The Online Spam Campaign to Support Alberta Separatism ⇥ thetyee.ca

Charles Rusnell, the Tyee:

A network of 20 inauthentic YouTube accounts has racked up nearly 40 million views by peddling lies, grievance, division and narratives normalizing the prospect of Alberta’s secession and annexation by the United States.

“Because these channels offer no identifying information to real humans or organizations, nor ties to the secession movement in Alberta, we are flagging this phenomenon as a potential covert influence operation produced by unknown actors pursuing unclear objectives,” states a report released today by the Canadian Digital Media Research Network.

The authors of the report “cannot confirm this network’s origin or intent, and the available evidence is inconclusive on both counts”, but it is notable to me that the official X accounts of two of the most-viewed channels, the “Canadian Reporter” and “David Fraser”, say they are either based in or connected via the Netherlands App Store. This seems to me like the product of a VPN, but it is notable they did not even mask their origin and pretend to be in Canada.

This sucks. Our province is such a political catastrophe that we are being exploited from — probably — abroad and close to home. It is unclear to me how much of an effect the YouTube network identified by these researchers would have; many of the channels have video view counts of well under a hundred. And even though a few of these channels appear to be taking off, they are surely eclipsed by a home-grown industry of people who seem to pump out daily videos broadcasting their conspiracy theories and separatist fairytales. I easily found a bunch of separatism-promoting channels — “Fight for Canada”, “PJ the Belt”, “John Bolton”, and “Igor Ryltsev” — each with millions of total lifetime video views. They are loud and probably a minority, but they are probably more likely to tilt a referendum, and that is frightening.