Facebook and Twitter want a role in the election debate show, reigniting broader questions about social media’s function in the democratic process.Ottawa is currently designing a policy to create an independent body to organize political party leaders’ debates in the 2019 federal election and beyond. Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould will meet behind closed doors with academics, media and public interest groups in Toronto on Wednesday, as part of a cross-country consultation tour launched last week along with a website where the public can weigh in until Feb. 9.Meanwhile, more than two dozen experts have provided input to a parliamentary committee studying party leaders’ debates. Facebook and Twitter told MPs late last year that if they want to engage the most people, digital platforms must be embedded in the distribution model, echoing several other witnesses.Read more:U.S. Senate releases trove of Russian Facebook ads, revealing sophisticated influence campaignOpinion | Thomas Walkom: Parsing the Russian social media ‘plot’ to elect Donald TrumpFacebook invites you to live in a bubble where you’re always rightThe internet has long been lauded as a democratizing tool but in recent months attention has shifted to the potential for platforms to be co-opted — a concern that’s been amplified as democracies around the globe grapple with the proliferation of fake news and misinformation, shady targeted advertising, and possible foreign meddling in elections.Those concerns should be addressed when rolling social media into any election-related policy, say a pair of prominent digital democracy researchers.“If an aim of using social is to increase engagement, then we have to be careful about what kind of engagement we are inviting,” said Elizabeth Dubois, an assistant communications professor at the University of Ottawa.Dubois and Fenwick McKelvey, an assistant professor of information and technolog ...
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