Just as most countries lifted Covid-19 measures, another pandemic emerged in the summer of 2022: mpox. Mpox is an infectious disease caused by the monkeypox virus. It is endemic in East, Central, and West African countries. However, in May 2022, large clusters of mpox cases began appearing outside of its endemic region, bringing global attention to the virus. More cases quickly emerged across Europe and in the Americas, spreading through sexual networks of men who have sex with men (MSM). By July 23, with over 16,000 reported cases in 75 countries and territories, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros declared the global mpox outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).
Given that poor-quality information affected Covid-19 responses around the world, robust communications are more important now for pandemic preparedness than ever. Therefore, this report analyzes the efficacy of communications during the first four months of the mpox pandemic from May to August 2022 across five jurisdictions: British Columbia, Ontario, Nigeria, Spain, and the United States.
Although not exhaustive, these five case studies showcase a range of approaches to communications, enabling us to identify more effective strategies and tactics. The cases were analyzed through the lens of the RAPID Principles, developed by Heidi Tworek, Ian Beacock, and Eseohe Ojo after assessing communications in the first six months of Covid-19.
The principles are:
Rely on Autonomy, not Orders
Attend to Emotions, Values, and Stories
Pull in Citizens and Civil Society
Institutionalize Communications
Describe It Democratically
Our analysis found some principles to be more pertinent than others for mpox. Mpox had a different epidemiology and affected certain populations more than others, specifically networks of men who have sex with men (MSM). This made managing stigma even more important in health guidelines than strict preventive measures. Mpox’s emergence soon after the removal of Covid protections also created unique challenges. Two years of Covid-19 politicized public health in certain countries and/or pulled away resources from certain communities. Based off these considerations and analysis, we identified further recommendations for effective pandemic communications.
Our simplest recommendation is to prioritize communications for managing any pandemic or epidemic. This aspect of pandemic management often remains underprioritized, even after the experiences of Covid-19. Across all five cases, communications were crucial to managing distrust in public institutions, curbing transmission, and minimizing further marginalization of affected communities. Beyond the lessons of the original RAPID framework, mpox highlighted two further lessons for health authorities and governments. The first is the importance of managing stigma. Addressing stigma directly using the voices of the most affected communities tended to be the most effective approach to minimize stigmatization of queer and Black communities. To support this, a key recommendation is for governments to have well-established networks with community organizations that they can call on to help develop and deliver messages. The second is for governments to prioritize the health of diverse communities with specific policies that meet their needs, as this will enable quick mobilization when crises do arise. Finally, the lack of specialized aid and support for those who fall ill with the virus should be addressed.
Dr. Heidi Tworek is a Canada Research Chair and professor of international history and public policy at UBC. She directs the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Her work examines history and policy around communications, particularly the effects of new media technologies on democracy. She is a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation as well as a non-resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. She co-edits the Journal of Global History. She is the author or co-editor of three books as well as over 30 journal articles and book chapters. Her latest book is the prizewinning News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945 (Harvard University Press, 2019). Her current work examines the history and policy around health communications. She has testified before and advised governments around the world on social media, hate speech, and disinformation. Alongside regular appearances on radio and TV, her writing in English and German has appeared in media outlets including The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, The Independent, and Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Joseph Flores recently completed his Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs at UBC with a focus on global human rights, sustainability, and queer health. With growing tensions in society amid various global crises, Joseph believes that strong democratic institutions can help alleviate these issues. He hopes that his research brings light to how democracies can work to address issues of inequality and prevent further injustice around the world. His work with CSDI involves researching the efficacy of mpox health communications around the world.
The pandemic created an unprecedented demand for health communication. Public health officials, health experts, and medical practitioners increased their engagement online to address a surge in public demand for information. To play these roles, health communicators intensified their use of social media platforms. Some health communicators identified specific underserved communities to address, such as the South Asian community, the Black community, seniors, and the homeless or under-housed. They also tried to address widespread misinformation (created inadvertently), and disinformation (intentionally spread for political and economic aims).
