“There’s a lot of crap on the internet,” Taylor Owen tells me early in this week’s feature interview. “But that is not an election phenomenon, that is not a foreign-interference issue, that’s just a reality of our internet and our social media.”
Except sometimes it is an election phenomenon, or could be. Has been elsewhere. Might be again. So for Owen, whose office at McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy is down two short hallways from mine, it’s very much worth keeping an eye on what goes online before and during campaigns. And trying to sift what’s routinely terrible from what might be malicious and strategic. “How do you separate the signal from the noise,” he asks, “when the noise is a baseline of really bad content?”
The short version of Owen’s biography says he’s Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications and the founding Director of The Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill. He’s the host of the Globe and Mail’s Machines Like Us podcast. The longer version is longer. Our interview is a little longer than most I’ve run during this campaign, because the ground is newer to a lot of our audience and it’s worthwhile getting some of the basic concepts right.
It’s tricky work. During the interview, we discuss an incident where the federal government’s SITE Task Force flagged discussion on WeChat about Mark Carney. The day after we spoke, Taylor’s team publicly concluded that the SITE report was no big deal, probably a case of excess of caution.
My second guest is one we’ve heard before, recently. Hélène Buzzetti is the columnist for the newspaper group that includes most Quebec daily newspapers outside Montreal. She and I debate politics every Thursday on Radio-Canada’s flagship newscast, Le Téléjournal. I figured you’d want to hear from her again, during a week that started on the talk show Tout le monde en parle and will end, for all intents and purposes, with Wednesday’s French-language leaders’ debate and Thursday’s English-language debate, both from Montreal.
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You can read a (machine-generated) transcript of this week’s episode via the "Transcript” button at the top of this page when you view it on your desktop browser. As we learned from last week’s cross-platform Transcript button search, which was actually a thing (and thanks to everyone who took part!), it can be tricky if you’re reading on your phone or a tablet. But on your desktop browser, you should be able to find this post at this URL, and the Transcript button should be reasonably discoverable.
I am grateful to be the Max Bell Foundation Senior Fellow at McGill University, the principal patron of this podcast. Antica Productions turns these interviews into a podcast every week. Kevin Breit wrote and performed the theme music. Andy Milne plays it on piano at the end of each episode. Thanks to all of them and to you. Please tell your friends to subscribe to The Paul Wells Show on their favourite podcast app, or here on the newsletter.
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