From 27-29 May 2019, the Standing Committee on Access to information, Privacy and Ethics (the Committee) and, by extension, the International Grand Committee (IGC) on Big Data, Privacy and Democracy, held multiple hearings in Ottawa.

During these meetings, the IGC was made up of members from the Committee, as well as Parliamentarians from 10 other countries.[1] For the duration of the hearings, foreign Parliamentarians were deemed ex-officio members of the Committee, granting them the authority to question witnesses.

The IGC heard many witnesses, including experts and academics, as well as regulators, who provided testimony to help better understand challenges regarding Big Data, privacy and democracy.[2]

For example, Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at the Harvard Business School and author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, defined surveillance capitalism:

Surveillance capitalism follows the history of market capitalism in the following way. It takes something that exists outside the marketplace and brings it into the market dynamic for production and sale. Industrial capitalism famously claimed nature for the market dynamic, to be reborn as land or real estate that could be sold or purchased. Surveillance capitalism does the same thing, but now with a dark and startling turn. What it does is it claims private human experience for the market dynamic. Private human experience is repurposed as free raw material. These raw materials are rendered as behavioural data.

Some of these behavioural data are certainly fed back into product and service improvement, but the rest are declared as behavioural surplus, identified for their rich predictive value. These behavioural surplus flows are then channelled into the new means of production, into what we call machine intelligence or artificial intelligence. From there, what comes out of this new means of production is a new kind of product—the prediction product. These factories produce predictions of human behaviour[3].

She also explained the imperatives that motivate surveillance capitalism:

It began with economies of scale. We need a lot of data to make great predictions. It moved on to economies of scope. We need varieties of data to make great predictions. Now it has moved into a third phase of competition, economies of action, where the most predictive forms of data come from intervening in human behaviour – shaping, tuning, herding, coaxing, modifying human behaviour in the directions of the guaranteed outcomes that fulfill the needs of surveillance capitalism's business customers.

This is the world we now live in. As a result, surveillance capitalism is an assault on democracy[4].

Jim Balsillie, the founder and former co-CEO of Research in Motion and Chair of the Centre for International Governance Innovation, offered comments on the power of technology and data:

Technology gets its power through control of data. Data at the micro-personal level gives technology unprecedented power to influence. Data is not the new oil. It's the new plutonium – amazingly powerful, dangerous when it spreads, difficult to clean up and with serious consequences when improperly used. Data deployed through next generation 5G networks is transforming passive infrastructure into veritable digital nervous systems.

Our current domestic and global institutions, rules and regulatory frameworks are not designed to deal with any of these emerging challenges. Because cyberspace knows no natural borders, digital transformation's effects cannot be hermetically sealed within national boundaries. International coordination is critical.

…

Technology is disrupting governance and, if left unchecked, could render liberal democracy obsolete. By displacing the print and broadcast media in influencing public opinion, technology is becoming the new fourth estate. In our system of checks and balances, this makes technology coequal with the executive, the legislative bodies and the judiciary.

When this new fourth estate declines to appear before this committee, as Silicon Valley executives are currently doing, it is symbolically asserting this aspirational coequal status, but is asserting this status and claiming its privileges without the traditions, disciplines, legitimacy or transparency that check the power of the traditional fourth estate[5].

Roger McNamee, a former mentor of Mark Zuckerberg and the author of a book entitled Zucked painted a picture of how large platforms operate:

Google and Facebook use data voodoo dolls to provide their customers, who are marketers, with perfect information about every consumer. They use the same data to manipulate consumer choices.

…

The algorithms of Google and Facebook are tuned to keep users on site and active, preferably by pressing emotional buttons that reveal each user's true self. For most users, this means content that provokes fear or outrage. Hate speech, disinformation and conspiracy theories are catnip for these algorithms. The design of these platforms treats all content precisely the same, whether it be hard news from a reliable site, a warning about an emergency or a conspiracy theory. The platforms make no judgments: users choose, aided by algorithms that reinforce past behaviour. The result is 2.5 billion Truman Shows on Facebook, each a unique world with its own facts[6].

