Thank you, and good afternoon.

My name is John McAndrews. I'm the managing director of the digital society lab.

We are an interdisciplinary research centre based at Hamilton's McMaster University. For transparency, the digital society lab has received funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Mitacs, McMaster University and Facebook's parent company, Meta. These funders do not decide how the lab does its research or what it publishes. Our list of funders can be found on our website: digitalsocietylab.org. The lab is also a proud member of the Canadian Digital Media Research Network, and receives in-kind support from the CDMRN in the form of space in its surveys.

It is an honour to appear before your committee today.

Let me begin by speaking plainly about why, in my view, misinformation, and particularly misinformation circulated on social media, is so hard to deal with.

First, misinformation is hard to detect and its effects are hard to measure—not impossible, but hard.

Second, the underlying technologies in this space are changing rapidly, and it is challenging for both research and policy to keep up.

Lastly, there are sometimes difficult trade-offs regarding free expression in deciding if or how to respond to misinformation. It is the job of Parliament to make some of these calls, in my view, and I do not envy you in your task.

Next, let me say a few words about how the digital society lab is trying to help. The lab has two in-progress research projects about misinformation. In the first, we begin with the premise that, while new technologies risk making the ancient problem of misinformation worse, some of those same technologies also have the potential to help humans combat misinformation. The lab is thus actively developing applications of generative AI to help distill fact-checkable claims from among the vast numbers of posts on social media, and to then leverage information about how these claims are created and shared to provide timely insights. We envision this as a kind of early-warning system to surface potentially misleading claims for further human review.

In the second lab project, we begin by observing that amidst the growing international body of research about misinformation, we still do not know enough about what features of misinformation the public considers to be harmful and what types of responses citizens consider appropriate. To that end, the lab has recently embarked on new, pilot, survey-based research to answer these questions for our partners at CDMRN.

The work of both of these projects is preliminary and not yet peer-reviewed, but I believe it holds promise in better understanding misinformation and public support for policy responses to it.

In the time remaining, let me turn to offering for your consideration three recommendations for how this committee can help fight misinformation and build a more resilient information ecosystem.

First, this committee should recommend robust, sustainable, public support for research about misinformation and its effects in Canada. This should come in the form of public funding for high-quality, transparent and publicly accessible scientific research, and in the form of rules that require platforms to share their data with researchers under appropriate conditions and protections.

Second, echoing the views of prior witnesses, this committee should also recommend robust, sustainable, public support for initiatives that promote up-to-date, evidence-based media and science literacy efforts. There is no single response to misinformation, but an important feature of such literacy efforts, in my view, is that they largely sidestep the most difficult trade-offs regarding free expression, which I noted earlier.

Lastly, this committee should maintain its own ongoing visibility into the subject matter. To my mind, this means regular quarterly or annual hearings about the state of misinformation in Canada after the committee concludes its present study.

Let me end by commending committee members for undertaking its crucial and timely work.

I look forward to the discussions that follow. Thank you.