As Alberta referendum nears, seeds to dispute results planted online: report

Just days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said strikes on Russian bot farms halted some of that traffic online, social media researchers at McGill University say they’ve found no significant change in “inauthentic” online discourse connected to the Alberta referendum.

However, they’re warning that significant narrative groundwork has been laid to contest the validity of the next week’s vote.

Researchers are McGill’s Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO) have been keeping tabs on the online discourse around the province’s referendum which will ask, among other questions, if Albertans want a binding provincial vote on independence from Canada.

With widespread concerns about foreign interference in the vote, a narrative began circulating last week that Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres had led to a drop in online separatist accounts — suggesting those accounts were inauthentic “bots.”

The McGill researchers found no evidence the purported changes in Russian traffic had any effect on either pro- or anti-separatism voices online. But Aengus Bridgman, one of the researchers, said the viral claims provide a window into the fraught nature of the debate.

“The (separatist) movement, as a whole, is very active online, it has this disproportionate footprint, that people look at it and think ‘this feels inauthentic … how is support in this province low for this movement, but their online presence is so big?’” Bridgman said in an interview.

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“And the answer that has really been reached for in the national discourse is that there is large, inauthentic activity driving this.”

That hasn’t been the MEO’s observation, Bridgman said. Instead, he said a very passionate, very online community of Albertans is pushing the separatist cause. And because they’re so online, they appear to be a larger movement than they are in terms of voting power.

But the distortion also has an effect on the online separatists, who have started to believe “somehow that their information environment online and the events that they go to online are somehow representative of a broad swath of Middle Alberta,” Bridgman said.

Bridgman gave the example of online separatist seeing a poll of thousands of people online on X.com that indicated 80 per cent support for independence, and have a hard time squaring that with professional polling that almost universally shows the opposite when specifically asking people who are eligible to actually vote in the referendum.

“You have all political communities feeling like the other one is inauthentic, or is dishonest, or is cheating,” Bridgman said.

Federal politicians, including Prime Minister Mark Carney and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, traveled to Alberta this week to bolster the pro-Canada campaigns that have been working against the separatists for months.

National pollsters have consistently suggested that the separatists are significantly outnumbered. An Ipsos poll for Global News in mid-September suggested seven out of 10 Albertans intended to vote against holding a separation referendum.

But Bridgman warned that significant groundwork has been laid online for separatists to call into question the results of the vote, should that side lose.

“This is now normal, we see this in every electoral event … but this is the largest number we’ve seen, and it’s happening earlier,” Bridgman said.

He noted that while trust in electoral administration agencies has been dropping on the political right, in Alberta that declining trust cuts across the political spectrum.

“It doesn’t feel like a great moment, and I think those in Alberta are really feeling it,” Bridgman said.

“And I think part of the frustration with this whole process … is reflective of (it) not feeling as legitimate or as clear as we would like. That’s something that, on Oct. 20, there’s going to have to be a rebuilding of that trust, and some real work to do that.”