Who is behind YouTube videos with millions of views saying parts of Canada should join the U.S.? CBC News’ visual investigations team and Radio-Canada’s Décrypteurs find the truth about YouTube channels with names like The Canadian Politician pushing Alberta separatism that a recent report says are full of misleading and false information. We go down the rabbit hole and uncover the web of hired actors and ‘faceless’ creators who live overseas that are publishing this content to make a profit.

  • wampus@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    8 days ago

    Eh, the piece’s take on it being “just some youtubers tryin to make a few bucks” is nonsense.

    It’s on an American platform, who’s algorithms push this narrative and amplify the views. If Canada made a way for individuals to profit off of destabilizing / undermining the USA, paid non-Canadians to use that system, it’d still be an issue originating from Canada and impacting the USA. Or, like if China got Huawei to make compromised devices for foreigners, and then paid people outside of China to hack those Huawei devices.

    Just because the USA / Tech oligarchs have crowdsourced their clandestine undermining of foreign nations, doesn’t make it any better in my view.

    I’d like to know where the fuck are CSIS/CSE in all this. This is an operation aimed at dismantling Canada, an existential threat to the nation, and a complex foreign influence campaign funded by a tech-giant propaganda company, a company that is directly tied to a hostile nation government. It’s an influence campaign occurring out in public, on a hostile nation’s tech platform, aimed at destroying Canada. If the dutch have businesses that’re training people to do this sort of fraudulent shit, Canada should be lodging formal complaints with the netherlands, and given the content/intent of this material, naming people connected to it as terrorists or something similar. Sanction Youtube for paying these people to destabilize Canada, and for amplifying their messages – it’s absurd that we punish individuals for funding terrorist activity, but we turn a blind eye to it when its a US company paying people to attack Canada. That’d be the polite Canadian way – if we were the USA, I’m sure they’d just send the CIA to eliminate this sort of issue.

    CBC journalists are dunkin on our “spy agencies”.

  • Teppa@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    7 days ago

    This literally exists for everything. There are housing people who all they do is push a crashing housing bubble narrative, people that say the currency is failing and you need to buy bitcoin, then people like this who want to push seperation to a specific audience. An audience like these investigators ironically.