Facebook and Canada’s political parties have three things in common in 2019.

First, they are going to be vital parts of the federal election coming this fall. Second, they don’t seem all that fussed about privacy laws. And third, perhaps related to that second thing, they are suffering from a serious trust deficit.

Yet one more blow to Facebook’s reputation was delivered on Thursday by two of Canada’s privacy watchdogs, on the same day that a major trust survey was released. Neither of the reports were good news for social media.

On top of the news that Canadian privacy commissioners may be taking Facebook to court for flouting privacy laws, the trust survey from the communications and marketing firm Proof showed that Canadians’ faith in social-media companies is in sharp decline from even four years ago. Trust is down all over, but especially for those chattering platforms where everyone is sharing their likes and vitriol.

In 2016, less than a year after the last election, more than one quarter of respondents to this same survey expressed trust in social media. In the 2019 edition of what Proof calls its “CanTrust Index,” that number is down to just 18 per cent.

Trust is also plummeting for the electoral system, the survey found. Only about half of respondents — 52 per cent — said they believed the electoral system was fair and only 47 per cent could agree that “the electoral system adequately represents the votes of its citizens.” Political parties, the drivers of that system, should consider themselves severely reproached.

Politicians are in no position to preach to Facebook about privacy, as long as those big databases of theirs also remain outside privacy laws. Privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien has repeatedly exhorted Liberals, Conservatives, New Democrats and other parties to make their databases align with the same laws governing the private and public sector, and nothing has happened.

Moreover, it’s too late to do anything about that before the next election, even if there was a sudden change of heart from the Liberals, who balked at including any such protections in the newest electoral reform legislation.

So the information that the political parties are collecting about you over the next few months is about as safe as the data you feed into those Facebook quizzes — in other words, not at all, as the federal and B.C. privacy commissioners said in their Thursday news conference.

It’s little wonder that political parties like Facebook so much. It collects all the kinds of information that influences voter behaviour — where you live, who your friends are, how you react to the news. Remember how Conservatives used Facebook information to toss people out of a Stephen Harper campaign event in 2011?

The trust survey also revealed some interesting partisan breakdowns about how supporters of each of the main parties are using social media. While all partisans lean heavily on Facebook for information — roughly one third of each group said it was one place they would go to seek information — fascinating distinctions emerge for other social media.

Liberals like Twitter more than other partisans, the survey found, while Conservatives are much more fond of YouTube, and New Democrats liked Instagram more than people in the other parties.

The survey was conducted online among 1,543 adult Canadians from Feb 7-24, right in the first few weeks of the SNC-Lavalin saga’s explosion all over the news and social media. (Because it is an online survey, margin-of-error statistics aren’t supplied.)

The real question for federal politicians is whether all this news about Facebook makes people more wary of using it to get their political news as the election draws nearer.

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The survey showed that Canadians may in fact be going retro when it comes to which information they trust the most. Far and way, word of mouth is the preferred first source of information, it appears, with about 45 per cent reporting it as their first and most trusted choice. Editorial content from newspapers, TV or radio is a distant second at 23 per cent. Twitter, Donald Trump’s favourite medium, stands last at 1 per cent.

That may explain why the political parties are still going to be knocking on doors and still relying on face-to-face contact to win voters’ trust this fall. Canadians just might want to be careful what they tell the door-knocking visitors from the political parties. Don’t let them put anything in the party database that you wouldn’t share on Facebook. Privacy apparently isn’t guaranteed with either.

Susan Delacourt is the Star's Ottawa bureau chief and a columnist covering national politics. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt

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