AMO director Fenwick McKelvey has recently published, with coauthor Elizabeth Dubois of the University of Ottawa, a report on the use (or lack of use) of bots in Canadian politics. Read the working paper in full or a briefer summary in the Toronto Star. The report is part of a global project looking at the use of bots in politics in nine nations.
In their paper, McKelvey and Dubois review the kinds of bots that have been thus far detected in the Canadian political scene, exploring how some bots are built to inform the public while others are deployed to degrade political discourse or game social media on behalf of particular parties. McKelvey and Dubois also call attention to the lack of public discussion around bots in Canada and warn that, though bots have yet to make much of a noticeable impact on Canadian politics, ignoring their existence may leave a policy vacuum that unethical or malicious bots will likely fill.