Maria Ressa, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Editor of Rappler Inc., said the following about the situation in the Philippines:

We here in the Philippines are a cautionary tale for you, an example of how quickly democracy crumbles and is eroded from within and how these information operations can take over the entire ecosystem and transform lies into facts. If you can make people believe that lies are facts, you can control them. Without facts, you don't have truth. Without truth, you don't have trust.[7]

With respect to the work of journalists and the disinformation targeting Rappler, Ms. Ressa added the following:

Journalists have long been the gatekeepers for facts. When we come under attack, democracy is under attack. When this situation happens, the voice with the loudest megaphone wins. The Philippines is a petri dish for social media. As of January 2019 ... Filipinos spend the most time online and the most time on social media globally. Facebook is our Internet, but as I'll show you with some of the data ... this is about introducing a virus into our information ecosystem. Over time, that virus lies, masquerading as facts. That virus takes over the body politic and you need to develop a vaccine. That's what we're in search of, and I think we do see a solution.[8]

…

For us, this is a matter of survival.[9]

Jason Kint, Chief Executive Officer of Digital Content Next, stated the following regarding the role of third parties and intermediaries in the collection and use of personal data:

Today, personal data is frequently collected by unknown third parties without consumer knowledge or control. That data is then used to target consumers across the web as cheaply as possible. This dynamic creates incentives for bad actors, particularly on unmanaged platforms like social media which rely on user-generated content mostly with no liability, where the site owners are paid on the click whether it is from an actual person or a bot, on trusted information or on disinformation.[10]

The opaque data-driven ecosystem has strongly benefited intermediaries, primarily Google, and harmed publishers and advertisers. These intermediaries have unique leverage as gatekeepers and miners of our personal data. As a result, issues have surfaced including bot fraud, malware, ad blockers, clickbait, privacy violations and now disinformation, all over the past decade. However, importantly these are all symptoms. Make no mistake, the root cause is unbridled data collection at the most personal level imagined.[11]

Taylor Owen, Associate Professor at McGill University, highlighted some of the problems caused by the attention economy:

Disinformation, hate speech, election interference, privacy breaches, mental health issues and anti-competitive behaviour must be treated as symptoms of the problem, not its cause. Public policy should therefore focus on the design and the incentives embedded in the design of the platforms themselves. It is the design of the attention economy which incentivizes virality and engagement over reliable information. It is the design of the financial model of surveillance capitalism, which we'll hear much more about, which incentivizes data accumulation and its use to influence our behaviour. It is the design of group messaging which allows for harmful speech and even the incitement of violence to spread without scrutiny. It is the design for global scale that is incentivized in perfect automation solutions to content filtering, moderation and fact-checking. It is the design of our unregulated digital economy that has allowed our public sphere to become monopolized.[12]

Ben Scott, director of Policy and Advocacy at Luminate, observed the following changes in the use of Internet:

What I saw was that the open Internet that was meant to expand freedom instead turned into a powerful technology of social manipulation and political distortion. You all know the story. What was once the great hope for the revitalization of democracy is now considered by many to be among its greatest threats.[13]

Regarding the attention economy, online hate speech and the role of technology, Mr. Scott added the following:

It happened because they figured out a business model for superprofits. Step one: Track everything that billions of people do online and put it in a database. Step two: Sort that data and group people into target audiences and then sell access to their attention, engineering your entire information marketplace to optimize not for the quality of information or the civility of the dialogue in our society, but optimize just for addictiveness and time spent on the platform. Because the more time people spend on the platform, the more ads they see, and the more money the superprofits make.[14]

…

… it's not just the ads that get targeted. Everything gets targeted. The entire communications environment in which we live is now tailored by machine intelligence to hold our attention. This is not a recipe for truth and justice. What feels true performs better than what is true. Conspiracy and hate have become the organizing themes of social media, and that is a space that is easily exploited by propagandists peddling bigotry, social division and hatred to the disillusioned.[15]

However, I want to be clear: Technology doesn't cause this problem. It accelerates it. It shapes it. It shapes its growth and its direction. It determines in what ways social development and history flow. Technology is an amplifier of the intentions of those who use it. These consequences are, in my view, not inevitable. There's no technological determinism here. We can fix this.[16]

