VANCOUVER—Joel Korn has around 1,000 friends on Facebook, and when a couple of them shared a “Vancouver 2018 Election Quiz,” he clicked right away and started to answer the questions.

Then he paused.

“For the first time in my life, in being on Facebook, I actually woke up to what’s going on here,” Korn said.

Another Facebook user who encountered the quiz, Tyler Michael, sent screenshots of it to StarMetro.

The quiz included questions on hot-button topics such as bike lanes, housing, crime and Uber. It also included: “Would you consider voting for a mayoral candidate who was accused of sexual misconduct in the past?” and “If Donald Trump ran for mayor, would you vote for him?”

An ad for the quiz featured the photos of former Conservative MP Wai Young and Non-Partisan Association councillor Hector Bremner, both right-leaning mayoral hopefuls. Young and Bremner told StarMetro their campaigns did not pay for or know anything about the poll.

Korn said the Vancouver quiz brought to mind the Cambridge Analytica scandal — in which the U.K. firm allegedly accessed the private information of 50 million Facebook users because their contacts participated in a personality quiz — and revelations about how countries such as Russia may have influenced Trump’s U.S. election win through Facebook pages and promoted posts.

“I thought this is exactly the kind of thing that would be posted to influence my vote,” Korn said. “Once I fill out all this information, it’s going to go somewhere and then all of a sudden I’m going to start receiving some unsolicited (content in my) news feed, and the intention of that is going to have me go in a certain direction.”

Toronto residents Gordon Leslie and David Hurley created the quiz. Clicking on the ad sends people to a chatbot — an automated conversation — in Facebook Messenger, which asks questions and responds to answers. The Vancouver 2018 Election Quiz was a trial for a digital product they hope to develop for a future company called Polltivia.

The Vancouver 2018 Election Quiz was not commissioned by any person or party, Leslie and Hurley told StarMetro. They compared it to CBC’s Vote Compass tool, which is meant to help voters understand which political party best fits their views.

When people answered all the survey questions — which changed based on positive or negative responses — the bot would tell them which candidate was the best “match” for them, its creators explained.

Leslie and Hurley said they believe chatbots have great potential for election polling.

“It would appear that people of all ages are surprisingly comfortable with using our chatbot technology, and our tests have shown that people are actually more honest with a chatbot than other types of digital polls and definitely more honest than with a telephone poll,” they wrote via email.

Canadians should think twice when they see ads such as the Vancouver 2018 Election Quiz, said Sara Bannerman, communication studies professor at McMaster University.

“I think it’s great that the public is more aware of taking a more critical look of the ads that are out there,” she said. “If I received this kind of a poll about the election, I’d be asking myself what kind of information is this polling company actually able to access about me and what are they going to do with that information.”

Cambridge Analytica mined Facebook users’ information through a personality quiz that required the user to give an app permission to gather data. App makers once had access to a dizzying array of information, but in response to criticisms Facebook recently restricted the amount of data available to those third parties.

Facebook Messenger bots — a feature intended to help businesses interact with customers — allow relatively limited data collection: the first and last name of the user, their gender, location and profile picture, according to information Facebook provides to developers.

Hurley and Leslie say chatbots provide a cheaper and better way to run opinion polls. But Bannerman said social-media polls that “engage” with users and change based on the responses aren’t exactly objective, the way mainstream pollsters attempt to be with a standard set of questions.

“They articulated that part of their goal was to make the person taking the poll learn something about themselves,” Bannerman said. “What do you want people to learn, exactly, and might that learning have a political implication?”

Alex Kucharski, a spokesperson for Facebook Canada, sent StarMetro a statement outlining stricter measures the company has put in place, or plans to.

Those include new ad transparency measures in Canada that came into effect in October, meaning that only authorized advertisers will be able to run electoral ads on Facebook or Instagram. The company also plans to extend that requirement to anyone who wants to show “issue ads,” including political topics debated across the country.

The company confirmed Polltivia’s survey would fall under the latter category.

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Facebook said it will also label political ads, reveal who paid for them and add a new feature to let users see all the ads a Page is running. The company added it will release a public, searchable ads archive this June.

Bannerman also called for a public archive of online political ads but warned that it needs to be accompanied by Canadian legislation, similar to the proposed Honest Ads Act in the U.S.

“It shouldn’t be left up to (Facebook) whether they change the archive in the future, make more or less information available,” she said.

Jen St. Denis is a general assignment reporter based in Vancouver. Follow her on Twitter: @jenstden

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