Russia Weaponization of Canada's Far Right and Far Left to Undermine Support for Ukraine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article details the Russian government's efforts to influence Canadians' perceptions of the war in Ukraine. Specifically, we examined Russian information campaigns tailored to Canadian audiences on X (formerly known as Twitter) and the supportive ecosystems of accounts that amplify those campaigns. By 2023, this ecosystem included at least 200,000 X accounts that have shared content with millions of Canadians. We identified ninety accounts with an outsized influence. The vast majority of the influential Canadian accounts were far right or far left in orientation. These networks were among Canada's most prolific and influential political communities online. We determined this by comparing these networks' potential influence to the online community engaging with Canada's 338 members of Parliament on X and a sample of twenty influential X accounts in Canada. The sophistication and proliferation of Canada-tailored narratives suggest a highly organized and well-funded effort to target Canadian support for Ukraine.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".