OTTAWA — Facebook, Google and Microsoft have signed onto a declaration promising a dozen initiatives to protect the integrity of the Canadian election this fall — including working to remove phoney social-media accounts and fake content.
But other tech giants, including Twitter, have not signed on.
The “Canada Declaration on Electoral Integrity Online” was announced Monday by Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould, just hours before an international committee of politicians was to begin a three-day meeting in Ottawa aimed at figuring out how best to protect citizens’ privacy and democratic fairness in the age of social media.
“I wish to stress that the Wild-West online era cannot continue,” Gould told the House of Commons.
“Inaction is not an option. Disinformation must not stand.”
She appealed to other digital platforms “who are operating in Canada and who care about protecting our election to join Microsoft and Facebook and publicly commit to meeting these expectations” laid out in the declaration.
She did not mention Google but the company later said it had informed the minister’s office prior to her statement that it was supporting the declaration.
Watch: Gould says she’s not feeling great about social media co-operation ahead of election
Members of the international grand committee on big data, privacy and democracy are to grill representatives from a host of internet giants — Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon and Mozilla — on what they’re doing, or not doing, to prevent abuse. Many politicians from all three major parties in Canada have come to the conclusion that government needs to regulate the tech giants because they can’t be relied upon to regulate themselves.
Indeed, the NDP’s new democratic-reform critic Daniel Blaikie dismissed Gould’s new declaration as meaningless “lip service” because it does not compel any social-media company to comply with Canada’s privacy laws or do anything else to protect against foreign interference, disinformation and other cyberthreats during the coming election campaign.
Real protection would mean “taking a regulatory approach rather than going cap in hand to social media giants and asking them to pretty-please change the way they do things,” Blaikie said.
Companies commit to fight disinformation
Still, by signing onto Gould’s declaration, some of the largest internet companies at least signalled a willingness to voluntarily tackle some of the problems that politicians fear threaten democracies around the globe.
“Joining the Canada Declaration on Electoral Integrity reflects how deeply committed we are to playing a meaningful role in promoting a healthy and resilient democracy,” said Kevin Chan, head of public policy for Facebook Canada.
“We support principles aimed at affording all Canadians access to technology, control over their data and peace of mind when it comes to their online privacy and security,” said Colin McKay, Google Canada’s head of public policy.
Among other things, Facebook, Google and Microsoft commit to:
For Facebook, Chan said that will mean going “over and above” the recently legislated requirement that digital platforms create an online registry for political ads. Facebook will not just identify the source of each ad, it will also provide information on how much was spent on it and the target audience. It will also use artificial intelligence to try to seek out political ads that do not comply with the law.
Chan acknowledged eliminating cyberthreats poses a huge challenge.
“It’s a bit of an arms race, right? So as we find ways to prevent bad actors from doing certain things, they’re going to want to evolve and they’re going to want to find different ways to do it and then we then want to counteract by further evolving our systems and our processes,” he said in an interview.
Politicians initially embraced social media as an innovative and inexpensive way to engage and communicate with more voters. But their enthusiasm has waned since the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, which was bedevilled by disinformation, fake social-media accounts and hacked emails aimed at sowing dissension and manipulating the outcome — much of it engineered by Russia.
Their trust in social media evaporated following last year’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which it was revealed that the personal data of some 87 million Facebook users had been improperly shared with the political consultancy firm for use in the 2016 U.S. campaign and Britain’s Brexit referendum.
The international grand committee was formed after that scandal and held its first meetings in London last year. Politicians from Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Ecuador, Morocco, Estonia, Ireland and Singapore are taking part in the second set of meetings in Ottawa this week.