Facebook and Twitter say Ottawa should consider incorporating digital platforms in leaders’ debates, reigniting broader questions about social media’s function in the democratic process.

Ottawa is currently designing a policy to create an independent body to organize political party leaders’ debates in the 2019 federal election and beyond. Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould will meet behind closed doors with academics, media and public interest groups in Toronto on Wednesday, as part of a cross-country consultation tour launched last week along with a website where the public can weigh in until Feb. 9.

Meanwhile, more than two dozen experts have provided input to a parliamentary committee studying party leaders’ debates. Facebook and Twitter told MPs late last year that if they want to engage the most people, digital platforms must be embedded in the distribution model, echoing several other witnesses.

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The internet has long been lauded as a democratizing tool but in recent months attention has shifted to the potential for platforms to be co-opted — a concern that’s been amplified as democracies around the globe grapple with the proliferation of fake news and misinformation, shady targeted advertising, and possible foreign meddling in elections.

Those concerns should be addressed when rolling social media into any election-related policy, say a pair of prominent digital democracy researchers.

“If an aim of using social is to increase engagement, then we have to be careful about what kind of engagement we are inviting,” said Elizabeth Dubois, an assistant communications professor at the University of Ottawa.

Dubois and Fenwick McKelvey, an assistant professor of information and technology policy at Concordia, are among a handful of Canadian academics to have extensively studied bots, automated accounts that can be used by political entities to amplify their messages and shape public opinion.

“Bots and trolls will easily infiltrate conversations — and political parties, journalists and the public all need to be aware of this and have plans in place to deal with it,” Dubois said.

Who gets access to data about engagement and page views on the platforms, and how that’s used, must be taken into account, she said. The data should be public and “anonymized” so personal information isn’t compromised. People also shouldn’t be forced to log in or register for a social media account to be able to watch a debate, Dubois said.

McKelvey is wary of one or two private companies dominating the virtual public sphere. “If we enclose all these conversations on Facebook, that gives Facebook a lot of power and influence — and we still have some gaps in common knowledge about how that platform is being run,” he said.

Both lauded Ottawa’s move to better co-ordinate debates of party leaders and said, generally, a broadcasting system should include television and the internet.

Canadians increasingly consume information online — 51 per cent get their news from digital sources first, according to the national electronic spy agency, and more people are choosing to watch television on the internet rather than cable, says the CRTC. About 23 million Canadians log into Facebook daily and, last summer, Twitter reported #cdnpoli was the second-most used hashtag in the country of all time.

The next vote won’t be the social media companies’ first foray into Canadian debates. Both partnered with news organizations in 2015 to help facilitate coverage.

Integrating questions from the virtual audience in real time would better connect constituents to their potential representatives, the social media companies told the procedure and house affairs committee.

“Twitter can be a microphone for those not invited to the debate hall” and for voters and candidates alike, said Bridget Coyne, the platform’s senior public policy manager. In 2015, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May took to Twitter to join in a debate to which she was not invited. Her tweets received 2.1 million “impressions,” a 2,000-per-cent jump from her daily average, Coyne said.

Data analytics may also be used to “better understand the issues that citizens care about the most” and in “developing debate topics and questions accordingly,” Kevin Chan, Facebook Canada’s head of public policy, said in a written submission to the committee.

Chan recommended keeping rules “technology neutral” in light of rapid advancements. For instance, Facebook Live and Instagram Stories weren’t very popular in 2015, whereas today the government regularly uses them to stream important announcements and events.

Facebook and Twitter have taken steps to shine more light on how the platforms operate following public criticism and the threat of regulation in other countries. That includes more transparency around political advertising, news literacy campaigns and a crackdown on fake accounts, among other measures. Facebook also picked Canada to test drive a new ad-transparency function and launched an “election integrity initiative” in response to a 2017 Communications Security Establishment report that warned hacker groups would “almost certainly” attempt to disrupt the next election.

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Unlike scrapping first-past-the-post, setting up a non-partisan commissioner for the leaders’ debates is an element of democratic reform that’s remained in the minister’s mandate letter after the Liberals campaigned on the promise in 2015, a year that turned into a free-for-all for debates. Traditionally, a consortium of major news and broadcast outlets work with the parties to arrange nationally televised debates, but negotiations fell apart in the last election when then-prime minister Stephen Harper declined to participate in certain consortium-organized events.

Future debates should be “available to as many people as possible,” Gould said last week. “Leaders’ debates provide Canadians with the opportunity to learn more about the policies and personalities of the people who seek to lead our country. These debates, and the discussions that they can spark amongst Canadians, are important elements of our democracy.”

Clarification: Jan. 16, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that stated that Facebook and Twitter want a role in the Canadian election debates. The article should have made clear that the social media platforms were invited to give input about the debates and have asked MPs to consider incorporating digital platforms in the debates.

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