Advice in the age of trolls: Think before you click
With the next federal election exactly a year away, a social media researcher is warning Canadians to be wary of what they see online.
"Think before you click," Ben Nimmo told Chris Hall on The House.
Twitter released a report this week that showed nine million tweets were sent from Russian bot accounts, some in an effort to sway elections.
"These were really, really big, longterm accounts," he said.
Some activists in Canada have been pushing for Ottawa to enact legislation to curtail the spread of misinformation online. Nimmo said the government has a roll to push for transparency and fund more education, but having government control the flow of information is too far.
But he added the threat of tampering is real leading into 2019.
"You're going to have people who have an interested in spreading lies and deceit."
Nimmo advises voters to look for "the three As": Activity, anonymity and amplification.
That means looking at how much the account posts, whether the account has a name and profile picture, and examine what type of content the account is posting.
"Just because the account I'm dealing with has a picture of a beautiful girl in a bikini, maybe it's not actually a beautiful girl at the other end of the keyboard."