Projects launched to help strengthen Canadians' resilience against harmful online disinformation Français
Projects funded through the Digital Citizen Contribution Program will strengthen citizens' critical thinking about disinformation and enhance their ability to get involved in democratic processes
GATINEAU, QC, July 21, 2022 /CNW Telbec/ - Credible information is fundamental to a healthy democracy and a strong society. Canadians should have access to diverse and reliable sources of information so that they can form opinions; hold governments, public institutions, and individuals to account; and participate in public discourse.
The Minister of Canadian Heritage, Pablo Rodriguez, and the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Infrastructure and Communities, the Honourable Dominic LeBlanc, today announced over $2.4 million in funding for projects that will give Canadians the tools to identify online disinformation, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine.
Today's announcement is the result of a special call for proposals launched in March 2022. These projects are citizen-focused activities and funded under Canadian Heritage's Digital Citizen Initiative (DCI). The Initiative promotes civic, news, and digital media literacy through funding third-party educational activities and programming to help citizens become resilient against disinformation.
Projects will create educational workshops, podcast documentaries, and learning materials for new educational resources, focused on countering Russian disinformation.
We are also announcing the annual call for proposals for the Digital Citizen Contribution Program. Applicants are encouraged to submit research proposals that focus on countering online disinformation and other online harms and threats. Funds received through this open call for proposals are for fiscal year 2022–23 and must be spent by March 31, 2023. The application deadline for this call for proposals is August 18, 2022.
Details on how to apply can be found on the DCCP webpage.
Investing in these projects will help Canadians critically assess what they see online; understand misinformation and disinformation; understand how algorithms impact a user's online experience; recognize how and when bad actors exploit online platforms; acquire skills to avoid being manipulated online; and effectively engage in public debate and online discussions.
A list of the funded activities, including recipients, funding amounts and project descriptions, is available in the attached backgrounder.
"The best defence against Russian disinformation is Canadian citizens armed with facts. These projects will give Canadians skills and tools to tell fact from fiction online. We live and work better as a society when we have a common set of facts."
—The Honourable Pablo Rodriguez, Minister of Canadian Heritage
"In Canada and around the world, democracies are contending with malicious actors seeking to weaken our institutions and undermine citizens' trust in their government. Working with civil society, this program will give Canadians the tools they need to identify disinformation and strengthen our democracy."
—The Honourable Dominic LeBlanc, Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Infrastructure and Communities
The Digital Citizen Initiative supports a community of Canadian researchers and civil society organizations that promote a healthy information ecosystem, to help Canadians and the government understand online disinformation and its impact on Canadian society, and in turn build an evidence base to identify potential action and develop future policy making.
The Digital Citizen Contribution Program supports the priorities of the DCI by providing financial assistance for research and citizen-focused activities. The Program aims to support democracy and social cohesion in Canada by enhancing and/or supporting efforts to counter online disinformation and other online harms and threats.
In Budget 2019, the Government of Canada invested $19.4 million to expand Canadian Heritage's Digital Citizen Initiative to create a new research program that supporting stronger evidence-based policy making in the countering of disinformation and other online harms in a Canadian context. Research is implemented through three main activities:
- a new Digital Citizen Contribution Program
- a joint initiative with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
- support to the Public Policy Forum's Digital Democracy Project
The Initiative also supports digital media literacy and complements the multi-stakeholder International Engagement Strategy that developed guiding principles for the diversity of content online.
Through investing in digital citizen initiatives, the Government of Canada can help understand and mitigate the impact of online disinformation on Canadian society.
The Government of Canada is also working to develop a legislative and regulatory framework to confront the spread of harmful content online and has tasked an Expert Advisory Group on Online Safety to provide recommendations for the development of future policy.
Backgrounder - Government of Canada to fund projects addressing the growing problem of online mis/disinformation
The Digital Citizen Contribution Program is providing over $2.4 million in total funding to projects
The Digital Citizen Contribution Program supports the priorities of the Digital Citizen Initiative by providing time-limited financial assistance for research and citizen-focused activities. The Program aims to support democracy and social cohesion in Canada by enhancing and/or supporting efforts to counter online disinformation and other online harms and threats.
The 2022–2023 special call for applications was targeted specifically to fund initiatives to help identify misinformation and disinformation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In total, 11 projects received more than $2.4 million in funding for a range of activities including educational workshops, podcast documentaries, the development of learning materials for new educational resources, and countering Russian mis/disinformation.
