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With the recent bombshell report on Russian interference in the 2016 election in the United States, panelists stressed that the U.S. is not the only country subject or vulnerable to information warfare.

For example, Global Affairs Canada released a report in September detailing “co-ordinated inauthentic activity” on social media during the Alberta provincial election in April, although it found it unlikely there was foreign interference.

Justin Ling, a Toronto-based freelance journalist, noted that preventing misinformation should be governments’ goal, but many refuse to even believe interference is happening.

He has writtenextensively on Canada’s own vulnerability to misinformation and cyber warfare in the lead-up to the current federal election, which he argued media has a critical role in curbing.

“I don’t think we can put this on the public anymore,” Ling said, noting that Canada generally views cyber warfare in traditional military terms that don’t capture its complexity. “It can no longer be a question of resilience, I think it has to be a question of prevention.”

Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro stressed “how unaware people still are” that such concerted efforts to spread misinformation exist, and that holding social media platforms accountable for the content they allow to spread is key.

“(Russia) has no problem using American social media platforms to wage war against us,” Aro said.

Panelists agreed that citizens need to not only be critical of what they are reading, but call on government and private industry to acknowledge and prevent information warfare before it happens.

“How do we get the (political) resolve to address this? I truthfully don’t think we do. I think that ship has sailed,” said Ling. “I think social media regulation is possible, and I don’t know that we’re going to have the capacity to target these people at the individual level.”

mwyton@postmedia.com

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