More than a quarter of Canadians have been exposed to fake political content on social media that is “more sophisticated and more politically polarizing” as the country prepares to vote in a federal election, researchers have found, warning that platforms must increase protections amid a “dramatic acceleration” of online disinformation in the final weeks of the campaign.
In a new report released on Friday, Canada’s Media Ecosystem Observatory found a growing number of Facebook ads impersonating legitimate news sources were instead promoting fraudulent investment schemes, often involving cryptocurrency.
Canada’s federal election, on 28 April, is the first national vote in which Canadian news is not permitted to be shared on products owned by Meta, including Facebook and Instagram. The ban, which began in August 2023, is a result of a standoff between the tech giant and Ottawa over the Online News Act that forced intermediaries such as Meta and Google’s parent company Alphabet to compensate journalism outlets for sharing their content. Meta described the legislation, Bill C-18 – passed on 18 June – as “unworkable” and argued that the only way to comply with the law is to “end news availability for people in Canada”.
But media researchers found more than half of Canadians still say they get political news from Facebook, despite the platform’s ban on news articles from reputable outlets.
“People using Facebook aren’t often thinking, ‘Am I reading the news?’ But they leave feeling more informed politically, either from comments from friends or family, about the election. They might see a post from a candidate or follow cultural news aggregating types of accounts,” said Aengus Bridgman, the executive director of the MEO.
“But we know this is not the same quality of information they might have accessed before the ban. The richest, densest and most accurate and factchecked information is not making it through any more. Neither is information that might contradict the views they hold. All of that just has been cut really – like, off at the knees.”
Bridgman says that most of the content the team uncovered – including more than 40 Facebook pages promoting fraudulent ads, with new pages being created and identified every day – were meant to be humorous or ironic, instead of convincing. None of the content the team found is expected to sway the electorate.
But Canada’s Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (Site) is monitoring the election for disinformation and says it expects increased online political activity following the two closely-watched leaders debates. China, Russia and Iran remain the greatest threats to Canada’s election, according to the taskforce.
Last week, Site officials said they had found an information operation linked to China on Chinese-language social media platform WeChat, the popular news account Youli-Youmian.
“Foreign interference has been top of mind this election, with candidates bludgeoning each other on this issue. We monitor these platforms and our evaluation of that incident in particular doesn’t feel as though it had any material influence or consequence,” said Bridgman.
“We don’t think one WeChat channel posting a couple times about Canadian politics articles consistent with their editorial line amounts to foreign interference.”
Instead, researchers have focused their attention on a series of scams that appear to be a continuation of a trend replicated in other countries, in which ads showing “fake sensational political headlines” impersonate small business and personal accounts.
Bridgman cautioned that the broader risk of deepfakes comes when a population is uninformed. “If you’ve never heard about this person before, you cannot distinguish audio or video of them in compromising situations or making offensive remarks. And in the context of politics, we worry that with more unfamiliar candidates, the risk of convincing deep fakes escalates,” he said.
Among posts examined by the team were seven deep fake videos falsely showing prime minister Mark Carney promoting the fraudulent investment platforms featured directly in the ads. These deepfakes typically mimic broadcasts by the CBC or CTV, two of the top news outlets in Canada.
In one of those, the headline reads “Mark Carney announces controversial retaliatory tariff plan in response to Trump’s devastating tariff hikes this week”. The article shows Carney meeting with a top CBC news anchor and includes a purported transcript of an interview, in which he promises to send money to Canadians if they register for what purports to be a newly formed government programme. The link, however, brings users to a cryptocurrency scam.
In another, a page called Money Mindset, which uses the logo of the CBC/Radio-Canada, bought five French-language Facebook ads that were active from one to four hours between 4 and 9 April. One of the ads, featuring a deep fake video of Carney, cost US$300–$399 (about C$500) and received between five and six thousand impressions. In total, the five ads represent an investment of approximately C$1,000 and have received around 10,000 impressions.
“These imposter ads, fake news articles, and deepfake videos can undermine the credibility of both the targeted party leaders featured in the content and the news brands and journalists whose names, logos, or visual designs are being impersonated,” the report said.
A spokesperson for Meta told the Guardian it was “against our policies to run ads that try to scam or impersonate people or brands” adding the company encouraged people to report fraudulent content.
“This is an ongoing industry-wide challenge – scammers use every platform available to them and constantly adapt to evade enforcement. Our work in this area is never done, and we continue to invest in new technologies and methods to protect people on our platforms from scams.”
But researchers say the response from tech companies “appears to have been inconsistent and insufficient for preventing these ads from spreading” – pointing to the proliferation of ads in recent days. The observatory also found that since many of these ads do not self-disclose as political, they often do not appear in the Meta’s ad library, which hampers the ability to assess the scope of the trend.
“Imagine that on TV there’s an ad using clearly fraudulent content or is a deepfake. In what world would that be allowed? It would never get approved for use because of the advertising standards in this country,” said Bridgeman.
“And yet, Facebook runs these ads that get hundreds of thousands of views across the country and it’s just a pure scam. In the midst of a federal election using an image of Carney and a fake CBC news website on a platform that bans the news – this feels like we’re kind of in like a Black Mirror kind of moment. And what worries me is that it feels like people are just okay with this.”
