June 13, 2024
Longer description:
Canada’s federal government has recently released a first draft of Bill-63, which includes an Online Harms Act. This act aims to develop a new federal commission which will have the power to demand data from digital platforms to share with researchers.
This presentation explores Canada’a recent data transparency efforts from the position of researchers at the Samara Centre for Democracy, and considers the potential for the new legislation to make a meaningful contribution to safeguarding Canadian and global democratic norms.
The Samara Centre is a non-partisan charity that produces research on Canadian democracy to support a resilient democracy in Canada. For the last three years, they have run the SAMbot project, which uses machine learning to evaluate abusive content sent to Canadian political candidates during elections. This project illuminates the realities of abuse on the digital campaign trail and the barriers to civic engagement created by technology’s influence on our democratic culture. Through this project, there have been difficulties in accessing social media data for public research purposes, and the potential for research in the public interest to meaningfully inform better digital legislation efforts when data sources are transparent and accessible.
Grounded in the speakers’ lived experience of developing SAMbot, this presentation explores the potential for Bill-63 to support research into how digital technologies are affecting our social fabric — and shows how researchers have been kneecapped in their efforts to analyse how social media platform policies affect the wellbeing of the public and the health of our democracies. It looks at Canada’s data transparency efforts, compares them to efforts internationally, and discusses how providing accessible and equitable data access can help us better regulate digital spaces and inform more complex future regulation that targets algorithmic recommendation systems, generative AI, and other existing and emerging technologies.
Sabreen and Alex will make this presentation remotely, from their base in Canada.