and Russia.
Canada's safeguards are far weaker than they used to be, and during election time, having a robust and reliable information system is essential. From now until the election, MEO is leading a non-partisan, data-based election monitoring effort, at cdmrn.ca.