Category: The Conversation – Canada

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Xi Chen, Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship, University of Guelph

As Canada navigates an ongoing tariff dispute with the United States, small businesses and startups are emerging as a source of economic growth that could help Canada assert greater independence from its largest trading partner.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has warned that Canada cannot rely on the U.S. any longer and must instead achieve “economic autonomy.” Ottawa’s efforts to remove internal trade barriers and expand infrastructure projects are central to this objective, paving the foundation to revitalize the Canadian economy.

Another key part of this agenda is fostering entrepreneurship — the engine for new opportunities and economic growth.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the Canadian economy. As of December 2023, small businesses made up 98.1 per cent of all employer businesses in Canada, accounted for 63.7 per cent of the private labour force and 48 per cent of Canada’s GDP (gross domestic product) over the 2017-21 period. They also represented 38.2 per cent of the total value of exported goods.

Although exporting has traditionally been dominated by larger, innovation-intensive SMEs — particularly those with significant intellectual property — recent data shows an increase in exports from smaller, service-oriented firms, many of them immigrant-led.

These businesses are playing an increasingly important role in diversifying Canada’s export base and reducing dependence on any single market — particularly the U.S.

The lean startup model

For many aspiring entrepreneurs, one of the most popular frameworks for launching a business is the lean startup method, developed by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Eric Ries and expanded on in his 2011 book, The Lean Startup.

This practice has been widely adopted by incubators and accelerators, some of which require new ventures to meet hundreds of mentors and potential customers for consultation.

The Lean Startup provides a recipe for starting businesses with minimal cost, fast iteration and higher success rate. The philosophy behind it is for entrepreneurs to validate their market before investing tons of resources into building a product.

Since its publication, The Lean Startup has been used by millions of entrepreneurs around the world. The book advises entrepreneurs to “get out of the building” and talk to potential customers, but it doesn’t specify how much effort entrepreneurs should invest in market validation — how many people to consult or how often to do so.

Market validation is the process of testing a product or service idea with its target market to confirm if there’s real demand for it and whether it is viable for success. Although it’s central to the lean startup approach, many entrepreneurs shy away from it for different reasons.

Some entrepreneurs want to protect their business ideas from being stolen by others. In addition, new ventures have scarce resources that need to be allocated to multiple tasks, and market validation competes for the limited attention and resources of entrepreneurs.

The ‘sweet spot’ for market validation

In a recent study, my co-author Stephen X. Zhang and I set out to understand which entrepreneurs are more likely to invest in market validation, and how much investment is optimal for new venture performance. We conducted a three-wave survey with 210 entrepreneurs and their co-founders from Canada, Chile and China.

We measured the self-efficacy of entrepreneurs — how confident they felt about market and entrepreneurial success — and asked co-founders to report their ventures’ market validation frequency and hours. We found that entrepreneurs with moderate levels of confidence invested most resources into market validation. They sought feedback more frequently and invested more time in understanding potential customers.

Entrepreneurs with low confidence either didn’t think market validation was worthwhile or they found it too intimidating. Those with high confidence didn’t think it was necessary to validate their market because they were already convinced of their success.

More importantly, we found that a moderate level of market validation led to the strongest new venture performance. Checking in with about four to five people monthly was the most efficient. Interestingly, this number coincides with the most efficient size of social network, as well as the number needed for user testing.

The results suggest that effective market validation is more about quality and consistency than quantity. Talking to a small, diverse group of knowledgeable contacts on a regular basis is optimal for enhancing new venture performance.

Yet there is a precaution: we did not study the quality of informants. Five people may be enough for qualitative methods such as interviews, but it may not be enough for quantitative methods such as surveys.

What this means for new entrepreneurs

Our findings can make the task starting a new business less daunting for entrepreneurs. Instead of trying to interview hundreds of customers or skipping validation entirely, early-stage entrepreneurs can start small.

If you have an idea, find five people that are most knowledgeable and relevant for the idea, and ask their opinions about the product or service you envisioned. If they like the idea, develop a minimum viable product to test it out. If not, revise your idea or try a different one.

In addition, understanding the way confidence has an impact on how entrepreneurs seek feedback can help organizations and mentors improve their coaching methods.

Entrepreneurs with low confidence may benefit from support that builds self-efficacy through vicarious learning, such as observing and simulation, to make feedback less intimidating. Those with excessive confidence may need to be challenged to provide evidence for their assumptions and reminded of the value of customer feedback in challenging even deeply held convictions.

