Disinformation Risk Assessment: The Online News Market in Canada

11 octobre 2021 / Journalisme
Mots-clés: Désinformation, Journalisme, Médias en ligne, Numérique

The Global Disinformation Index‘s (GDI) assessment of Canadian online news media reveals that, while the majority of the websites studied have low disinformation risks, « most Canadian news sites lack transparent operational policies which can help mitigate the risks of disinformation. » 

The GDI’s current report presents the findings pertaining to disinformation risks for the media market in Canada, based on a study of 35 news domains (23 in English and 12 in French).

Examining the Canadian media landscape, this analysis concludes that « nearly two-thirds of the news sites in [their] sample present minimum to low levels of disinformation risk, » while « only a limited number of Canadian sites present high or maximum levels of disinformation risk. » 

However, the authors still point out that, while websites’ news contents tend to show generally low disinformation risks, their operational practices lack transparency: « most sites provide little to no information about their attribution policies and how they ensure the accuracy of the stories they publish. »

The report also targets possible solutions for increased transparency, like publishing article authors’ names clearly with each article or « [improving] and [making] more visible a site’s fact-checking and error-correction practices and policies. » 

A French version of this report is also available on our website.