Foreign interference means Canada should get serious on media literacy, advocate says
As federal parties craft the scope of a possible inquiry into foreign interference, Canada’s media-literacy charity argues governments and schools need to do a better job of preventing citizens from being manipulated by hostile states.
“We are going to need a media-literate populace,” said Matthew Johnson, education director with MediaSmarts, a non-profit aimed at boosting critical thinking among Canadians.
“Whatever the source of disinformation, but certainly including foreign interference, digital media literacy really is both the first and last line of defence.”
In May, as wildfires in Alberta hit a peak, images of blazes from years past spread on Twitter, with false claims that entire towns had been destroyed. That same month, a phoney image of the Pentagon on fire circulated, with fabricated claims that an explosion had occurred in Washington.
The two claims could be easily disproven by simple Google searches, such as a reverse-image search. But Johnson noticed both were widely amplified, which he agues is an indication of how easily foreign actors can disrupt Canadian democracy.
David Johnston, the former special rapporteur on foreign interference, warned before his resignation that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service is concerned about foreign states putting out “disinformation or divisive content” that influences how citizens vote, or even dissuades them from wanting to cast a ballot.
“The openness of our democracy and media also provides an ideal forum for foreign actors that wish to disrupt our democratic process, often using social media and other mass communication technologies,” the former governor general wrote in his only public report.
Former governor general David Johnston has resigned as special rapporteur on foreign interference. He cited the ‘highly partisan atmosphere’ around his appointment and work as reasons for his departure.
In recent months, The Canadian Press has had to warn its audiences about fabricated screenshots purporting to be articles published by the news service. Other outlets have issued similar warnings about phoney news reports related to last year’s self-styled Freedom Convoy protests against COVID-19 measures.
MediaSmarts’ Johnson testified at a February committee meeting on foreign interference about the need for media literacy, but MPs largely focused on comparing Canada to allies that have expelled Chinese diplomats or launched foreign-agent registries.
“People want quick solutions and digital media literacy is a slow solution,” said the education director.
He said Canada should look to peer countries to see how they respond to bad actors and proactively prime the population against foreign narratives.
Other countries can be a model
Matthew Johnson noted that Nordic countries have long included critical thinking and media literacy in their national curricula, in part because of Russia’s decades-long attempts to destabilize neighbouring democracies.
He said Canada should bolster its tools for both children and adults.
Canadian schools used to focus more on media literacy as part of a slew of cultural policies meant to insulate the country from being overwhelmed by U.S. broadcasting. That included educational programs run by the National Film Board in the early 1980s. MediaSmarts is now an independent successor to a program the board launched in 1994.
Johnson said those programs sought to teach Canadian youth that media are constructions based on conscious and unconscious choices by multiple people, as opposed a simple reflection of reality. The approach helped prepared people to decipher mass-media messages, he said.
But the internet has made communication interactive, making it much easier for people to exchange content while also raising privacy concerns. In Ontario, that reality is set to be reflected in a new curriculum for language classes in September, which was last updated in 2006.
“We really have not, in very many cases, updated curriculums particularly to reflect the increasingly central role of media in kids’ lives,” he said.
False claims about the origins of Canada’s wildfires have been getting millions of views online. The National’s Adrienne Arsenault talks with investigative reporter Justin Ling about who’s behind the disinformation and why they’re pushing it.
Today’s kids have been raised in a digital era. “They’ve learned not to trust what they read online,” said Johnson. “The problem is they don’t trust anything.”
He argued Ottawa should have national standards for media literacy in school curriculums that provinces could voluntarily follow, similar to existing federal standards on sexual-health education.
The standards could include tools for discerning credible sources of information.
“Disinformation quite often is true information that is presented in a misleading context, like a genuine photo that’s presented as being from a different time and place than it actually was,” he said.
“Knowing how to use fact-checking tools is one of the quickest and most efficient ways of finding out whether a claim has already been verified or debunked.”
Johnson said voters still need to develop habits to reflect on the sources of information they encounter — especially emotionally evocative content that fits one’s assumptions or political worldview.
“It’s vital that we apply critical thinking to our own thinking and consider, ‘How am I biased on this, and what would legitimately make me change my mind?”‘ he said.