Xi Chen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Small sample, big impact: How talking to just five people can improve startup success – https://theconversation.com/small-sample-big-impact-how-talking-to-just-five-people-can-improve-startup-success-266661

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Ramona Pringle, Director, Creative Innovation Studio; Associate Professor, RTA School of Media, Toronto Metropolitan University

Imagine an actor who never ages, never walks off set or demands a higher salary.

That’s the promise behind Tilly Norwood, a fully AI-generated “actress” currently being courted by Hollywood’s top talent agencies. Her synthetic presence has ignited a media firestorm, denounced as an existential threat to human performers by some and hailed as a breakthrough in digital creativity by others.

But beneath the headlines lies a deeper tension. The binaries used to debate Norwood — human versus machine, threat versus opportunity, good versus bad — flatten complex questions of art, justice and creative power into soundbites.

The question isn’t whether the future will be synthetic; it already is. Our challenge now is to ensure that it is also meaningfully human.

All agree Tilly isn’t human

Ironically, at the centre of this polarizing debate is a rare moment of agreement: all sides acknowledge that Tilly is not human.

Her creator, Eline Van der Velden, the CEO of AI production company Particle6, insists that Norwood was never meant to replace a real actor. Critics agree, albeit in protest. SAG-AFTRA, the union representing actors in the U.S., responded with:

“It’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation. It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion, and from what we’ve seen, audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience.”

Their position is rooted in recent history: In 2023, actors went on strike over AI. The resulting agreement secured protections around consent and compensation.

So if both sides insist Tilly isn’t human, the controversy, then, isn’t just about what Tilly is, it’s about what she represents.

Complexity as a starting point

Norwood represents more than novelty. She’s emblematic of a larger reckoning with how rapidly artificial intelligence is reshaping our lives and the creative sector. The velocity of change is dizzying, and now the question is how do we shape the hybrid world we’ve already entered?

It can feel disorienting trying to parse ethics, rights and responsibilities while being bombarded by newness. Especially when that “newness” comes in a form that unnerves us: a near-human likeness that triggers long-standing cultural discomfort.

Indeed, Norwood may be a textbook case of the “uncanny valley,” a term coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori to describe the unease people feel when something looks almost human, but not quite.

But if all sides agree that Tilly isn’t human, what happens when audiences still feel something real while watching her on screen? If emotional resonance and storytelling are considered uniquely human traits, maybe the threat posed by synthetic actors has been overstated. On the other hand, who hasn’t teared up in a Pixar film? A character doesn’t have to feel emotion to evoke it.

Still, the public conversation remains polarized. As my colleague Owais Lightwala, assistant professor in the School of Performance at Toronto Metropolitan University, puts it: “The conversation around AI right now is so binary that it limits our capacity for real thinking. What we need is to be obsessed with complexity.”

Synthetic actors aren’t inherently villains or saviours, Lightwala tells me, they’re a tool, a new medium. The challenge lies in how we build the infrastructures around them, such as rights, ownership and distribution.

He points out that while some celebrities see synthetic actors as job threats, most actors already struggle for consistent work. “We ask the one per cent how they feel about losing power, but what about the 99 per cent who never had access to that power in the first place?”

Too often missing from this debate is what these tools might make possible for the creators we rarely hear from. The current media landscape is already deeply inequitable. As Lightwala notes, most people never get the chance to realize their creative potential — not for lack of talent, but due to barriers like access, capital, mentorship and time.

Now, some of those barriers might finally lower. With AI tools, more people may get the opportunity to create.

Of course, that doesn’t mean AI will automatically democratize creativity. While tools are more available, attention and influence remain scarce.

Sarah Watling, co-founder and CEO of JaLi Research, a Toronto-based AI facial animation company, offers a more cautionary perspective. She argues that as AI becomes more common, we risk treating it like a utility, essential yet invisible.

In her view, the inevitable AI economy won’t be a creator economy, it will be a utility commodity. And “when things become utilities,” she warns, “they usually become monopolized.”

Where do we go from here?

We need to pivot away from reactionary fear narratives, like Lightwala suggests.

Instead of shutting down innovation, we need to continue to experiment. We need to use this moment, when public attention is focused on the rights of actors and the shape of culture, to rethink what was already broken in the industry and allow space for new creative modalities to emerge.

Platforms and studios must take the lead in setting transparent, fair policies for how synthetic content is developed, attributed and distributed. In parallel, we need to push creative institutions, unions and agencies to collaborate in the co-design of ethical and contractual guardrails now, before precedents get set in stone, putting consent, fair attribution and compensation at the centre.

