Digital Sovereignty

Democracy requires free debate and information integrity

State sovereignty once meant self-government; control of borders and territory; and independence from external authority. It now has a massive digital dimension.

When radio became a dominant means of information transmission in Canada, we enacted the Broadcasting Act, which received royal assent in 1936. When television was introduced, our legislation was updated in 1958 and 1968.

In today’s Canada most of our attention — ears and eyeballs — and the advertising dollars that follow them now go to mostly unregulated digital platforms that are not subject to the Broadcasting Act and not controlled by or accountable to Canadians. These social media behemoths have put local Canadian media outlets out of business, decimated national newsrooms, impaired Canadian media business models, ravaged our political debate, and left Canadians misinformed about basic issues, while producing little Canadian content and paying almost no taxes here.

Far from being benign or even neutral, these platforms have generated polarization, extremism and immersive content with harmful impacts comparable to drug addiction and serious mental illness. The costs are so grave that Australia is banning social media use among teenagers, and Denmark is considering it.

Since social media began to divert the attention of our populations away from edited and curated news sources, the number of authoritarian and populist governments around the world has risen inexorably. The number and quality of remaining democracies has declined. Within almost every democracy, political opinion has coalesced around unhealthy extremes. Many political parties now bring forward proposals that, far from reflecting the common good or sensible policy solutions, simply reflect the obsessions of a radicalized fringe whose views stampede and overrun those with a more deliberative and moderate approach.

Without a new commitment to digital sovereignty, this slide will continue.

In this new era of disinformation and malign influence operations, the most ambitious measures to protect democratic debate from further impoverishment have been taken by EU member states. For example, Sweden established a Psychological Defence Agency (MPF) on January 1^st, 2022 — just before Russia’s full-scale invasion. It has had considerable success in coordinating initiatives across Swedish government and civil society, while building capabilities to detect and prevent election interference and upgrading institutional resilience.