Senator Simons: Thank you very much, Senator Kutcher. As a child of the Cold War, it seems strange to stand in the Senate of Canada and talk about Russian plots. It seems like something from a Cold War movie. I wouldn’t have thought that it was plausible until we saw the reporting in the United States about Russian actors manipulating Facebook to create mob mentalities, creating both fake Republican pages and fake Democrat pages and then setting the pages against each other.

So it’s incumbent upon us, first of all, as citizens — all of us, not just senators — to practise what I call “social media hygiene.” Don’t share something if you don’t know where it’s from or what it is. The more outrageous and anger-provoking the post, the less likely it is to be true.

I have sometimes seen people retweeting stuff they know is nonsense ironically or to call it out. Don’t do that because when you share things and interact with them, the algorithm doesn’t know you are “hate-sharing.” The algorithm just thinks, “Oh, people want to see that.” So be careful in how you use social media. We talk about safe sex. Well, practise safe tweeting.

It’s also incumbent upon us — in an age in which so many people get their information filtered through social media platforms — to think about what the correct responsibility of those platforms should be and what our responsibility should be as legislators to ensure that — not that we’re censoring debate — we’re providing some kind of filter for the information so that all of the lies do not get the algorithmic juice to rise to the top.

I think it’s fair to ask the major platforms, whether that’s Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or all the new ones that come along, what their protocols are to guard against malicious campaigns by foreign actors that are clearly designed to poison democratic debate in Western democracies.

Hon. Stan Kutcher: Senator Simons, thank you very much for your extremely passionate, well-conducted and well-thought-out speech on this issue.

There certainly seems to be a coordinated disinformation campaign specifically around Bill S-233, but it’s not the only one we are seeing. Bill C-67 is another one, which isn’t even in the federal Parliament.

However, in addition to the conspiracy theories that have infiltrated all this communication, there has been increasing concern recently — although this has been going on for some time now — about the role of malicious state actors, particularly Russia, in initiating much of this kind of campaign, or in amplifying campaigns currently under way, with the clear intent of destabilizing democratic institutions.

You mentioned some ideas that we as parliamentarians need to be involved in for addressing this. Are there any specific things you can share with us that you think parliamentarians should be doing to address those kinds of disinformation campaigns?