And creators, for their part, must use these tools not just to replicate what came before, but to imagine what hasn’t been possible until now. That responsibility is as much creative as it is technical.

The future will be synthetic. Our task now is to build pathways, train talent, fuel imagination, and have nuanced, if difficult, conversations.
Because while technology shapes what’s possible, creators and storytellers have the power to shape what matters.

Ramona Pringle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. What AI-generated Tilly Norwood reveals about digital culture, ethics and the responsibilities of creators – https://theconversation.com/what-ai-generated-tilly-norwood-reveals-about-digital-culture-ethics-and-the-responsibilities-of-creators-266564

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Noah Eliot Vanderhoeven, PhD Candidate, Political Science, Western University

Amid threats from United States President Donald Trump to make Canada the 51st state, the Toronto Blue Jays’ season started with protocols aimed at avoiding booing during the American national anthem and the removal of someone wearing a “Canada is not for sale hat” at the ballpark.

Nonetheless, the Blue Jays are still being heavily marketed as “Canada’s team” as they square off against the New York Yankees, America’s most storied baseball team.

Why do the Blue Jays frame themselves as not just Toronto’s team, but Canada’s? And is their current post-season run their biggest and most important opportunity in years to fully establish themselves as representing all of Canada?

Truly Canada’s team?

The Jays serving as Canada’s team may make sense since they’re the only Canadian team currently playing in Major League Baseball (MLB). But to some Canadians, positioning the Jays as the nation’s team may not sit well.

After all, for baseball fans in Québec, memories of the now-defunct Montreal Expos still loom large.

For fans closer to the Windsor-Detroit border, the Detroit Tigers are a more proximate and accessible team.

Finally, some British Columbia MLB enthusiasts — despite the trips Blue Jays fans make to take over T-Mobile Park when the Blue Jays play the Seattle Mariners — still opt to support the Mariners since the team is so much closer than the Blue Jays are in Toronto.

What all this means is that to some Canadian baseball fans, the Blue Jays aren’t really Canada’s team — they’re just Toronto’s.

Huge market

It’s unsurprising that the Toronto Blue Jays organization, owned by Rogers Communications — “proud owner of Canada’s team” — is intent on framing the squad this way because it provides a substantial financial boon. The Jays benefit greatly from being Canada’s team by compelling baseball fans from across the country to attend their games, and most importantly, to watch them on television.

Despite playing north of the border and earning revenues in the weaker Canadian dollar, the Jays operate in one of MLB’s largest markets — Toronto — and can also market to fans across the country. That gives them the largest geographical market in professional baseball — an entire nation.

This massive audience contributes to equally massive television ratings, even at a time when most MLB teams are struggling for regional television revenues. Being “Canada’s team” has also allowed the Blue Jays to spend competitively over the past 10 years and operate a Top 5 payroll, as they have in 2025, alongside other teams in huge markets like Los Angeles and New York.

Cross-border trash-talking

As the series with the Yankees continues, Prime Minister Mark Carney met with Trump to discuss trade, tariffs and security. The meeting, held just days after Trump made yet another veiled annexation threat, reportedly went well.

But the ongoing backdrop of tense relations between the U.S. and Canada is perhaps echoed by some of the commentary about both teams.

Early in the season, the Yankees’ play-by-play man, Michael Kay, called Toronto “not a first-place team” despite the Blue Jays having just passed the Yankees for first place in the American League East.

In September, Jays colour-commentator and former catcher, Buck Martinez, said that the Yankees were “not a good team.”

Also in September, a Baltimore Orioles television analyst, Brian Roberts, questioned how well Canadians understood baseball, leading to the Blue Jays themselves defending the baseball intelligence of their fans.

There was even a popular hoax online about Trump not inviting the Blue Jays to the White House should they win the World Series — an invite he’s extended to many championship teams in American sports leagues.

Stoking Canadian nationalism

Ultimately, the Blue Jays ended up winning the American League East, guaranteeing the Jays a home-field advantage against the Yankees. Blue Jays players and their manager, John Schneider, have spoken of the intense atmosphere Blue Jays fans create for their opponents and how the team draws on the support of the entire nation of Canada.

The Jays’ success so far in the post-season in this current political moment — as Trump is once again making veiled threats about making Canada the 51st state during tense trade negotiations — presents the Blue Jays with perhaps their best opportunity to fulfil their role as Canada’s team.