In making these efforts, health communicators too often faced abuse or threats. A global survey by Nature of scientists who discussed the pandemic on news media or social media found over two-thirds reported negative experiences, 22 per cent received threats of physical or sexual violence, and 15 per cent received death threats.
Many Canadian news articles have documented online abuse of health communicators, but to date there is no rigorous research on the topic. Nor are there detailed recommendations for how individuals and institutions should address this problem. To help fill this gap, we hosted workshops with health communicators on January 26, 2023 (21 participants) and March 6, 2023 (16 participants). Participants included chief medical officers, communications staff for public health authorities, nurses, physicians, independent science communicators, and communicators at civil society health organizations.
This report summarizes insights from those workshops, along with current scholarship, regarding:
forms of online abuse on different platforms;
impacts of online abuse;
relationship between online abuse and the personal identities of health communicators;
forms of support that health communicators access, or wish to access;
possible next steps for research or advocacy.
Initial findings from these workshops will contribute to further research, peer-reviewed scholarship, policy publications, and public-facing products such as podcasts and op-eds.
This report was written by Chris Tenove, Heidi Tworek, Sabah Haque, Hanna Hett, and Oliver Oliver Zhang. Additional research from Elizabeth Dubois, Saima Hirani, Jaigris Hodson, Maliha Siddiqi, and George Veletsianos. Thanks to the folks at ScienceUpFirst, who helped us to find workshop participants.
Thank you to the workshop participants for their valuable time and thoughts.
This research is funded by the New Frontiers in Research Fund from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, council grant number NFRFR-2021-00289. The principal investigator is Canada Research Chair Heidi Tworek, professor of history and public policy at the University of British Columbia.
Further details on the research team and acknowledgments can be found in the report.
Citation: Tenove, Chris, Heidi Tworek, Sabah Haque, Hanna Hett, Oliver Zhang. (2023) Responding to Online Abuse: What We Heard from Health Communicators. Vancouver: Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, University of British Columbia.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic reached British Columbia in January 2020, there have been reports of online hate speech as well as offline hate incidents. This report aims to support the information-gathering and development of policy recommendations as part of BC’s Office of the Human Rights Commissioner’s inquiry into hate in the pandemic through four contributions.
We identify functions and forms of online hate that should be understood and addressed.
We summarize key research findings on online hate in Canada, and we suggest pandemic-related factors that may have exacerbated online hate.
We summarize ongoing research projects on online abuse of health communicators (conducted by our team at UBC) and online hate and counter-speech (conducted by our colleagues at Simon Fraser University), which are described more fully in the case studies.
We identify key actions that may be taken to address online hate, drawing on existing or proposed policies for governments, technology companies and civil society.
Alongside drawing on original research projects at UBC and SFU, this report brings together scholarship from communications and media studies, political science, criminology and history; policy reports by federal standing committees and international organizations; as well as research by civil society organizations and journalists.
We hope that this report will help individuals and organizations in B.C., including the Human Rights Commissioner, to better understand and address the complex online dimensions that form part of broader problems of hate.
The data in this report includes disturbing language and points to trends of online abuse and hate during the pandemic in British Columbia. We recognize this information will be deeply disturbing for many people in our province to hear. This issue, while critical to examine, is extremely challenging, especially for people who have experienced or witnessed instances of online hate and toxicity. British Columbians who experience distress at reading this report or who need immediate help can access a list of crisis lines and emergency mental health supports we have compiled on our website at: bchumanrights.ca/support.
Case Study A: Hate and harassment targeting health communicators
This case study emerged from a larger project investigating online abuse of health communicators in Canada, funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Engage Grant, no. 892-2021-1100.
During the pandemic, public health officials, medical practitioners and health experts engaged in unprecedented levels of public communication, including online.
As the pandemic continued, they faced escalating levels of online abuse, often linked to waves of infections, vaccine mandates and other public health measures, and broader political conflicts.
