Online news blackout, misinformation could leave voters in the dark, experts warn

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/03/2025 (560 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA – Canadians are in the midst of a federal election at a time when they can’t access news on the most popular social media platforms — and as U.S. President Donald Trump’s ally Elon Musk uses his own platform to meddle in the politics of other countries.

Those factors are ramping up anxiety about the information Canadians will be digesting as they go to the polls. Some experts also warn we’ll be in the dark about how it all plays out.

The current federal election is the first since Musk took over Twitter and rebranded it as X, and since Meta blocked links to news on Facebook and Instagram in Canada.

It’s also happening after both Meta and X eliminated or limited access to tools that allowed researchers to study social media activity.

Meta blocked Canadians’ access to news on its platforms in 2023 to protest the federal government’s Online News Act. Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and used the renamed platform to promote Trump before being put in charge of the president’s efforts to slash the U.S. federal government.

Musk has used X to insert himself into Canadian politics before. After Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as prime minister and Liberal leader in January, Musk expressed support for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and reposted a tweet from last year in which he called Trudeau “an insufferable tool.”

Musk’s interventions led then-heritage minister Pascale St-Onge to accuse him in January of “meddling” and to argue for the CBC as a necessary counterweight to the online influence of Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

At a press conference earlier this month, NDP MP Charlie Angus said that X may need to be “shut down during the campaign if it’s being used to manipulate voters.”

He said he fears Elections Canada isn’t ready to deal with “electoral inference” by Musk.

“We cannot be naive and think that we are not going to suffer from major interference from the malignant actors who are in Washington right now,” Angus told reporters.

On Feb. 20, Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault wrote to digital platforms citing Canadians’ concerns about the impact those platforms have on democracy.

“It is essential that Canadians be able to enjoy their freedom of expression, but they should expect to have access to accurate information and know who is trying to influence their choices,” he said in separate letters to LinkedIn, Google, Meta, Reddit, Snap, TikTok and X.

In written responses posted by Perrault’s office, TikTok, Snap and X outlined their election integrity efforts. X talked about how it approaches elections generally and did not specifically address the Canadian election.

“In the lead up to an election, we activate our Civic Integrity Policy, which typically remains in effect through election day,” the company said in its March 12 response. The policy stipulates users can’t use X to manipulate or interfere in elections and X says it will restrict the reach of content that violates the policy, including by excluding it from search results and timelines and restricting likes and reposts.

X added it also prohibits misleading media that has been “significantly and deceptively altered, manipulated, or fabricated,” is shared “in a deceptive manner or with false context,” and which is likely “to result in widespread confusion on public issues, impact public safety, or cause serious harm.”

Meanwhile, the news blackout on Facebook and Instagram, platforms used by most Canadians, undermines voters’ access to political news just as they’re making up their minds — and they might not know what they’re missing.

Aengus Bridgman, an assistant professor and director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory at McGill University, said many Canadians aren’t actually aware news isn’t available on Meta’s platforms anymore.

“There’s a very low level of understanding,” he said. “And one of the major implications of this is that Canadians might expect to find important news content — like this idea of ‘the news will find me in my day-to-day life’ — but in fact it won’t on those platforms.”

A recent study by the Media Ecosystem Observatory found Conservative MPs far outpace their Liberal and NDP counterparts in terms of online engagement — partly due to their voices being amplified on X.

In 2024, online posts from federal Conservative MPs drew 61 per cent more engagement — likes, shares and comments — than those from Liberal and NDP MPs combined.

Bridgman said there’s no good evidence indicating that the boost to Conservative voices is being driven deliberately by engineers at X. He said the algorithms work in a cycle — after some right-wing content does well, other right-wing content will do better, especially when Musk, with his massive reach on the platform, amplifies it.

Even keeping track of what’s happening in the information environment surrounding this election will be harder, since X and Meta made changes to tools they previously made available to researchers to monitor online posts.

In 2023, X introduced a paywall and restrictions to its API tool that made many academic studies impossible, and Meta eliminated CrowdTangle in 2024.

“Some of the tools that would allow us to understand the dynamics of the social media platform information ecosystem are now not accessible to researchers,” said Clifton van der Linden, an associate professor and director of the Digital Society Lab at McMaster University.

“Social media companies have increasingly stopped and inhibited researchers from accessing their platforms, for a good reason — they don’t want to be held accountable,” said Ahmed Al-Rawi, associate professor of news, social media and public communication at Simon Fraser University.

Al-Rawi noted that since the last federal election, there has been a boom in the number of alternative social media sites. They include Rumble, the Canadian company that hosts Trump’s Truth Social platform.

“Today, we have far more uncertainty than before about who is online and who is trying … to be in control of this information space,” he said.

Van der Linden said advances in digital technology and the evolution of social media have allowed for a “hyper-personalization of news and information.”

“The result is that individuals are being fed an information diet that is specifically designed to elicit particular viewpoints on certain issues, and there’s less and less evidence that we’re able to find points of consensus on what the base facts are of a particular issue or matter,” he said.

In recent survey commissioned by the CRTC, most respondents said they were at least somewhat confident in their ability to identify misinformation or “fake news” — and more than a third said they were very confident in their ability to do so.

Bridgman said Canadians have become increasingly worried about American influence in the election, even in the face of clear evidence of political interference by Russia, China and India.

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He pointed to the popularity of an influencer like Joe Rogan, who he said “makes frequent statements about Canada that are completely divorced from the reality on the ground here” but still has a massive amount of influence.

There is concern about “American voices flooding the Canadian conversation with ill-informed and hyper-political opinions in a context where the United States, while a historical ally and friend, is maybe not anymore,” Bridgman said.

The worst-case scenario, he said, would see a tiny number of American influencers “who are not interested in the well-being of Canada” manage to “dramatically sway the Canadian election one way or the other.”

Bridgman said that would be “a much more dramatic form of foreign interference than anything we’ve seen.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 28, 2025.