The BC Election Social Media War

Did this B.C. election feel like the battle of the memes?

On the social media platform X, the BC Conservatives were posting comparisons between plastic straws and lines of cocaine. On Instagram, the NDP created a “burn book” to capture the strange or offensive comments of their opponents.

While the parties were active on both platforms, an analysis by the Media Ecosystem Observatory shows that the Conservatives had the most engagement on X, while the NDP dominated engagement on Instagram.

“I've been tracking elections for five years now in Canada,” Aengus Bridgman, a researcher at the Media Ecosystem Observatory, told The Tyee.

“This is the most polarized I've seen the information ecosystem in terms of politicians and where they're reaching their audiences.”

The research group — a collaboration between McGill University and the University of Toronto — has been closely tracking the social media landscape and how it’s affecting Canadian politics.

In the pre-campaign period, the researchers took a look at how people were finding information about the election and the risk level for misinformation and foreign interference.

The good news is that they found little misinformation (people repeating false claims they believe to be true), disinformation (commentators repeating information they know to be false) or threats to the integrity of the voting process.

But the researchers found a remarkably polarized media landscape, and one where B.C. residents are much less likely to be exposed to information published by news organizations.

A news ban on Instagram and Facebook

In British Columbia, 49 per cent of survey respondents said they use social media to follow news, according to the Media Ecosystem Observatory’s report. In many cases, Bridgman said, users were coming across news content while they scrolled through feeds that were otherwise filled with friends’ posts, videos about cooking or animal antics.

But since August 2023, Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, has blocked news in Canada on both platforms. On the one-year anniversary of the ban, the Media Ecosystem Observatory published a report that showed Canadians were seeing less news, but that 78 per cent of Canadians were still not aware that Meta was banning news from the platforms.

According to the August report, “Canadians continue to learn about politics and current events through Facebook and Instagram, but through a more biased and less factual lens than before and many Canadians do not even realize the shift has occurred. They do not appear to be seeking news elsewhere.”

The news ban was in response to Canadian legislation that requires Google and Meta to pay news publishers for their content. While Google has struck a deal with news organizations, Meta has stood firm in blocking news from both Canadian and international news publishers.

The Media Ecosystem Observatory’s report about B.C. media consumption points out that the sale of Black Press has also shaken the local media ecosystem. The Black Press newspapers across the province are still publishing in smaller communities in print and online.

But the company’s social media strategy has changed since March, when the sale finalized and the company stopped posting links to news stories on X.

Like all Canadian news sites, Black Press papers have not been able to publish on Facebook or Instagram since August 2023.

“There's like a cliff, a social media posting frequency cliff,” Bridgman said. “If you're a social web user, you're not going to get [that content].”

A shift to the right on X

The platform previously known as Twitter has also gone through a major shift. In 2022, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk bought the site, renamed it X and discontinued a number of features that were intended to make the platform safer and more civil, but that Musk believed were stifling freedom of speech.

The Media Ecosystem Observatory found the same divide between more left-leaning Instagram users and more right-leaning X users during Alberta’s provincial election in 2023. But B.C.’s election showed an even more polarized landscape, Bridgman said.

“The NDP and potentially left-wing parties across Canada are using Instagram as their primary way to spread their message,” he said. “And under Elon Musk, X has become a platform where right-wing politics gets far more engagement.”

The trend might point towards a future in political campaigning where parties are focused more on mobilizing their base than on trying to persuade undecided voters to cast a ballot, Bridgman said.

In an election where the BC Conservatives regularly criticized the news media for being biased, the Media Ecosystem Observatory also found that B.C. residents have lower trust in news media and in journalists than nationally. Just 42 per cent of B.C. survey respondents said they trust news media, compared with 51 per cent nationally, while 47 per cent said they trusted individual journalists, compared with 55 per cent nationally.