Key themes of abuse include accusations of corruption and incompetence, responsibility for widespread injury, and loss of liberties. Health communicators face abuse from individuals who consider public health measures to be too extensive, but also from those who consider the measures to be insufficient.
Explicit racism, xenophobia and misogyny figure in a small but disturbing proportion of messages. More common are messages that seek to undermine the authority of women or racialized health communicators.
Online abuse and hate affect the safety and well-being of health communicators, as well as their ability to effectively promote health-related information.
Abuse toward health communicators, but also toward the vaccine hesitant and other groups, is intertwined with broader patterns of polarization and toxicity online.
Health communicators require support from employers and other institutions to help them manage online abuse and hate, in addition to more consistent action from social media platforms and law enforcement.
Case Study B: Hate and the COVID-19 pandemic—An analysis of B.C. Twitter discourse
This case study emerged from a larger project at the Digital Democracies Institute. The Institute’s From Hate to Agonism Project, funded by a UK-Canada Responsible Artificial Intelligence grant, is developing innovative and responsible machine learning approaches to support health democratic discourse online.
During the pandemic we saw an increase in tweets classified under the anti-Asian hate topic:
Natural language processing (NLP) text-model results showed an increase in hate speech in March 2020, when B.C. declared a provincial state of emergency.
The increase in hate speech was accompanied by an even larger increase in tweets classified as counterspeech. This finding is meaningful as it shows how the proliferation of hateful and harmful speech triggered an oppositional, and larger, response. However, reactionary counterspeech developing within highly toxic environments can further polarization rather than contribute to constructive dialogue over differences and conflict.
The conversation about anti-Asian hate in B.C. was highly susceptible to events taking place outside of the province and country, particularly events in the U.S. Specifically, we saw a dramatic increase of tweets classified as counterspeech in the wake of the tragic Atlanta, GA, spa shooting in 2021, as well as an increase in tweets attacking specific identities when notable and contentious events occurred in the United States (e.g., George Floyd murder, U.S. Capitol riot).
Data also show an increase in toxicity in general conversations about COVID-19 in B.C. and government management of the crisis (COVID-19 topic). Tweets within this topic expressed frustrations directed towards restrictions and vaccine mandates, political leaders and health officials, as well as individuals defying lockdown orders or public health order restrictions such as wearing a mask.
The effectiveness of text models decreased when these were applied to novel contexts (e.g., Wikipedia trained model used to analyze tweets, anti-Asian trained model used to analyze COVID-19). This limitation represents a challenge for researchers as well as for social media platforms, whose algorithms similarly struggle to contextualize language use across platforms, communities, cultures and subcultures.
This report recommends how to put health communications at the heart of democracies’ response to Covid-19. Communications are an effective non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) for Covid-19; other NPIs include travel restrictions, physical distancing, or personal protective equipment—each of which, in turn, requires clear, rapid communications. More effective communications could save lives.
Effective communications are essential in the short-term for uptake of public health measures like face coverings. But they matter more over a longer time horizon, whether to forestall compliance fatigue, lay the groundwork for vaccine uptake, or encourage the public to engage proactively with the healthcare system for concerns unrelated to Covid. They also matter for cultivating trust among citizens and their governments—trust that is critical for the future stability of democratic institutions.
If communications are a health intervention, democratic communications can be a civic intervention. Many democracies were already struggling with distrust before the pandemic: anti-vaccination activism, conspiracy theories, sinking faith in institutions, populism, rising inequality, the erosion of local journalism, and so on. This rolling democratic crisis is now interacting with the pandemic. Our report lays out a framework for how to communicate—even or especially during a public health emergency—in ways that strengthen democratic norms and processes rather than undermining them.
We draw our recommendations from in-depth studies of nine jurisdictions and two provinces on five continents: Senegal, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, and Canada (for which we also studied two provinces, British Columbia and Ontario). Each of these cases managed relatively effective responses on their own terms; each of them also took democratic communications seriously. Where appropriate, we compare with democracies that struggled to communicate around Covid-19, particularly the United Kingdom and the United States.
