How False Facts Led to the Capitol Riots

On the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol, Big Tech host Taylor Owen sat down with Craig Silverman to discuss how the rise of false facts led us to that moment. Long before Donald Trump popularized “fake news” as a blanket term to attack mainstream news outlets, Silverman — a journalist for ProPublica, editor of the Verification Handbook series and former media editor of Buzzfeed News — had been using it to mean something different and very specific.

In internet governance, there is no topic in greater need of better understanding than the debate over online content regulation. As important as free speech is, claiming that it is the foundational value is highly one-dimensional. As Blayne Haggart writes, it is far too easy for debates to devolve into with-us-or-against-us battles that make compromise — the soul of democratic politics — impossible. In this article, Haggart aims to illuminate some of the unstated assumptions in digital policy debates.

Canada and its Western allies need a new playbook with which to compete with China and succeed in the evolving global economy. Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States took their eye off the ball and missed the opportunity to be a significant global player in fifth-generation (5G) mobile network technology, but Britain and the United States have taken steps to catch up. In part 2 of her analysis on the challenges surrounding 5G, Amy Karam offers a six-point path forward for Canada.

The Canadian government has limited capacity to affect what happens politically in the United States. What it can and must do is prepare, including for the worst, should the United States become unrecognizable, or an unreliable ally after a century-long security partnership. As Michael Den Tandt and Wesley Wark argue, reimagining a strong sense of Canadian identity may be the greatest challenge of all — and the most necessary answer to any future American descent into authoritarianism.

Our broadening understanding of national security presents new challenges. As an entrepreneurial trading nation, Canada must court risk — while hedging against it — to ensure the economic capacity that ultimately underpins national security. Dan Ciuriak and Patricia Goff write that the identification of a security risk should not automatically preclude economic engagement but instead prompt a clear-eyed case-by-case assessment of the trade-offs, based on criteria that reflect the best interests of Canadians.