In a season defined by rivalry, politics and national pride, the Blue Jays are proving that even America’s pastime can become a canvas for Canadian nationalism.

Noah Eliot Vanderhoeven does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Toronto Blue Jays: Amid Canada-U.S. tensions, ‘Canada’s team’ takes a run at America’s pastime – https://theconversation.com/toronto-blue-jays-amid-canada-u-s-tensions-canadas-team-takes-a-run-at-americas-pastime-266882

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Jordan Loewen-Colón, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, Ontario

What if your biggest competitive asset is not how fast AI helps you work, but how well you question what it produces?

Business leaders tend to prioritize efficiency and compliance in the workplace. It’s one of the reasons why so many are drawn toward incorporating generative AI technologies into their workflows. A recent survey found 63 per cent of global IT leaders worry their companies will be left behind without AI adoption.

But in the rush to adopt AI, some organizations are overlooking the real impact it can have on workers and company culture.

Most organizational strategies focus on AI’s short-term efficiencies, such as automation, speed and cost saving. What tends to be overlooked are the impacts AI has on cognition, agency and cultural norms. AI is fundamentally restructuring not only what we know, but how we know it.

As AI becomes more integrated, it will continue to influence organizational tone, pace, communication style and decision-making norms. This is why leaders must set deliberate boundaries and consciously shape organizational culture in relation to AI integration.

Once embedded into workflows, AI influences workplace defaults: which sources appear first, what tone a memo takes and where managers set the bar for “good enough.” If people don’t set these defaults, tools like AI will instead.

As researchers who study AI, psychology, human-computer interaction and ethics, we are deeply concerned with the hidden effects and consequences of AI use.

Psychological effects of AI at work

Researchers are beginning to document a number of psychological effects associated with AI use in the workplace. These impacts expose current gaps in epistemic awareness — how we know what we know — and how those gaps can weaken emotional boundaries.

Such shifts can affect how people make decisions, calibrate trust and maintain psychological safety in AI-mediated environments.

One of the most prominent effects is known as “automation bias.” Once AI is integrated into a company’s workflow, its outputs are often internalized as authoritative sources of truth.

Because AI-generated outputs appear fluent and objective, they can be accepted uncritically, creating an inflated sense of confidence and a dangerous illusion of competence.

One recent study found that in 40 per cent of tasks, knowledge workers — those who turn information into decisions or deliverables, like writers, analysts and designers — accepted AI outputs uncritically with zero scrutiny.

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The erosion of self-trust

A second concern is the erosion of self-trust. Continuous engagement with AI-generated content leads workers to second-guess their instincts and over-rely on AI guidance, often without realizing it. Over time, work shifts from generating ideas to merely approving AI-generated ones. This results in the diminishing of personal judgment, creativity and original authorship.

One study found that users have a tendency to follow AI advice even when it contradicts their own judgment, resulting in a decline in confidence and autonomous decision-making. Other research shows that when AI systems provide affirming feedback — even for incorrect answers — users become more confident in their decisions, which can distort their judgment.

Workers can end up deferring to AI as an authority despite its lack of lived experience, moral reasoning or contextual understanding. Productivity may appear higher in the short term, but the quality of decisions, self-trust and ethical oversight may ultimately suffer.

Emerging evidence also points to neurological effects of over-reliance on AI use. One recent emerging study tracked professionals’ brain activity over four months and found that ChatGPT users exhibited 55 per cent less neural connectivity compared to those working unassisted. They struggled to remember the essays they just co-authored moments later, as well reduced creative engagement.

So what can leaders and managers do about it?

What leaders and managers can do

Resilience has become something of a corporate buzzword, but genuine resilience can help organizations adapt to AI.

Resilient organizations teach employees to effectively collaborate with AI without over-relying on its outputs. This requires systematic training in interpretive and critical skills to build balanced and ethical human-AI collaboration.

Organizations that value critique over passive acceptance will become better at thinking critically, adapting knowledge effectively and will build stronger ethical capacity. One way of achieving this is by shifting from a growth-oriented mindset to an adaptive one. Which, practically speaking, means workplaces should seek to do the following:

1. Train people to separate fluency from accuracy and to ask where information comes from rather than just being passive consumers of it. With better epistemic awareness, workers become active interpreters understanding what an AI tool is saying, as well as how and why it’s saying it.

2. Teach people to monitor their thinking processes and question knowledge sources. A recent study showed professionals with strong metacognitive practices, like planning, self-monitoring and prompt revision, achieved significantly higher creativity when using AI tools, while others saw no benefit. That means metacognition could be the “missing link” for productive LLM use.

