We need a Canadian Social Media platform

Our Digital Sovereignty is at stake

I got an email Friday from OpenMedia.org, a Canadian advocacy group that specializes in media and privacy issues. The 1st two paragraphs read:

Think about your digital life for a second. The social media apps we scroll through: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. The cloud services our businesses and even our governments depend on: Microsoft, Amazon, Google. The AI systems shaping what news we see and what content gets promoted. Not one of these is Canadian!

Every single one is controlled by foreign powers and corporations that profit off our data, manipulate our choices, and increasingly undermine our democracy. That’s what’s at stake: Canada’s digital sovereignty.

I agree. Preceding this email, a 14+ page open letter was sent to the Prime Minister signed by dozens of public organizations and 70-odd individuals including the likes of Margaret Atwood and former governor general, Adrienne Clarkson.

Canadian democracy cannot be free if our digital public sphere is overrun by foreign influence and made toxic for profit. Nor will we prosper as a zone of extraction—whether of oil, timber, minerals, or of data, intellectual property, or talent.

We are a sovereign country with one of the world’s largest digital markets, a highly creative and connected population, diverse in its official languages and cultural expressions and values, and yet we are being left no choice but to accept the “unquestioned and unchallenged technological dominance” of the US and all the harms this entails.

This letter proposed 14 actions the government should take to protect our digital sovereignty. Most are pretty general and concern government regulation, legislation and policy.

I propose something more direct. Let’s beat them at their own game – let’s show our digital strength by competing – not against the Americans but rather by establishing strategic equivalences to serve our specific Canadian interests.

First on the list should be a Canadian social network platform. Tens of millions of Canadians use American platforms every day (In 2023, 28 million Canadian were using Facebook alone – 77% of our population) and those companies have taken advantage of that by sending them feeds from Canadian news and information outlets – all the more to keep them reading. In turn Canadian companies spend 100s of millions in order to reach those same Canadians. I couldn’t find any overall numbers but in 2022 the Canadian government, all by itself, spent $21 million on advertising on US social media.

It was from all this advertising revenue (all levels of government as well as businesses and individuals) that the Digital Services Tax (DST) aimed to recover a portion in order to support the news media in this country which was providing the news material which, in essence, the social media companies were selling without compensating its providers.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) estimated that the DST would bring in revenues of $7.2 BILLION over 5 years. At 3%, (which is what the DST sought to recover from these companies) that works out to $48 BILLION per year being spent by Canadians on advertising in American social media. Let’s bring that home!

Canadians use social media much the same as people all over the world – most of the interactions are with people or companies they know – most of which are also Canadian. So why aren’t they doing it on a Canadian platform?

Simply, because there is not, at present, such a platform. I’m sure lots of entrepreneurs have thought about it but Facebook and the others are so ingrained that the market wasn’t there – until now. In the current atmosphere, there is a palpable toxicity to everything American.

A Canadian platform would likely attract most of that 28 million users (Facebook alone 2023 – more today). It could also attract the majority of that $48 billion in advertising revenue.

Think of the potential. A Canadian social media platform would almost immediately become a multi-billion dollar company – right out of the gate. And instead of wringing our hands about the Canadian news media being raped by big US tech companies, the government can be collecting corporation taxes from this very large Canadian tech giant.

We have lots of digital talent in this country and there are bound to be a number of Canadians working at Facebook (and other platforms) in the US who would jump at the opportunity to do the same thing on home turf.

Money? Investors? In my last article I suggested that Canadians might like to invest in a Canadian car manufacturer. I had a poll in that post (still open) which in, spite of small numbers, indicated that 100% would consider buying such a car and 50% would invest in the company “in a heartbeat”. Those same patriotic investors would likely also invest in Canadian social media. Huge potential – minimal risk! Another source of capital might be the very media companies who have been losing ad revenue to Facebook et al. Perhaps a consortium of media companies.

I wouldn’t normally suggest that the government be financially involved, but in this case, I think the government should take a substantial stake. Canadian tech companies have a long history of selling out to Americans and our government needs to be in a position to keep it Canadian. To further that goal, if the government wanted to be really creative, it could give free shares to every Canadian – 40 million Canadians would have a shareholder vote if anybody tried to take it over. It also gives them a stake in the platform’s success.

I’m not sure if any of the existing Canadian internet servers have the capacity to handle something like this – probably not – but, regardless, we need to protect Canadian data by developing much greater capacity here at home.

The open letter to the PM spells all this out in detail:

Digital infrastructure plays a key role in Canada’s economy, society, culture, and politics. But at every layer (like basic telecom carriage, software, social media, AI applications and governance), there are unaddressed vulnerabilities, over-reliance on US tech enterprises,and threats to Canada’s digital resilience and national independence. Canada’s digital sovereignty is at high risk.

The main weakness is that Canada has little control over its vital information and communications ecosystem, since so much of it is owned and controlled by US companies that are subject to US unpredictability, extraterritoriality, and legal fragmentation that has unacceptably intensified under President Trump.

This weakness is especially acute in social media which is dominated by a few US companies with their harmful algorithmic content curation and surveillance capitalism business model. The harms to Canada arising from this lack of control are individual, group, and societal. Economically, these US companies extract billions in revenue annually, through their capture of personal data and intellectual property value chains. These companies return to Canada only a tiny fraction in taxes or negotiated paybacks.

Also, looking at basic internet routing, at least 25% of Canada’s domestic internet traffic is unnecessarily routed through the US, where it loses Canadian control and protections and is subject to US surveillance and other forms of interference.

Furthermore, the majority of Canadian internet traffic with third countries is routed through US territory or via US carriers, with a similar loss of Canadian control and protections.

There are many other, less visible, layers of Canada’s digital infrastructure that are dominated by US companies and thus subject to US legal and political pressures. Mainly this is in cloud and related services, which have been ceded to three US tech giants: specifically, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, all of whom are major US military contractors.

Other critical layers in which US companies exercise significant control include online search, web browsers, secure chat, email, web hosting, content delivery networks, e-commerce platforms, education and research platforms, transit provision, DNS resolution, co-location centres, operating systems, advertising networks, virtual meetings, app stores, medical record systems, payment services, identity authentication/verification, virtual private networks, and cyber security.

A lot of money is going south to pay for these services – which are placing our data and our sovereignty at potential risk. These are all areas where Canadian companies could be providing equivalent services here. In large part these companies already exist but need to expand rapidly.

These are vital, nation-building projects which can directly and visibly impact Canadians in the short term – far faster than building ports, pipelines and energy corridors.