Harper Government: Election Surveys and Elections Act

harper government: Bill C 76 undoes many of the amendments passed by the Harper government through the Fair Elections Act which were widely criticized as undemocratic at the time and attempts to address foreign interference by prohibiting the use of funds from foreign entities for political advertising or election surveys and by amending the prohibition in the Canada Elections Act against making false statements about political candidates, according to Rabble. Despite these efforts, the amendments, particularly around making false statements, do not go far enough in addressing the problem of fake news and the use of social media to spread it. In response to the threat of foreign interference in the Canadian democratic process, the government has proposed a variety of amendments to the Canada Elections Act, through Bill C-76, the Elections Modernization Act. Bill C-76 in era of social media Bill C 76 was released in April of this year, just a month after it became public knowledge that Cambridge Analytica had collected personal data from millions of Facebook accounts, which was then used for targeted political advertising to those Facebook users with the goal of influencing elections in the U.S. and U.K. Bill C 76 came a year after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the U.S. released a report detailing Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. More recently, the New York Times reported that Facebook executives knew about the extent of Russian activity on the social media platform -- in particular the use of false information spread through Facebook to influence users during the 2016 U.S. Elections -- and that these executives took steps to conceal the extent of this interference from the public. It also came after the Canadian Communications Security Establishment released a report on cyber threats to Canada's democratic process, which identified the manipulation of traditional and social media in order to influence political discussion and/or reduce trust in the democratic process as a major threat to Canadian democracy. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.