3. Avoid a one-size-fits-all approach and consider levels of automation by task stages. AI tool developers should be encouraged to define clear roles for when the model drafts or analyzes, when the human leads and when verification is mandatory. Consider adding things like AI-use to responsibility and accountability charts.

4. Create workplace cultures that encourage workers to question AI outputs, track those challenges as quality signals and budget time for verification. Workplaces should publish style norms for AI-assisted writing, set confidence thresholds and evidence requirements by function, and specify who signs off at each risk level.

5. Hold quarterly “drift reviews” to spot shifts in tone, reliance or bias, before they calcify into organizational culture.

Efficiency will not decide the winners

As we are starting to see, the drive for efficiency will not decide which firms are most successful; the ability to interpret and critically assess AI outputs will.

The companies that pair speed with skepticism and protect judgment as a first-class asset will handle volatility better than those that treat AI as an autopilot. Speed may get you to the next decision, but judgment keeps you in business.

Ethical intelligence in organizations requires an ongoing investment in epistemic awareness, interpretive skill, psychological safety and active value-driven design.

Companies capable of balancing technological innovation with critical thinking and deep ethical understanding will be the ones to thrive in the AI era.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. AI tools promise efficiency at work, but they can erode trust, creativity and agency – https://theconversation.com/ai-tools-promise-efficiency-at-work-but-they-can-erode-trust-creativity-and-agency-264865

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Jason Wang, Postdoctoral Fellow, Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University

The United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform recently released a 238-page album, compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003 for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday. On Oct. 6, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Maxwell’s appeal of her 2022 conviction for sex trafficking girls with Epstein.

The release of the partially redacted album is part of a larger investigation of the federal government’s handling of Epstein and Maxwell and “possible mismanagement.”

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The album is in the spotlight due to an entry allegedly penned by U.S. President Donald Trump, though the White House has denied he wrote it. Entitled The First Fifty Years, the book overflows with handwritten letters, campy sketches and images fixated on women’s bodies.

The book was bound by Weitz & Coleman, an esteemed bookbinder in New York City since 1909, as indicated by a note within the album itself.

Its “vegetable tanned” leather covers, table of contents and sections titled “Family,” “Friends” and “Business” signal an intent to elevate casual notes into a permanent record.

As book historian D.F. McKenzie contends, a book’s physical form shapes its social role. Here, the elaborate binding and careful organization transform private, ephemeral notes into a social gesture, something shared in a legacy format.

In this sense, Epstein’s album sits alongside a tradition of bound tribute books — scrapbooks pressed into leather for golden anniversaries, glossy volumes marking a CEO’s retirement or academic festschrifts that canonize a career. What unites them is the transformation of passing moments into artifacts meant to endure.

Charm, codes, clichés

Maxwell’s prologue describes the book as a retrospective to “jog your memory of places and people and different events.”

In the birthday book, one redacted former “assistant” recalls how working for Epstein transformed her life: she went from being “a 22-year-old divorcée working as a hotel hostess” to rubbing shoulders with royalty, presidents, financiers and celebrities.

One letter from a childhood friend who recently said Maxwell instructed him to write something “raunchy” spins a sexually explicit fantasy about Epstein’s conception before drifting into nostalgic tales of their four-boy Brooklyn clique.

In one vignette, Epstein is praised for flaunting a “beautiful British babe” at his family’s home, his indifference to her feelings reframed as charm. The anecdote turns callousness toward women into a badge of confidence and belonging. The letter concludes: “That shows a lot. It really does … Yes, your charisma and persuasive ways came very early on … you’re my kid’s role model.”

Epstein’s sex life and treatment of women are recurring themes.

A note apparently from private equity investor Leon Black, who was earlier found to have paid millions in fees to Epstein, cast Epstein as Ernest Hemingway’s hero in The Old Man and the Sea, swapping fish for “Blonde, Red or Brunette” women.

Philosophers and scholars of rhetoric have long noted that ready-made clichés can replace inner reflection, forming a “code of expression” that insulates people from moral reckoning.

Laughter as defence

If language conveys loyalty, humour compounds it. Composed in 2003, as Epstein’s notoriety grew, today — amid the knowledge of Epstein’s sex crimes — the birthday book’s laughter seems knowingly defensive.

There are bawdy jokes and mocking nicknames: Epstein is dubbed “Degenerate One” and teased or taunted with “so many girls, so little time.”

