Online Disinformation Risks: Issues for Canadian News Media and Advertisers

Online Disinformation Risks: Issues for Canadian News Media and Advertisers / Risques de désinformation en ligne : Enjeux pour les médias canadiens et les annonceurs

News websites have financial incentives to spread disinformation, in order to increase their online traffic and, ultimately, their advertising revenue. Meanwhile, the dissemination of disinformation has disruptive and impactful consequences. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a recent example. By disrupting society’s shared sense of accepted facts, these narratives undermine public health, safety and government responses.

To combat ad-funded disinformation, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) deploys its assessment framework to rate news domains’ risk of disinforming their readers. These independent, trusted and neutral ratings are used by advertisers, ad tech companies and platforms, to redirect their online ad spending in line with their brand safety and disinformation risk mitigation strategies.

GDI defines disinformation as ‘adversarial narratives that create real world harm’, and the GDI risk rating provides information about a range of indicators related to the risk that a given news website will disinform its readers by spreading these adversarial narratives. These indicators are grouped under the index’s Content and Operations pillars, which respectively measure the quality and reliability of a site’s content and its operational and editorial integrity.

Register now for the launch event which will see panelists (bios below) discuss the findings of the research, and discuss the impacts of those findings, before taking Q&A from the audience:

Ron Lund, President and CEO of ACA

Jean LaRose, former CEO of APTN

Michel Cormier from RSF/JTI (also Exec. Director of the Canadian Leaders’ Debate Commission)

Kathy English, Canadian Journalism Foundation Chair and former Public Editor at the Toronto Star

Clare Melford, GDI's Co-founder and Executive Director

Aengus Bridgman, Research fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, McGill University

Introduced by Amy Harris, Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University, closed by Colette Brin, Laval University.

Links to the zoom webinar will be sent to all registrants 24 hours before the event, with a reminder 2 hours before as well.

Bios of Panelists:

Ron Lund, President & CEO Association of Canadian Advertisers. Ron Lund is the President & CEO of the Association of Canadian Advertisers (ACA), a member-based association whose advocacy work has been supporting client marketers for over 100 years. Before taking the helm at ACA, Ron’s career included roles in marketing management, advertising and as President of several George Weston Limited companies. Ron is currently focused on several important initiatives, including industry self-regulation for food and beverage advertising to children, the prioritization of diversity, equity and inclusion in marketing, the establishment of a solution for cross media measurement, and the advancement of a common framework for brand safety. Ron serves on the Boards of the World Federation of Advertisers, Ad Standards Canada, Digital Advertising Alliance of Canada and the Media Ratings Council.

Jean LaRose is president and CEO of Dadan Sivunivut, an independent holding company of Indigenous media and entertainment ventures . He was previously CEO of APTN, the Aboriginal People’s Television Network, for more than 17 years. Prior to joining APTN, he served as Communications Director for the Assembly of First Nations.

Jean LaRose est président et directeur général de Dadan Sivunivut, une société indépendante de médias et d'entreprises de divertissement autochtones. Auparavant, il a été PDG d'APTN, le Réseau de télévision des peuples autochtones, pendant plus de 17 ans. Avant de rejoindre APTN, il a été directeur des communications de l'Assemblée des Premières Nations.

Michel Cormier, directeur général de la Commission des débats des chefs du Canada, est membre du Conseil d’administration de Reporters sans frontières et représentant canadien du Journalism Trust Initiative de RSF. Ancien correspondant international de Radio-Canada et collaborateur de CBC, notamment en Russie et en Chine, il a aussi été directeur régional de Radio-Canada Acadie, puis directeur général de l'information du réseau français du diffuseur public national. Il est l’auteur de cinq livres, dont un essai sur la Russie et une étude du mouvement démocratique chinois.

Michel Cormier, Executive Director of the Canadian Leaders' Debate Commission, is a member of the Board of Directors of Reporters Without Borders and the Canadian representative of the Journalism Trust Initiative of RSF. A former international correspondent in Russia and China for Radio-Canada and a contributor to CBC, he also served as regional director of Radio-Canada Acadie, and then as head of news for the French-language network of the Canadian public broadcaster. He has authored five books, including an essay on Russia and a study of the Chinese democracy movement.

Kathy English is currently Vice-President, Content Integrity and Editorial Standards, for the New York-based digital publishing company Dotdash. She was the public editor of the Toronto Star from 2007 to 2020. She is the current chair of the board of the Canadian Journalism Foundation.

Kathy was a 2020/21 journalism fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford where she examined the role of public editors in ensuring trustworthy, diverse journalism. Previously, she reported and edited for six Canadian daily newspapers, launched websites for two Canadian media companies and served as a tenured faculty member at Ryerson School of Journalism. Kathy holds a Master’s degree in Canadian history from Western University, which awarded her a teaching fellowship in 2021.