This comprehensive strategy includes the development of new educational resources and activities on key themes. The twin pillars of the project are digital and civic literacy, which are requirements for informed and engaged citizenship. Given the context of social fragmentation and polarization, activities will be designed to promote constructive civic discourse.
This project is a program designed to counter Russian mis/dis/malinformation in Canada related to the Ukrainian conflict and build broad resilience to such efforts that seek to undermine social cohesion. Using detection and analysis tools, DPS will begin monitoring Canada's online information environment to rapidly identify and monitor trends in key Russian mis/dis/malinformation narratives circulating online within Canada.
Project IDEa (identify, de-mystify, and empower) aims to counter the Russian disinformation campaign related to the invasion of Ukraine propagating through online social media as well as mainstream print and electronic platforms. Project IDEa has three parts: 1) analyzing and determining trends and propaganda through artificial intelligence-driven tools; 2) de-mystifying propaganda through subject matter experts by podcasts; and 3) empowering young Ukrainian diaspora through education by arranging workshops.
Breaking Bread and Bias is a pilot project that will build Canadian capacity for digitally-enabled interventions. Through facilitating workshops and producing sharable content, this project will help young Canadians develop the skills to talk about and engage with disinformation, radicalization, and bias. The objectives of the project are to: 1) promote respectful, inclusive engagement and critical thinking; 2) provide de-escalation and de-radicalization strategies; and 3) increase civic literacy and increase trust in and knowledge of democratic processes.
This project will build greater resilience against Russian disinformation for Canadian journalists, specifically those working within ethnic media, Canada's Russian-language media (print, radio, and television), and community leaders and stakeholder groups in the 4.5 million Canadians of Ukrainian and Central and Eastern European heritage. They will do this by developing 90-minute workshops, tailored to each of these groups to outline and explain Russian information warfare objectives, tactics, and narratives in the context of the war in Ukraine and how that threatens our own democracy.
This project will deploy a Canada-wide, public knowledge and skills-based campaign to empower individuals to understand evidence and how to ask for it. The campaign will consist of two digital resource guides to: 1) equip individuals to identify and verify evidence; and 2) outline questions to empower the individual to obtain evidence from different sources, and how asking for evidence can help hold individuals, organizations, institutions and companies to account for the claims they make.
This project will create a promotional campaign, primarily through social media and targeted email outreach, to reach Canadians who may need help turning a critical eye to the current digital landscape. Historica Canada will also create an interactive learning module focusing on the history and contribution of both Ukrainian and Russian communities in Canada.
McGill will develop and deliver a limited-run documentary podcast series focused on cultivating an understanding of and resilience to disinformation in the Canadian context while building Canadian capacity to have difficult conversations about disinformation. Each episode will include an example of a counter-intervention to disinformation, either by highlighting relevant digital literacy campaigns, social organizations, forms of "counter speech" online, fact checking, technological tools, and/or legislative efforts that have shown promise and success in countering specific forms of disinformation and can be paralleled in a Canadian context.
This project consists of a social marketing campaign that features educational videos with supporting material. The topics of the videos are: 1) Critical thinking and intellectual humility; 2) Propaganda and hate speech; and 3) Responding to mis/disinformation. Content will be in the vein of MediaSmarts' successful Break the Fake campaign and will promote actions and attitudes essential to recognizing and responding to misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda
In the fall of 2022, Concordia University will offer a freely available, six-week bilingual "From Hate to Hope" (H2H) open online course to equip a cross-section of Canadian citizens with improved digital media literacy, as well as resilience against disinformation and hate speech in the context of a highly polarized era.
This project will promote positive change in the online platforms that Canadians are increasingly using to communicate, share, and consume news and information by enabling: 1) an up-to-date report that surveys Canadians' use of online social platforms, its relationship to experience of online harms and belief in disinformation, and attitudes toward making changes to online platforms; 2) engagement with civil society, platform and government stakeholders, and the public at large to promote positive change in online platforms, including an event, video content, and multilingual infographics; and 3) direct engagement and advocacy with online platforms to promote change in platform design toward positive democratic outcomes, including advancing tools to help users contextualize what they see online.
Digital Citizen Contribution Program
The Government's commitment to address online safety
SOURCE Canadian Heritage
(media only), please contact: Laura Scaffidi, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Canadian Heritage, [email protected]; Jean-Sébastien Comeau, Press Secretary and Communications Advisor, Office of the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Infrastructure and Communities, 343-574-8116, [email protected]; Media Relations: Canadian Heritage, 819-994-9101, 1-866-569-6155, [email protected]
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