As French philosopher Henri Bergson argued, laughter functions as a social corrective: a “kind of social ragging” that polices behaviour by ridiculing deviation under the guise of amusement.

One birthday book contributor quips that Epstein had “avoided the penitentiary.” The comment implies knowledge of punishable behaviour, yet also suggests Epstein is an affable rogue.

Figures of authority

The book’s inclusion of entries from public office and science figures could suggest Maxwell and Epstein sought to keep or commemorate connections with figures of authority as a form of perceived legitimacy.

The Wall Street Journal reported that former U.S. president Bill Clinton, whose name appears in the album’s “Friends” section, gave Epstein a handwritten note praising his “childlike curiosity” and drive to “make a difference.” In 2019, a spokesperson for Clinton said he severed ties with Epstein prior to his 2019 arrest and he was not aware of Epstein’s alleged crimes.

Peter Mandelson, recently forced out as the United Kingdom’s ambassador to the U.S. after the Epstein birthday book’s release, penned a note saying Epstein was an “intelligent, sharp-witted man.” Mandelson has said he felt tremendous regret over his Epstein friendship and sympathy for Epstein’s victims.

The birthday book’s “Science” section, with letters from leading scientists, shows that Epstein’s reach extended beyond business and politics into elite academic networks.

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Eroticized power and dominance

While some entries strike a mundane or playful tone, others veer into vulgarity.

The former CEO of Victoria’s Secret, Leslie Wexner, contributed a sketch resembling a woman’s breasts with the words “I wanted to get you what you want… so here it is” — framing it as a present. Wexner has said before he severed ties with Epstein in 2007 and declined to comment about the book.

The note allegedly written by Trump features a drawing of a naked woman alongside typewritten text imagining a conversation between them. It calls Epstein “a pal” and ends with the wish that “every day be another wonderful secret.”

Former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold contributed a series of African wildlife photographs, claiming they spoke more vividly than words. The images — of copulating lions and a zebra with an erect penis — foreground predatory and sexualized behaviour, and may be interpreted as reflecting a fascination with dominance and raw biological impulse.

The Seattle Times reports that a spokesperson for Myhrvold said Myhrvold knew Epstein “from TED conferences and as a donor to basic scientific research” and “regrets that he ever met him.” The representative did not address the letter.

The legacy of small gestures

While journalists have long documented that Epstein’s networks stretched from political leaders and Wall Street financiers to influential figures in science and culture, it remains to be seen how the carefully curated and gifted birthday book fits into the larger investigation.

The book’s most insidious achievement is its ordinariness. It suggests the ways that power is fortified and legitimized not only with contracts and institutions but through gestures of social life, including commemorative books.

Jason Wang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Epstein’s ‘birthday book’ transforms private notes into a legacy record – https://theconversation.com/epsteins-birthday-book-transforms-private-notes-into-a-legacy-record-265715

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Stephen Monteiro, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, Concordia University

The frequency and length of daily phone use continues to rise, especially among young people. It’s a global concern, driving recent decisions to ban phones in schools in Canada, the United States and elsewhere.

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Social media, gaming, streaming and interacting with AI chatbots all contribute to this pull on our attention. But we need to look at the phones themselves to get the bigger picture.

As I argue in my newly published book, Needy Media: How Tech Gets Personal, our phones — and more recently, our watches — have become animated beings in our lives. These devices can build bonds with us by recognizing our presence and reacting to our bodies.

Packed with a growing range of technical features that target our sensory and psychological soft spots, smartphones create comforting ties that keep us picking them up. The emotional cues designed into these objects and interfaces imply that they need our attention, while in actuality, the devices are soaking up our data.

A responsive presence

Face recognition, geolocation, touchscreens, vibration, sound alerts and audio and motion sensing all play their part in catching our attention and responding to our actions. Separately, these may not create a strong emotional attachment, but collectively they situate the phone as a uniquely intimate, sensitive and knowing presence in our lives.

Take facial recognition locks, for example. Convenient for quick access, a smartphone will light up and unlock with a glance when it encounters a known and trusted face. When introducing Face ID in 2017, Apple claimed: “Do it up anyway you do it, Face ID learns your face. It learns who you are.” This implies a deeper user-device connection, like the one we have with folks we know when we spot them crossing our path.

Some devices have repurposed the hand wave — a typical gesture of friendship — into a feature that triggers the camera to take a photo.

Geolocation converts networking signals into a dot on a map, and we see that dot as us — not our phone — just as we may see the dots of our friends’ phones on the map as them.