This report proposes five broad principles that can underpin any democratic public health communications strategy. Our principles draw upon research from a range of disciplines, including political science, social epidemiology and public health, behavioural science, sociology, media and communications studies, history, and political theory. We call them the RAPID principles, because rapidity is an essential element of an effective response:
Rely on Autonomy, Not Orders
Pandemic responses should emphasize autonomy where possible, in alignment with national traditions and local political cultures, supported by thoughtful and clear communications. We identify two particularly salient forms of autonomy: personal and institutional. This means developing and repeatedly communicating a set of universal principles for making responsible and safe decisions during a pandemic. Autonomy is not anarchy, but rather a policy that includes stakeholders, assumes good faith, and reinforces democratic self-understanding.
Attend to Emotions, Values, and Stories
To complement autonomy, the most effective democratic health communications sustain and build community by incorporating societal values, emotions, and stories. Facts alone are insufficient. Emotions, shared values, and narratives build trust and make health information reliable. There is no single best practice for how to do the work of values-framing, or who should be responsible. What is important, however, is that someone repeatedly and carefully communicates how pandemic measures relate to existing social and political values. Effective communicators considered the diversity of the population and found strategies that avoided stigmatization; they relied on pro-social hygiene and behavioural messaging; they articulated positive emotions like gratitude and acknowledged mental health struggles; they sought to build rapport with citizens.
Pull in Citizens and Civil Society
While officials play an essential role, citizen participation and civil society are also essential. Too often, public health engagement occurs based on what officials think the public looks like, rather than trying to understand citizens as many overlapping groups of individuals with different ideas, beliefs, or capacities. It is essential to establishing feedback loops through techniques like surveys or text mining to understand a population’s diverse experiences, their feelings about the response, and their needs from government. Officials should also consider finding trusted local validators to share health information with friends, families, and followers (e.g. young people, social media influencers, celebrities, religious leaders). Encouraging participation and collaboration, especially on issues like public health, also reduces burdens on public-sector actors. Collaborating with citizens and civil society may create a more robust response; in turn, listening and responding to citizens’ concerns strengthens democratic values such as solidarity and collective responsibility.
Institutionalize Communications
A rapid response, paradoxically, requires structures built far in advance. Countries without communications units have sometimes struggled to deliver consistent information over time or to update citizens swiftly on how pandemic guidelines are changing. On the other hand, jurisdictions with institutional strategies for pandemic communications had the capacity to produce differentiated government messaging that embraced openness and transparency. An institution enables a swift response. A pandemic communications unit could also lay the groundwork for communicating quickly during future epidemics, follow the latest research on effective communications, and establish liaisons with large social media companies to combat misinformation. Finally, a specific unit indicates that communications are seen as an integral part of public health rather than ancillary.
Describe It Democratically
The most obvious way to keep democracies healthy during an emergency is to maintain the business of institutions like parliaments. But if democracy is not reducible to formal institutions, neither are effective democratic health communications. Communicators should describe the pandemic response democratically. This means avoiding militaristic metaphors that are hierarchical and limit space for agency. Instead, pandemic messaging should rely on more democratically-aligned metaphors. Just as citizens need repeated messaging on handwashing or physical distancing, they need repeated messaging on compassion or their democratic duties during times of emergency. Framing the Covid-19 response as a democratic challenge matters not only for the present; it could shape how citizens will remember it in the future. Like institutionalization, democratic framing better prepares us for the next pandemic even as it gives citizens new tools for addressing this one.
The five principles for effective democratic health communications in this report are a toolbox for sustaining democratic trust, practice, and self-understanding in an age of great uncertainty. They enable policymakers to recognize and frame this crisis not only as a threat to democracy—but as an opportunity for citizens to feel more trust than they did before, more resilient than they did before, and more sovereign than they did before Covid-19 emerged. It’s important that policymakers, elected officials, and citizens alike recognize the importance of clear, consistent, compassionate, and contextual communications during a time of crisis. Public health depends on it. The health of democracy does, too.
