The Online Warriors Calling for a Violent Invasion of Canada

On Feb. 2, a day after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowed to fight threatened U.S. tariffs on Canadian exports, American right-wing influencer Tim Pool took to X to send a message about relations between the two countries.

“After we destroy their economy their will to resist will erode,” he said in a post that got 2.2 million views.

“We will then march in unopposed and deliver Canada to its rightful place as a territory of the U.S. with no political representation.”

Another influencer, Ian Miles Cheong, weighed in with a bellicose suggestion of his own that yielded 181,000 views: “Trump should just declare war on Canada and annex it in 24 hours.”

Since getting re-elected in November, Trump has repeatedly called for Canada to join the U.S. as the 51st state but has said he wants to use economic, not military force, to make that happen.

A Canadian misinformation researcher says Pool’s and Cheong’s amplification and exaggeration of Trump’s message is typical of the way right-wing influencers pick up and spread the president’s talking points.

“It's an interesting thing where Trump makes a decision and then the online community kind of follows it and justifies it,” said Aengus Bridgman, the director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a collaboration between McGill University and the University of Toronto.

“It wasn’t typical to see people advocating for the invasion of Canada prior to Trump deciding that Canada becoming the 51st state was a worthwhile idea.”

The violent rhetoric is being picked up on other social media platforms, such as comments on an Instagram video that showed hockey fans in Vancouver booing the U.S. anthem.

“There won’t be a Canada anymore and your civilians will be obliterated,” promised one comment. “Rather it be by pen swipes or force, it won’t take long,” said another, while a third claimed “Canada could get wiped in two months. Kneel.”

Pool and Cheong both have connections with Russian state media. Cheong is a frequent contributor to Russia Today, a Russian state media channel that aims to reach western audiences. Pool is one of six right-wing influencers who were allegedly paid by Russia Today to produce videos for a social media channel called Tenet Media (Pool and the other influencers have all said they were unaware Tenet was funded by the Russian government).

Bridgman said Cheong’s and Pool’s violent rhetoric also points to a particular problem with X, the social media site that was known as Twitter before it was bought by Elon Musk in 2022. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who is the richest man in the world, funnelled hundreds of millions into getting Trump re-elected in 2024, and then celebrated Trump’s inauguration by making a Nazi salute.

Musk is now heading an aggressive effort to cut federal spending and is seemingly accountable only to Trump. His attempt to gain access to the personal financial information of millions of Americans is now being challenged in court, and his actions have been described as a coup by many critics.

“Here we have an online space which is increasingly hospitable to disinformation, or at least disinterested in accurate information,” Bridgman said.

Researchers have found evidence that the X algorithm was tweaked during the 2024 U.S. election campaign. “It wasn't necessarily intended to boost right-wing voices, although it's impossible to know the intention, but that was one of the effects that happened,” Bridgman said.

Bridgman and other researchers at the Media Ecosystem Observatory have also been tracking a trend of U.S. right-wing influencers who frequently talk about Canada as a weak, broken country with a “communist” prime minister and “woke” social policies.

Pool and the five other Tenet influencers were more likely to include rhetoric about Canada in their podcasts than other right-wing content creators, a Canada Digital Media Research Network analysis found.

It also found that the Tenet influencers frequently shared pro-Russia messaging, especially around the war in Ukraine. For many years, Russia has developed techniques to spread information through social media to bolster its specific objectives, like invading Ukraine, or to generally undermine western democracies.

Pool and Cheong are not the only influencers in the right-wing media space to argue that Canada’s annexation is justified, Bridgman said, although most aren’t using the violent language of Pool and Cheong.

“There’s been a decent number of influencers who have talked about the problems of Canada and why this is, to a certain extent, justified,” Bridgman said. “Including some Canadians.”

NDP call for Elections Canada to investigate X

Other tech CEOs have also curried favour with the Trump administration, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, recently followed X in removing some forms of content moderation.

But no other social media platform’s leader is as deeply embedded inside the president’s orbit as Musk is.

In recent months, Musk has been turning his attention towards Canada as a federal election approaches. He’s repeatedly made fun of Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and has posted in support of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.

Peter Julian, NDP MP for New Westminster-Burnaby, told The Tyee his party is concerned that, through X, Musk could influence the Canadian election by allowing the unfettered spread of misinformation or by manipulating the platform’s algorithm to favour one party over another.

The NDP are now calling on Elections Canada to investigate the company. The party has not yet received a response.

“The investigation into Elon Musk would be to find out to what extent he's used algorithms in order to override election laws,” Julian said. “When you have algorithms that force certain content onto people, that is a violation of principle of having a fair and level playing field for elections.”

Some jurisdictions have penalized X for not controlling the spread of misinformation. In August 2024, Brazil banned the use of X because it had failed to ban several accounts that the government found had spread misinformation during the 2022 presidential election. X was allowed to operate in the country again after it banned those accounts and paid a $5-million fine.

The European Union and the German government have ordered the company to give researchers access to data on political content, and the European Commission has alleged that X and other social media platforms have failed to curb rampant disinformation.

Julian contrasted what’s happening now with 2019, when a number of tech and social media companies agreed to abide by a Canadian declaration of electoral integrity for online content.

“There were expectations that the social media platforms would do their part to ensure elections integrity and enforce community standards,” Julian said.

“But with the election of Donald Trump, and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg basically saying we're not going to follow community standards anymore... this upcoming election will be very different from previous elections where these big social media platforms have attempted to act responsibly.”

A recent commission that looked into allegations of foreign interference in Canadian politics named misinformation and disinformation as the greatest threat to democracy in this country and called for more resources to fight the problem.

Bridgman, who testified at the commission, said he agrees with that assessment and supports the NDP’s call for X to be investigated.

“I'm not confident, and I don't think anyone should be confident, that with Musk in charge the leadership at X would not do that during an election, and would not be transparent,” Bridgman said.

“Last August, three Canadian members of Parliament wrote to X asking for some transparency around how many bots there were, and X just didn't reply. It is a fairly unco-operative platform.”