To be fair, our democracies are failing a lot of people. People are upset for good reason, but that upset is not manifesting as reform anymore. It's manifesting as a kind of festering anger. That radicalism comes from the way technology is shifting our information environments and shaping how we understand the world. We rarely see the world through the eyes of others. We are divided into tribes, and we are shown a version of the world day in and day out, month after month, that deepens our prejudices and widens the gaps between our communities. That's how we have to understand this problem.[17]

Finally, Heidi Tworek, Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia, stated the following regarding disinformation and algorithmic transparency:

Marginalized groups were targeted online and they were blamed for societal ills that they did not cause. News was falsified for political and economic purposes. Like with radio in the first half of the 20th century, a technology designed with utopian aims became a tool for dictators and demagogues.[18]

Only 29% of Americans or Brits understand that their Facebook newsfeed is algorithmically organized. The most aware are the Finns and only 39% of them understand that. That invisibility accords social media platforms an enormous amount of power. That power is not neutral. At a very minimum, we need far more transparency about how algorithms work, whether they are discriminatory and so on and so forth. As we strive towards evidence-based policy, we need good evidence.[19]

Representatives from Facebook, Google and Twitter appeared on 28 May 2019[20]. Representatives from Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla appeared on 29 May 2019[21].

During these hearings, platforms acknowledged that:

• Stronger privacy and data protection rules are needed;[22]
• They are willing to cooperate with governments on minimizing election interference;[23] and
• They should take responsibility for taking down harmful content and that there is a need for greater accountability on their part with respect to the algorithms that they use.[24]

On 28 May 2019, parliamentarians participating in the IGC signed the Ottawa Declaration. [25] Signatories declared their unwavering commitment to foster market competition, increase the accountability of social media platforms, protect privacy rights and personal data, and maintain and strengthen democracy. The declaration acknowledges the need for digital platforms to follow applicable competition and antitrust laws, to strengthen their practices regarding privacy and data protection, to increase their algorithmic accountability, and to improve the manner in which these platforms prevent digital activities that threaten social peace or interfere in the open and democratic processes around the world.

Finally, the Committee notes that Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg refused to appear before the IGC in Ottawa on 28 May 2019. In November 2018, Mr. Zuckerberg also failed to appear to the IGC’s hearing on disinformation and ‘fake news’[26] held in London, United Kingdom, and hosted by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, a Select Committee of the British House of Commons, despite a formal invitation. 

Mr. Zuckerberg’s failure to appear runs counter to his word. In an op-ed published in March 2019, he called for a more active role for governments and regulators in the areas of harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability. He stated that “Facebook has a responsibility to help address these issues, and I’m looking forward to discussing them with lawmakers around the world.”[27]

This contradiction led to the following exchange between the Chair of the Committee and Neil Potts, Global Policy Director for Facebook Inc.:

The Chair:

With respect, it is not your decision to select whether you're going to come or not. The committee has asked Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg to come, plain and simple, to appear before our international grand committee. We represent 400 million people, so when we ask those two individuals to come, that's exactly what we expect. It shows a little bit of distain from Mark Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg to simply choose not to come. It just shows there's a lack of an understanding about what we do, as legislators, as the member from Saint Lucia mentioned. The term “blowing us off”, I think, can be brought up again, but it needs to be stated that they were invited to appear and they were expected to appear and they're choosing not to. To use you two individuals in their stead is simply not acceptable.

Mr. Neil Potts:

I'm not familiar with the procedures of Canadian Parliament and what requires appearance. I respect that, but I do want to get on record that they are committed to working with government, as well as being responsible toward these issues.

Additionally—

The Chair:

I would argue, Mr. Potts, if that were the case, they would be seated in those two chairs right there[28].

During the IGC, a motion was adopted by the Committee to serve summons to appear to Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg:

That the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, on account of the refusal of Mr. Mark Zuckerberg and Ms. Sheryl Sandberg to appear before it on May 28th, direct the Chair to serve either or both with a formal summons should they arrive in Canada for any purpose to appear before the Committee at the date of the next meeting from to the date of their summons, and should they be served with a summons when the House is not sitting, that the Chair reconvene the Committee for a special meeting as soon as practicable for the purpose of obtaining evidence from them[29].

The Committee invites members of the Committee in the 43^rd Parliament to continue pursuing this issue and to pursue the work of the IGC in collaboration with parliamentarians from other countries.