Searching for content about the Canadian election on YouTube, we discovered that Indian news media appeared at the top of search results - these videos were highly viewed and highly commented on. A number of these videos contained disinformation about the Canadian government, and a number of the most highly liked comments expressed anti-Canadian sentiment. It is important to understand, in the context of concerns about foreign interference, that these videos are popular and have a wide reach. When we think about the impact social media can have on Canadian politics and the Canadian public, it is important to explore what content gets high exposure and engagement. While there has been a lot of focus on foreign interference in the news, foreign influence is also a factor in shaping our politics, and is happening online in ways that we aren’t currently accounting for.
In Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s final report for the public inquiry into foreign interference in January 2025, she cited India - behind China - as the second most active country involved in foreign interference in Canada. This interference is understood to be targeted towards all levels of government, and to focus on the Indo-Canadian community. Justice Hogue points out that India may have used - and may continue to use - proxy agents to provide “illicit financial support” to pro-India Canadian politicians, and also uses disinformation as a key foreign interference tactic. She also noted that diaspora communities in Canada are disproportionately affected and vulnerable to foreign interference - as of the 2021 census, 1.35 million people of Indian origin live in Canada, and that is not a full accounting for all current residents of Canada who are part of the Indian diaspora.
When searching for videos about the Canadian election on YouTube, Indian media sources were listed very high up in search rankings.
We categorized the top 150 videos provided by the YouTube search when searching by the term “canada election”, filtered by “upload date: this month”, and sorted by “view count” searched at 3:50pm EST on April 21, 2025.
Note that although we used the “sort by view count” feature in the YouTube search, videos were not always ranked in the search by view count. Our scan is sorted as the search results provided by YouTube, which is not necessarily always exactly ranked by view count.*
“Other videos” includes all videos not from a media organization. This category mostly contains political commentary videos, podcasts, and interviews, as well as comedy sketches.
Among international media, three videos were from a UK media (BBC News, The Independent, Times Radio), one was from a French outlet (ARTE), one was from an EU-based outlet (EU Debates), and one was a Qatari outlet (Al Jazeera).
We noticed that comments on two of these videos (the respective videos published by Career247 and Firstpost) featured comments in support of India interfering or influencing Canadian politics.
This led us to cast a wider net and expand our search to videos published in the last year, to see if other videos with similar comment sections were present. We did this to investigate if the presence of Indian media in YouTube content about Canadian politics was a recent phenomenon related to the 2025 federal election period, or part of a longer term trend.
We categorized the top 150 videos provided by the YouTube search when searching by the term “canada election”, this time filtered by “upload date: this year” and sorted by “view count” searched at 11:30am EST on April 22, 2025.
In this scan, one video was from a Canadian political candidate’s account (Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada).
Among international media, six videos were published by UK media (BBC News, The Guardian, TLDR News, and The Independent), one was from a French outlet (ARTE), and one was from an international source (Reuters).
We found that the content and viewpoints shared in these Indian media videos were remarkably similar. The videos tended to feature the following: support for the current Indian government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi; criticism of the Canadian government and skepticism or denial of Canadian government reports; denial of the Indian government having a role in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar; sentiment that opposes the Khalistani separatist movement; and a clear disdain for Canadian political leadership.
Three of these videos came from Indian media outlet FirstPost. We found that videos from Firstpost presented subtle but significant disinformation about Canada and the Canadian government. For example, the video India Rejects Canadian Allegations of Election Meddling | Vantage with Palki Sharma | N18G accuses Canada of facilitating “illegal migration” and “organized criminal activities.” The speaker calls the Canadian government’s allegations of Indian involvement in Nijjar’s killing “baseless” and refers to Canadian intelligence reports as “hit jobs”.
In another Firstpost video, Canada Has a New Prime Minister. Can He Handle Donald Trump? | Vantage with Palki Sharma | N18G, the speaker alleges that former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was “forced to resign.” While Trudeau was called on to resign by opponents and his own party members, he ultimately chose to resign, both as Liberal Party leader and as Prime Minister of Canada, without force. Subtle misrepresentations such as this promote a skewed vision of Canadian politics to viewers.
There is a diversity to the Indian media videos we found. For example, the video Canada is Afraid of India's Interference in Elections | By Prashant Dhawan published by Indian media and career organization Career247, contains criticism of the Canadian government without spreading misinformation. This video, primarily in Hindi, features critiques of the Canadian government’s stance on Canada-India relations (under both Trudeau and Carney’s leadership) and commentary on Canada-US relations. While the content is certainly critical of the Canadian government, it does not contain inaccurate information. However, some of the top comments are very hostile towards Canada and supportive of Indian influence in Canadian politics.
Comparatively, the video Full Raw Speech: Pierre Poilievre Warns Trump After Mark Carney Announces Snap Polls | Canada News, published by the Hindustan Times, featured a video of Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre announcing the beginning of his party’s 2025 election campaign. There was no other content aside from this speech, and the comments on the video did not contain any anti-Canada rhetoric, and thus we decided to exclude discussion on this video in our comment analysis.
We chose to look at all comments that had 100 or more likes across these six videos identified in our two scans. YouTube comment sections tend to have few comments that receive many likes, while most comments receive little to no likes. Comments with the most likes are by default brought to the top of the comments section, meaning that most YouTube users will only see a handful of those highly liked comments when they view a YouTube comment section, and aren’t likely to see many other replies unless they scroll farther down in the discussion or root through reply threads intentionally.
Across these videos, here’s how many comments met this criteria of having 100 or more likes:
This leaves us with 58 comments with over 100 likes to analyze, some in English and some in Hindi.
We found four of these comments were openly in favour of interference:
Four comments openly opposed Canadian sovereignty:
17 of these comments were anti-Justin Trudeau, 6 were anti-Mark Carney, 4 were anti-Jagmeet Singh, and 1 was anti-Pierre Poilievre. Only one comment was favourable towards anything related to a Canadian official - “Pierre for PM and jail for JT” received 143 likes.
Notably, among these two scans, in both cases Indian news media was the third most common publisher, only behind Canadian and American news media.
When discussing foreign interference and influence in Canada, Russia, China, and India are among the most commonly discussed potential actors. Notably, Russian and Chinese media aren’t present at all in this scan, while Indian media regularly appears near the top of YouTube searches (12th in search in the “last month” scan, and 11th and 16th in search in the “last year” scan).
We know from research and testimonials that diaspora populations in Canada face transnational repression - particularly China, India, Iran and Russia. However, these findings on YouTube suggest that influence through foreign media should be explored so that we can understand the role these entities play in influencing Canadians and Canada. More research is needed to better understand the nature of foreign influence on Canadian politics conducted via social media.
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