Listen: Heidi Tworek on how governments should communicate with the public about vaccines.Can Better Communication Curb Vaccine Hesitancy?Jackie Lamport, Capital Daily Podcast. May 19th, 2021.
Listen: Heidi Tworek discusses vaccine hesitancy as Health Canada’s announcement that Pfizer vaccines are safe for young people between 12- 15. The Early Edition with Stephen Quinn. CBC Radio. May 5, 2021.
Heidi Tworek discusses the missteps Canada has taken during its COVID-19 response. What’s gone wrong in Canada. Justin Giovannetti, The Spinoff. April 23, 2021.
Listen: Heidi Tworek on Solving Heatlhcare podcast with Dr. Kwadwo Kyeremanteng. COVID-19 (Livecast): The Path Forward with Zain Chagla, Heidi Tworek & Stefan Baral. January 21, 2021.
Listen: Heidi Tworek and Kulpreet Singh on CBC’s On The Coast with Gloria Macarenko discussing how the province can improve multilingual Covid-19 communications. Covid-19 Communications. January 8, 2021.
Heidi Tworek in The Vancouver Sun. COVID-19 is a dress rehearsal for next pandemic. Lessons learned about building trust and battling misinformation will be crucial to managing the next health crisis. Randy Shore. December 10, 2020.
Financial Times Alphaville. Further Reading. September 16, 2020.
About the Authors
Dr. Heidi Tworek is Associate Professor of History and Public Policy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She is a non-resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. She is the author or co-editor of three books as well as over 30 journal articles and book chapters. Her latest book is the prizewinning News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945 (Harvard University Press, 2019). Her current work examines the history and policy around health communications. She has testified before and advised governments around the world on social media, hate speech, and disinformation. Alongside regular appearances on radio and TV, her writing in English and German has appeared in media outlets including The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, The Independent, and Süddeutsche Zeitung. She is a contributing editor to the Brookings Institution TechStream.
Dr. Ian Beacock is a prizewinning historian and journalist. He holds a PhD in History from Stanford University, where he specialized in modern Europe, modern Germany, and the history of democracy. His work has been supported by major research fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, the Europe Center at Stanford University, and elsewhere. His reporting and analysis on contemporary politics, as well as his criticism, has appeared in publications including The New Republic, The Atlantic, Aeon, and The Walrus. He is currently working on a book about democratic feelings in modern history.
Eseohe Ojo holds a BSc in International Relations from Lead City University, Nigeria and a Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs (MPPGA) from the University of British Columbia where she studied as an African Leader of Tomorrow (ALT) Scholar and a R. Howard Webster Foundation Fellow. Her work focuses on policy, advocacy and communications around gender, youth inclusion, and human rights, particularly freedom of expression, access to information, digital rights and Internet freedoms. She also works on civic engagement, transparency and other good governance issues globally and on the African continent. Her most recent publication is “Redefining Policy and Practice: Unraveling Definitions of Sexual Violence Through a Survivor Centered Approach,” a report on the impact, limitations, and approaches to improving current definitions of sexual violence.
Researchers
Sudha David-Wilp is a Senior Transatlantic Fellow and Deputy Director of the Berlin Office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Victoria Ker is pursuing her Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs (MPPGA) at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She holds a BSc in Microbiology and Pacific and Asian Studies from the University of Victoria.
Yoojung Lee is a BA student majoring in International Relations and minoring in Law and Society at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
David Metzger is a student assistant at the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in International Relations at the joint study program of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Universität Potsdam.
Sean Wu holds a Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs (MPPGA) and a BA in History and Political Science from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His research interests include policy communications, the digitization of government, and digital diplomacy.
Social media are crucial for contemporary election campaigns, and the Covid-19 pandemic has only accelerated that trend. While online interactions during campaigns can be positive and productive, candidates also face insults, threats, hate speech, and other forms of incivility.
