Mark Carney was just days away from announcing his bid to lead Canada’s Liberal Party in January when his face popped up on a viral right-wing Facebook page.
Two photographs showed Mr. Carney, who became prime minister last month, at a garden party beside Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker and former confidante of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. There was no evidence that Mr. Carney and Ms. Maxwell were close friends, and his team dismissed the pictures as a fleeting social interaction from more than a decade ago.
But they were perfect fodder for Canada Proud, a right-wing Facebook page with more than 620,000 followers. For days, Canada Proud posted about the images, including in paid ads that repeatedly said Mr. Carney had been “hanging out with sex traffickers.”
This type of online content — hyperpartisan and often veering into misinformation — has become a staple in the Facebook and Instagram feeds of Canadians as the country heads toward a crucial federal election on April 28. While such posts have become familiar in political campaigns everywhere, the content is especially prominent in Canada during its first-in-the-world, long-term news ban on Facebook and Instagram.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, blocked news from its apps in Canada in 2023 after a new law required the social media giant to pay Canadian news publishers a tax for publishing their content. The ban applies to all news outlets irrespective of origin, including The New York Times.
That has allowed Canada Proud and dozens of other partisan pages to rise in popularity on Facebook and Instagram before the election. At the same time, cryptocurrency scams and ads that mimic legitimate news sources have proliferated on the platforms. Yet few voters are aware of this shift, with research showing that only one in five Canadians knows that news has been blocked on Facebook and Instagram feeds.
The result is a “continued spiral” for Canada’s online ecosystem toward disinformation and division, said Aengus Bridgman, director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a Canadian project that has studied social media during the election.
Meta’s decision has left Canadians “more vulnerable to generative A.I., fake news websites and less likely to encounter ideas and facts that challenge their worldviews,” Dr. Bridgman added.
In a statement, a Meta spokesman said the company had been “forced to make the difficult business decision to end the availability of news to comply with the law.” That could change if the law is reversed, he said. Paying publishers would most likely cost Meta, which generated $164.5 billion in revenue last year, 62 million Canadian dollars a year, or about $44 million.
Canada Proud, which is now one of the most popular political Facebook pages in Canada and has more followers than the country’s major parties, has emerged as a particularly potent weapon aimed at the Liberal Party and Mr. Carney.
Since Mr. Carney called last month for a snap election, Canada Proud has averaged nearly 200,000 engagements a day, rivaling the engagements of official Facebook accounts for the major political party leaders, according to an analysis by The Times. Since January, Canada Proud has had more than nine million engagements on its posts and its videos have been viewed nearly 60 million times, the analysis found.
Canada Proud often posts news updates, citing mainstream news sources that are barred from sharing their content on Facebook. But the posts sometime add misleading details not found in the original reports, according to a review by The Times.
One of its posts this month said Mr. Carney had suspended his campaign because of “connections with China” and cited a major Canadian news outlet, Global News, as its source. But the Global News article did not mention connections to China. Mr. Carney had instead paused campaigning to return to Ottawa, the capital, to deal with tariffs imposed on Canada by President Trump.
“Canada Proud has been very successful,” Dr. Bridgman of the Media Ecosystem Observatory said. Social media, he added, has “shifted to the right and continues to do so.”
Canada Proud, which describes itself as a “grass-roots group of Canadians” concerned about the country’s direction, is run by Mobilize Media Group, a public affairs firm that has worked for Conservative Party candidates. The group was founded by Jeff Ballingall, a conservative political operative who has made waves in federal and provincial elections in Canada since he established Mobilize Media in 2016.
Canada Proud, which also has hundreds of thousands of followers on X and TikTok, does not disclose its funding sources. It accepts donations and sells merchandise.
Mr. Ballingall said that Canada Proud’s posts “speak for themselves, and we encourage people to watch and read all our content before rushing to judgment.” Canada Proud’s prominence in the election was reported earlier by The Logic.
Mr. Ballingall said that some traditional Canadian media should be held accountable, because the tax on Meta went into effect partly as a result of their lobbying the Trudeau government. “I’m a strong believer in traditional media, and Canada Proud is not trying to replicate that. There should be tons of different voices,” Mr. Ballingall said. “What we have now is this weird zombie ecosystem in Canada.”
Canada Proud has also bought more than $250,000 in ads on Facebook and Instagram since January, according to Facebook’s ad tracker, making it the 15th-biggest ad spender in Canada during that period.
One ad, published last month on Facebook and Instagram, included the photo of Mr. Carney with Ms. Maxwell. It was seen more than 100,000 times.
Dozens of political ads from other sources with content generated by artificial intelligence have also flooded Canadians’ Facebook feeds in recent weeks. The ads often masquerade as news articles from legitimate sources but link to fake websites that resemble mainstream publishers like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the national public broadcaster.
Among some of the A.I.-generated content about political events that did not occur are plugs for cryptocurrency schemes.
The sites have exploited Mr. Trump’s trade war, which rattled Canadians and opened the door for marketers to push false investment products with a timely peg. In March, a securities commission in Canada issued a warning that the news site mimicry gave “their schemes the appearance of legitimacy.”
Canadian media have responded to the news ban on Facebook and Instagram by focusing on other platforms, mostly TikTok. A study last year by the Media Ecosystem Observatory found that after one year, engagement on social media with Canadian news outlets had fallen by about half.
Kenny Yum, the senior director of innovation and partnerships at CBC News, said his organization did not need Facebook to reach Canadians.
“They’re long in the rearview mirror for many of us in the Canadian industry,” he said. “They made themselves a non-news platform.”
Matina Stevis-Gridneff is the Canada bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the country.
Stuart A. Thompson writes about how false and misleading information spreads online and how it affects people around the world. He focuses on misinformation, disinformation and other misleading content.
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