Phantom vibrations

Sensory cues play a strong role. Touchscreens allow the phone’s interface to react subtly, like edge lighting and rubberbanding, to mimic the pliability of skin.

Vibration and sound alerts make us highly sensitive to the smallest movement or sound from the device. This produces conditions like phantom vibration syndrome, where we imagine that the device requires our attention, even when it doesn’t.

Audio and motion sensing, on the other hand, allows the device to react to us almost instantly, as when it lowers its ringing on an incoming call when we grab its body.

Roots and origins

Most of these features were developed decades ago for other uses. GPS was created by the U.S. military in the early 1970s, then was adopted by hikers and sailors to both navigate and to allow others to locate them if necessary.

Vibration alerts were created for pagers in the late 1970s for professionals — from hospital staff to travelling salespeople — to notify them of an important phone call.

Sound alerts became more widespread with Tamagotchi and other 1990s digital pets. Those toys are especially significant when discussing today’s psychological dependency on portable devices.

Through their beeping cries for attention, Tamagotchi trained millions of school-age millennials to build emotional attachments to virtual handheld companions needing care and nurturing. Not surprisingly, these toys were banned in many schools for their tendency to disrupt classes and distract students.

Indiscriminate tracking

Phones have become an essential part of who we are and how we behave. But there’s also an issue of privacy around our most intimate actions and behaviours. Sensors keep sensing, measuring sounds, movements and proximity.

There is the risk that our dependency will intensify as phones learn things about us that have, until recently, been off limits.

Sleep is a good example. Audio and motion sensing allows the device to get a reasonable picture of when and how we sleep, often collecting and sharing biometric data through pre-loaded health and wellness apps.

Another example is more sophisticated facial recognition, that will not only be able to recognize a face, but also analyze expressions to determine alertness or mood.

All of this collected data may have profound consequences, making our bodily behaviour, our off-line interactions with others and our emotional fragility a regular part of the data profiles used to leverage our lives for corporate profit.

Managing dependency

Short of powering off or walking away, what can we do to manage this dependency? We can access device settings and activate only those features we truly require, adjusting them now and again as our habits and lifestyles change.

Turning on geolocation only when we need navigation support, for example, increases privacy and helps break the belief that a phone and a user are an inseparable pair. Limiting sound and haptic alerts can gain us some independence, while opting for a passcode over facial recognition locks reminds us the device is a machine and not a friend. This may also make it harder for others to access the device.

So-called “dumb phones” limit what a user can do with their devices, though that’s a tough sell when 24/7 connectivity is becoming an expectation.

Manufacturers can do their part by placing more invasive device settings in the “off” position in the factory and being more transparent about their potential uses and data liabilities. That’s not likely to happen, however, without stronger government regulation that puts users and their data first.

In the meantime, at a minimum, we should broaden our public discussions of dependency beyond social media, gaming and artificial intelligence to acknowledge how phones, in themselves, can capture our attention and cultivate our loyalty.

Stephen Monteiro does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Smartphones manipulate our emotions and trigger our reflexes — no wonder we’re addicted – https://theconversation.com/smartphones-manipulate-our-emotions-and-trigger-our-reflexes-no-wonder-were-addicted-265014

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Richa Shivakoti, Research Lead, Migration Governance at the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration & Integration program, Toronto Metropolitan University

The United States government recently announced a US$100,000 H-1B visa fee on new applications, which will affect highly educated workers from abroad who are seeking jobs in the U.S. This policy could have ripple effects for Canada by reducing the emigration of Canadians going to work in the U.S. — and by attracting a talented workforce to the country.

The H-1B visa program was created in 1990 for applicants with at least a bachelor’s degree or higher to work in the U.S. The current annual statutory cap is 65,000 visas, with 20,000 additional visas for professionals from abroad who graduate with a master’s or doctorate from an American institution of higher learning.

The recent announcement regarding the fee increase has astounded tech companies that have long relied on the visa to employ foreign workers in the U.S. Since 2012, about 60 per cent of H-1B workers approved each year have held a tech-related job. Tech companies have been pushing U.S. Congress to expand the visa program due to the high demand and competition for the H-1B.

Instead, this massive increase in fees will make it much more expensive for firms to hire highly educated and skilled immigrants.

The impact on Canadians

Approximately 828,000 Canadian-born immigrants lived in the U.S. as of 2023, many of whom moved to the country via employment channels. Canadians made up one per cent of the total H-1B applications in 2019, and the new H-1B visa fee could reduce the number of Canadians moving to the U.S. for work.

