Our Research

Funded by Canadian Heritage’s Digital Citizen Contribution Program (DCCP), this ongoing project builds on our team’s prior research on digital disinformation and its impact on ethnocultural diasporic communities in Canada. Informed by earlier findings, this initiative focuses on producing a multilingual and culturally relevant digital toolkit aimed at strengthening digital literacy and community resilience, particularly among South Asian, Arab, and Chinese diasporic populations.

Key Objectives:

• Develop relevant and empirically grounded digital mitigation tools.

• Create content that is accessible in English, French, and third languages, and that reflects the cultural and contextual realities of its intended audiences.

• Disseminate these digital materials to both the funder and civil society partners, enabling them to directly support their communities in combating mis/disinformation.

Why This Project Matters

Coordinated disinformation campaigns—often backed by state and non-state actors—frequently target ethnocultural communities with divisive content meant to confuse, polarize, and erode social cohesion. These communities not only work at the grassroots level to correct such harmful narratives but also face heightened risks of discrimination and stigmatization as a result.

Our prior research, including original survey data and focus group insights, found that racialized and marginalized diasporas in Canada experience a "double burden" of disinformation: both fighting it internally and facing its external social consequences. The project directly responds to this inequity by equipping these communities with tailored, culturally resonant digital resources that promote long-term digital resilience.

Funded by Canadian Heritage’s Digital Citizen Contribution Program, this interdisciplinary research project investigates how and why digital disinformation continues to circulate on private chat and direct messaging platforms—such as WhatsApp, Facebook/Instagram Direct Messenger, Telegram, Signal, and WeChat—within select ethnocultural communities in Canada.

Project Overview

This project builds directly on our earlier study examining the types of disinformation circulating in these private platforms. Now, we turn our focus toward understanding the underlying behavioural and psychological factors that shape how disinformation is shared and interpreted in these digital spaces.

Focusing on three major ethnocultural communities—South Asian, Arab, and Chinese Canadians—we aim to uncover what drives individuals to believe, share, or correct disinformation within their social networks on private messaging apps.

Research Questions

• How and why does digital disinformation continue to spread in closed chat spaces?

• What individual-level perceptions, motivations, and psychological traits shape engagement with mis/disinformation?

• How do these dynamics affect broader issues of social cohesion and trust in Canadian society?

Objectives

• Identify the micro-level behavioural and psychological determinants behind the spread and consumption of digital disinformation.

• Understand how perceptions and understandings of disinformation differ across cultural contexts and community experiences.

• Examine how disinformation impacts social cohesion, potentially increasing polarization, discrimination, or marginalization.

• Translate research findings into community-based strategies for building digital literacy and long-term resilience against misinformation.

Research Approach

We use a mixed methods design that combines:

• Quantitative research through original survey data

• Qualitative insights gathered from semi-structured focus groups

This dual approach allows us to explore both broad patterns of behaviour and in-depth personal perspectives, with a strong emphasis on cultural specificity and lived experience.

By highlighting the individual- and community-level impact of digital disinformation, this project contributes to a deeper understanding of Canada’s evolving information ecosystem—and proposes practical, culturally informed strategies for countering its most harmful effects.

Funded by Canadian Heritage’s Digital Citizen Contribution Program, this pan-Canadian research project explored how private messaging applications like WhatsApp, Snapchat, WeChat, Instagram Direct, and Facebook Messenger are used to spread disinformation within ethnocultural communities—and how such content can be countered through community-driven strategies.

Project Overview

Private messaging apps are increasingly becoming spaces where disinformation spreads unchecked, often outside the scope of traditional regulation or public scrutiny. This project investigated the transnational and domestic flow of disinformation into Canadian diaspora communities, with particular focus on how this content may undermine democratic institutions, social cohesion, and trust in public institutions.

The project focused on five key newcomer communities in Canada—Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Pakistani, and Arab—to better understand how disinformation spreads in linguistically and culturally diverse environments, and to test the effectiveness of non-regulatory, community-based counter-messaging.

Research Questions

How can disinformation, that is undermining Canadian social cohesion and being spread on private messaging apps, be stemmed and countered?

Objectives

• Identify and track disinformation on private messaging platforms targeting ethnocultural communities in Canada.

• Develop and test empirically grounded, multilingual counter-messaging campaigns that are trusted, persuasive, and respectful of privacy.

• Recommend best practices and community-based strategies to reduce the impact of disinformation—without relying on technical censorship or surveillance.