ERROR


To best access our work, please return to one of the following pages:

Thank you!

Information Incident, Featured Aengus Bridgman Information Incident, Featured Aengus Bridgman

Information Incident Notification: Ripple Effects of the Charlie Kirk Assassination in the Canadian Information Ecosystem

The assassination of Charlie Kirk has been followed by a massive amount of polarized online discussions in the Canadian information ecosystem, fuelling disinformation, partisan conflict, and mobilization exposing the risk of targeted and/or large scale unrest and physical harm.

Read More

Incident Debrief ︱August 3 Bot Activity on 𝕏 Related to Rally in Kirkland Lake

This minor incident was likely caused by a single entity or actor using a set of newly created bot accounts with posts composed by either a low-quality (cheap) or poorly prompted generative Large Language Models (often described generically as AI) [Incident Update (IU) 6]. This network of bots consistently posts about recent news topics and are only incidentally interested in Canada or Canadian politics content [IU6].

Read More

Incident Update 6︱Bots and LLMs

In this final update on the bot incident related to Pierre Poilievre’s rally in Kirkland Lake, we aim to provide additional context about bot activity in the Canadian information ecosystem. Specifically, we wanted to know: 1) the extent to which Large Language Models (LLMs) were used in combination with bot profiles to produce the messages; 2) how many people saw these messages; 3) how blame attribution was a major part of the subsequent discussion; and 4) what other messages the bots produced.

Read More

Incident Update 5︱Survey Findings : Kirkland Lake Bot Incident

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre's rally in Kirkland Lake on July 31st drew subsequent attention from bot posts on 𝕏 praising the event with variations of similar phrasing. To learn more about public opinion of the event, and of how online bot activity interacts with democracy in Canada, we fielded a survey of 1437 Canadians from August 16th to 21st. The margin of error for a comparable probability-based random sample of the same size is +/-2.59%, 19 times out of 20.

Read More