Affective polarization
‍Defined by researchers as “a trend where citizens develop a strong affective connection toward their own political side, while increasingly disliking and feeling animosity toward people with opposing political allegiances.”
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‍Astroturfing
‍The practice of hiding the sponsors of a message to make it appear as though the message originates from, and is supported by, grassroots participants, in an attempt to manipulate public opinion.
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‍Bot accounts
‍Accounts operated automatically or en masse, often with the intention of skewing online discussion to particular ends.
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‍Inauthentic engagement
‍Online activity that is the product of inauthentic use, such as posts by bot accounts, fake user engagement, or artificial amplification. Inauthentic engagement may be coordinated in attempts by either domestic or foreign actors to influence Canadian political processes or, more generally, to sow discord and confusion online. However, as AI-generated content becomes more sophisticated and easily accessible, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between authentic and artificially generated or synthetic content.
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‍Power abusers
‍To highlight the link between high-volume posting behaviours and online abuse, we use the term “power abusers” to suggest that high-volume social media users are also very likely to post high volumes of abuse.
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‍Power users
‍Users who post frequently on social media. While some power users may be real users who simply post frequently, others may be bot accounts posting at rates not humanly possible in an attempt to skew online discussions.
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‍Synthetic content
‍Online content, in the form of text, image, or audio, that is fully or partially artificially altered or generated.

There are fewer and fewer major platforms where Canadians can reliably share and discuss news online. Changes to the online news landscape in Canada has made Reddit a particularly important platform for Canadian civic engagement - although it has been one of the largest platforms among Canadians for a long time. 

With Meta blocking news content for Canadians on their platforms (Facebook and Instagram) following the passage of the Online News Act, and with bots and other forms of inauthentic engagement commonplace on X (formerly Twitter) - and all three platforms significantly cutting their trust and safety teams and intentionally reducing their moderation efforts, these major platforms do not offer a healthy news environment for Canadian users.

While Meta platforms used to be the largest platforms where Canadians shared news, X (formerly Twitter) has also been a key online platform that Canadians have used to share news content online for years. The preliminary data shared from the Toronto Metropolitan University’s Social Media Lab’s State of Social Media report shows that while all other major platforms have seen growing userbases, X is now seeing a decline in Canadian users - showing us that Canadians are choosing in part to abandon the platform after its drastic changes.

These changes in the online media landscape means that Reddit has become a more important platform than ever before, as, within the most popular social media platforms among Canadians, it’s the premier platform for linking to, sharing, and discussing print news (X allows this as well, but due to the state of its moderation practices and the ownership’s active disdain for Canadian sovereignty, we do not feel like it could be considered a healthy place for Canadian news or civic discussions).

Reddit use among Canadians has grown significantly in recent years - the same report conducted by the TMU Social Media Lab in 2022 and 2025 shows that Reddit climbed from having 19% of Canadians having a Reddit account to 27% between those years.

Although only 27% of Canadians report having a Reddit account, it’s important to note that Reddit is a highly public platform. Users can view subreddits and read discussions on the platform without an account, and many do. Reddit discussions also show up frequently in online searches, particularly on Google.

VERIFIED collects data at scale from YouTube, Reddit and Bluesky, using AI-facilitated semantic analysis tools to support analysis and reporting on the quality of online civic conversations across these platforms. The content that we monitor is analyzed against five abuse categories using a machine learning tool called Perspective API:

Perspective API provides a confidence prediction to assess whether a tweet meets an abuse category. When a piece of text is evaluated, it is given a score from 0% to 100% for each category, based on how certain the machine learning model is that the tweet meets that abuse category. If the tweet is assessed as >=70% likely to meet an abuse category, we determine that the tweet has met the criteria. If a tweet meets at least one of the five abuse categories at the >=70% confidence interval, it is counted as an abusive tweet. The abusive tweet category serves to aggregate all tweets that meet at least one abuse category.

We use a >=70% confidence interval as it’s consistent with what is recommended for social science research.

2025 social media users (18+) data from the TMU Social Media Lab