This report examines incivility on social media in the 2019 federal election campaign and beyond. It draws on an analysis of over one million tweets directed at candidates in the 2019 campaign, and on interviews with candidates, campaign staff, and elected officials.
Our major findings include the following:
About 40% of tweets at candidates were uncivil, and 16% of all tweets were abusive. Just 7% were positive.
Party leaders and other high-profile candidates received exponentially higher levels of incivility than most candidates. Candidates’ experiences thus varied significantly depending on their prominence before the campaign began.
Women and racialized candidates were not necessarily subjected to higher rates of incivility online, but the impact of the incivility and abuse they faced was often amplified by their lived experiences of threat, harassment, or marginalization offline.
Campaign teams often struggled to manage online incivility and abuse. Many felt that they lacked sufficient resources, training, or technical skills. In particular, they were unclear about the effectiveness and political consequences of taking actions like responding to or blocking abusive accounts, a problem made more difficult because they were often unsure who was behind the attacks.
Overall, we argue that pervasive incivility and frequent abuse threaten the security and wellbeing of public figures and their staff, undermine productive engagement between citizens and candidates during campaigns, exacerbate distrust and polarization in our politics, and present further barriers to political participation by people from under-represented groups.
Recommendations
To address online incivility and abuse in Canadian politics requires a multi- pronged approach. Candidates, political parties, social media platforms, and policymakers can all take action.
1. Candidates and campaign teams should:
Develop and implement proactive plans to manage abuse and incivility;
Publicly communicate their expectations for people who wish to engage them online;
Promote healthy discussions and online behaviour—including by their own supporters.
2. Political parties should:
Provide appropriate training and resources so candidates and campaign teams can safely and effectively manage online abuse;
Provide support that addresses candidates’ diverse experiences and risks;
Establish guidelines for the online conduct of their candidates and staff.
3. Social media platforms should:
Reduce deception via fake accounts, bots, and manipulated media;
Develop clearer and more reliable enforcement of terms of service;
Design social media platforms to better incentivize productive discussion;
Improve their transparency about patterns of abuse and their activities to address it.
4. Policymakers should:
Clarify and improve the laws and police procedures for addressing online threats, defamation, and hate speech;
Promote greater transparency and more effective content moderation by social media companies;
Support groups that are combatting online incivility, abuse, and hate;
Coordinate with other governments and international bodies to address this global problem.
This report does not propose a quick fix for online incivility directed at candidates and elected officials. Instead, it offers an evidence-based assessment of the problem and options to address it. The actions we propose are just part of a broader effort to promote the meaningful and inclusive discussions that are necessary for a robust Canadian democracy.
Events and Presentations
Watch: Chris Tenove and Heidi Tworek joined federal Members of Parliament Charlie Angus, Iqra Khalid and Bob Zimmer for Online Harm: Protecting Canadian Democracy in the Age of Social Media (February 11, 2021.) The virtual panel discussion was hosted by FRIENDS of Canadian Broadcasting and The Samara Centre for Democracy.
We thank Equal Voice for partnering with us in this endeavour.
Please see the report for our full acknowledgments.
Citation: Tenove, Chris, and Heidi Tworek (2020) Trolled on the Campaign Trail: Online Incivility and Abuse in Canadian Politics. Vancouver: Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, University of British Columbia.
Authors
Chris Tenove is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of Political Science and History at the University of British Columbia. He has published peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and policy reports on cyber-security threats, harmful speech, and disinformation. His last major report for the CSDI was Digital Threats to Democratic Elections: How Foreign Actors Use Digital Techniques to Undermine Democracy. Tenove previously worked as an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. For more details see www.tenove.com, or follow him on Twitter @cjtenove.
Heidi Tworek is Associate Professor in Public Policy and International History at the University of British Columbia. Tworek has advised and testified before governments around the world on social media, hate speech, and democracy. She is the award-winning author of News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945 (2019) as well as many journal articles and book chapters. Her writing has appeared in English and German in outlets such as Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She is a non-resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and Canadian Global Affairs Institute as well as a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. Her last report for CSDI was on democratic health communications during Covid-19. For more details see her UBC profile or follow her on Twitter @HeidiTworek.
