GATINEAU – Canadian Heritage announced today that more than $1.2 million will go toward 16 research projects intended to “counter and educate about online harms, misinformation, and disinformation.”
The projects will “evaluate the efficacy of efforts by platforms to counter disinformation and other online harms, understand the role of non-news and alternative media sources of disinformation, or identify the behavioural and psychological underpinnings of the spread of disinformation and other harmful content in the Canadian context,” the press release said.
The projects were selected following an annual call for proposals launched in July by the Digital Citizen Contribution Program (DCCP), a component of the department’s Digital Citizen Initiative, “which promotes civic, news, and digital media literacy through funding third-party education activities and programming to help citizens become resilient against disinformation,” according to a press release.
The projects are: Black Francophone Youth and Digital Media: A Study of the Effects and Impacts of Racism; Mods, Memes, Minigames: Play and Games as Alternative Media Sources for Disinformation; Combating Misinformation Within Families: What If Young People Could Become Information Ambassadors?; Peel Community Anti-Black Racism Social Action Response; The New Landscape of Anti-Black Racism: Combating Online Misinformation and the Spread of Racial Hatred in Canada; Resonate: Tackling Misinformation in Albertan Ethnocultural Communities; Reporting Platforms: Young Canadians Evaluate Efforts to Counter Disinformation; Prevalence and Types of Online Harms Encountered by Canadians in Day-to-Day Use of Digital Media; Possible Practices to Protect Canadian Organizations from Queerphobic Cyber-violence; Conversations for Change and Community; Shooting the Messenger: Credibility Attacks on Journalists; Platform Governance in Canada; Post-Secondary Students and Climate Misinformation: Attitudes and Relationships to New Digital Media; A Multimodal Analysis of Misinformation Strategies on TikTok; To Share or Not to Share: A Randomized Controlled Study of Misinformation Warning Labels on Social Media; and Digital Diasporas, Chat Apps, and Social Cohesion: The Behavioural and Psychological Determinants of Disinformation Spread, Engagement, and Impact.
The ministry announced in the spring of 2020 that it would invest $3 million in organizations through the DCCP, principally to tackle false and misleading Covid-19 information.
The minister also announced today that a new $1.5-million call for proposals through the DCCP to “raise awareness about tools and services offered by non-government organizations and online platforms and services to counter online harms against kids and more generally hate speech, incitement to violence, child sexual exploitation material, and the non-consensual distribution of intimate images,” the release added.
“The rise of harmful content online, including misinformation and disinformation, is one of the most pressing issues of our time,” said Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez in the release. “This is why programs like the Digital Citizen Contribution Program are essential in helping fund important research to address this problem.
“In order to make informed decisions in our democracy, Canadians need to have access to the tools to identify disinformation and be able to express themselves freely without the fear of violence,” the minister added. “These projects work toward achieving this goal and we will continue our work to make the Internet a safer and more inclusive space for everyone.”
