Last week, Canada’s intelligence agencies flagged a disinformation campaign on WeChat aimed at Mark Carney, with posts reaching up to three million views. Originating from an account tied to the Chinese Communist Party, the posts cast Carney as a “rock-star economist” and lauded his toughness on Trump—praise that officials say masked a calculated attempt to sway Chinese-Canadian voters and stir political blowback. Meanwhile, AI-generated videos of Carney endorsing cryptocurrency scams made the rounds on Facebook. There was also a doctored image that went viral, which depicted Carney on a beach alongside Tom Hanks and Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker and Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend, peddling the conspiracy theory that he’s part of a shadowy global cabal.

As Canada’s federal election approaches, I’ve been closely monitoring the online landscape as part of my work as the head of trust and safety at Bluesky. Historically, Canada has a clean online political environment. For a long time, Canadians mostly engaged with credible news outlets and elected officials. But that has shifted. The 2022 trucker convoy protests marked a turning point—signalling a growing fragmentation in where people get their information.

Unlike in the U.S., where Russia has launched sweeping campaigns to sow division, Canada’s disinformation landscape is less centralized. Canadians’ trust in traditional institutions is waning, and fringe personalities and alt-media platforms have stepped into the vacuum, creating a society where many Canadians no longer encounter—or believe in—the same basic facts. Put simply, the disinformation now circulating across the country is changing how Canadians determine what’s true. With a federal election just weeks away, that shift could play a major role in shaping the outcome.

When I began working for the Canadian government in 2005, the field of digital “trust and safety”—the very thing I now dedicate my career to—didn’t even exist. While at Global Affairs Canada during the Arab Spring, I got a crash course in how digital platforms could be used to both promote democratic values and spread propaganda. I watched as social media empowered protest movements, only to see those same tools hijacked by the authoritarian regimes they opposed, as well as extremist groups like ISIS.

In 2019, I left Global Affairs Canada and joined Twitter as an Information Operations analyst in its Trust and Safety team. At the time, we were reeling from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Russian........

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