Research Team
Jordan Buffie is a PhD student at the University of Toronto. He has an MA in Political Science from the University of British Columbia (UBC).
Trevor Deley is a PhD candidate in e-business at the University of Ottawa. He has a BSc in Neuroscience, an MSc in Biology and Data Science, and worked as a software developer at IBM.
Jaskiran Gakhal recently graduated with an Honours in Political Science from UBC. She is now a JD candidate at UBC’s Peter A. Allard School of Law.
Grace Lore teaches at the University of Victoria. She provides research and communications support for not-for-profits, and has helped provincial and territorial legislators draft sexual harassment policies.
Sonya Manuel is pursuing a Master of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University. She recently graduated with a double major in Political Science and Psychology from UBC.
Veronica Stolba recently graduated with a major in Political Science and a minor in Law and Society from UBC, where she was Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs of the Alma Mater Society.
By Chris Tenove [1], Jordan Buffie [2], Spencer McKay [3], David Moscrop [4], Mark Warren [5], Maxwell A. Cameron [6]
January 18, 2018
Our democracy is under digital attack. That concern is now raised before and after every major election. Newspaper headlines and social media feeds are full of stories of hacked documents, foreign troll networks, and bot-driven misinformation campaigns. Foreign actors, from states to extremist social movements, use these digital techniques to influence or undermine democratic processes. This issue has raised serious concerns among policymakers and citizens, but it is hard to get a grasp on what these digital threats are, how they work, and what might be done about them.
Drawing on research by academics, think tanks and journalists, we make the following observations:
Foreign actors employ four key digital techniques. The report details how foreign actors pursue hacking attacks on systems and databases; mass misinformation and propaganda campaigns; micro-targeted manipulation; and trolling operations.
The threat of digital interference is not limited to its impact on electoral outcomes. Foreign actors using digital techniques can undermine three critical elements of democratic elections: fair opportunities for citizen participation, vibrant public deliberation, and effective rules and institutions. More research is needed to specify the effects of digital interference on these activities and on electoral outcomes. However, it’s clear that these digital techniques may affect some groups more than others, such as the troll networks that target women and minority groups with threatening and stigmatizing messages.
State and non-state actors use these techniques, and often do so in ‘partnership’ with domestic actors. States have the resources to use these techniques at a large-scale, as made clear by analyses of Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. Digital techniques are also widely used by non-state actors, including terrorist groups, corporations, hacktivists, and extremist social movements. But foreign actors are not alone in using these digital techniques. Domestic actors use similar techniques, and act as de facto “partners” to amplify the interference by foreign actors.
What makes countries vulnerable? We identify five key sources of vulnerability to digital interference: deficits in digital literacy; shortcomings in the design and policies of social media platforms; high levels of political polarization; and electoral regulations; and the lack of international laws and practices to address cyber-attacks and information operations. Countries differ in their vulnerabilities.
There are many possible counter-measures to digital interference, but no proven solutions. Responses to digital interference range from increased fact-checking on social media to new electoral regulations to improve cyber-security of voting systems. We lack strong evidence about what works, but it is clear that action must be taken on multiple fronts.
Foreign digital interference may contribute to vicious circles for democracy in Canada and other countries. Digital techniques can undermine democracy, such as by exacerbating social cleavages and weakening political institutions, and this in turn makes countries more vulnerable to future interference. If such vicious circles continue, democracy will decline.
Policymakers, citizens, and researchers therefore need to take serious, timely, evidence-based action. We need to address digital interference as part of the larger project of making our democratic systems more resilient and responsive to citizens.
[1] Lead Author. Postdoctoral Research Fellow, UBC.
[2] MA student; [3] PhD Candidate; [4] Postdoctoral Researcher; [5] Professor and Merilees Chair in the Study of Democracy; [6] Professor and Director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions.
