The Canadian government’s response to foreign disinformation: Rhetoric, stated policy intentions, and practices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, governments have considered how to respond to “disinformation.” However, there is little academic literature on Canada’s response in the area of security and foreign policy. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing how and why Canadian government foreign and security actors have “securitized” foreign disinformation. It argues that, since 2014, they have increased awareness about disinformation and transformed it into a matter of “security” through rhetoric and discursive framing, as well as stated policy intentions and actions. This has occurred in response to perceived threats, but without coherent policy. The findings suggest that challenges are linked to persistent difficulties in defining and understanding disinformation. The result has been fragmented actions, some of which may legitimate actions that deviate from “normal political processes.” The implications are that definitional challenges need to be addressed, the role of security actors assessed, and a clearly articulated and holistic strategy drawn.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".