Article content continued

Scott said the “disaster” that has befallen the American political system was accelerated by disinformation disseminated through digital media, accentuating extreme views and causing “a rapid and destructive polarization in American political culture.” The same phenomenon has occurred in different ways across the democratic world and Canada will not be immune, he said.

“In my view, it’s not a question of whether it will happen in Canada. It will happen in Canada. The only question is what will it look like and how well will we be prepared to mitigate the negative effects of that new reality of digital media?”

On that score, Scott declined to say how Bill C-76 measures up, stressing that he’s not an expert in Canadian election law. Nevertheless, he said: “In my view, digital ad transparency and the labelling of automated accounts ought to be part of any comprehensive election reform package.”

Another expert consulted by the cabinet, University of British Columbia digital media professor Taylor Owen, agreed that C-76 could use some added muscle.

“The single thing that they could do that would be most powerful would be more robust ad transparency so that we know, every political piece of content that’s shown to us as an individual is identified: who purchased it, who they targeted, how much they spent and who it reached,” he said.

“If we have that, then at least we’ll get transparency in the system so that after an election we can hold actors accountable for who tried to influence whom.”

Owen said he also believes that online giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter, should be made legally liable for the content they allow on their platforms. There is no reason, he argued, that digital media should be able to publish hate speech that is illegal in the non-digital world.