This is especially true in the tech sector, as noted by Prime Minister Mark Carney in his recent remarks at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York:

“We are a leading developer of AI. And our research universities are some of the biggest producers in volume of AI, computing and quantum talent in the world. Unfortunately, most of them go to the United States. I understand you’re changing your visa policy, I hear, so going to hang onto a few of those.”

But another possibility is that American businesses could shift towards using the TN visa — an American non-immigrant visa for citizens of Canada and Mexico to work in specific professional-level jobs — to hire more Canadian workers. Canadians are eligible for the work permit under the Canada-US-Mexico-trade agreement.

These companies could then bypass paying the new H-1B visa fee while still hiring Canadian talent.

Competition for global talent

Various countries, including Canada, are competing to attract and retain global talent. For many highly educated people from abroad seeking work in the U.S., especially recent international graduates of American universities, the new visa fee might result in fewer employment opportunities. As they start to look elsewhere, Canada could be an attractive destination if immigration pathways can be provided in a timely fashion.

Research has also shown that when faced with restrictions on immigration policies to hire skilled immigrants, U.S.-based multinational companies have responded by decreasing the number of jobs they offer in the U.S. and by increasing foreign affiliate employment, particularly in India, China and Canada.

So Canada should be proactive in working with these companies as they plan alternate pathways to retain their workforce.

This sudden and drastic change in the H-1B visa fee by the Donald Trump government presents a window of opportunity for Canadian policymakers to react quickly and offer pathways to recruit such foreign talent. The Canadian government seems to be paying attention. Carney told a recent news conference in London:

“Not as many of those people are going to get visas to the United States. And these are people with lots of skills that are enterprising, and they’re willing to move to work …. So it’s an opportunity for Canada, and we’re going to take that into account. And we’ll have a clear offering on that.”

Crises can create opportunities

A policy window opens when there is the right combination of recognizing a problem and providing a feasible policy solution while there is a favourable political climate. This allows policymakers to link the problem to a solution and advocate for change.

In the current environment, policy officials inside and outside of government can provide ideas on creating targeted policies and pathways to recruit talented workers to Canada.

An example of such a targeted initiative was seen in 2023, when the Canadian government, while announcing its Tech Talent Strategy, introduced a program that allowed H-1B visa holders to apply to receive an open three-year work permit in Canada.

It became clear that Canada was regarded as a popular alternative when applications closed within 24 hours after the maximum number of 10,000 applications was reached.

Richa Shivakoti receives funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council.

Anna Triandafyllidou receives funding for research related to high-skilled migration and its governance from the Tri-Council Agency and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as Horizon Europe (Link4Skills research project).

– ref. The H-1B visa fee hike in the United States opens a policy window for Canada – https://theconversation.com/the-h-1b-visa-fee-hike-in-the-united-states-opens-a-policy-window-for-canada-266518

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Nadia Hasan, Assistant Professor, School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, York University, Canada

In April 2024, a video circulated online showing an Oakville, Ont. high school teacher and a student having an alarming and contentious conversation about his keffiyeh.

The Iroquois Ridge High School educator says mid-way in the clip: “I didn’t call you a terrorist. I said it (the keffiyeh) reminds me of …” When the student pushes her to finish her sentence and suggests “Hamas?” she answers “yes.”

The Halton District School Board (HDSB) quickly placed the staff member on leave and launched an investigation, deeming her language “harmful and discriminatory.”

This incident, a clear example of Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, is one of many detailed in our recently released Islamophobia Research Hub report, Documenting the “Palestine Exception”: An Overview of Trends in Islamophobia, Anti-Palestinian and Anti-Arab Racism in Canada in the Aftermath of October 7, 2023.

Our findings point to a pattern of unethical use of institutional power to intimidate and alienate those expressing support for Palestine or their identities — what many community organizers in Canada now call “the Palestine exception.”

What is the Palestine exception?

The expression describes how democratic freedoms and multicultural ideals historically meet their limits when it comes to Palestinian human rights, history and identity. Studies in Canada and the United States show systemic silencing and erasure of Palestinian experiences — often through unfounded accusations of antisemitism.

Race scholars have long argued that Canadian multiculturalism practises inclusion through exclusion, demanding that racialized people suppress parts of their identity to gain conditional belonging in order to uphold a normative racial order.

For Palestinians in Canada, this often means hiding their heritage for fear of stigmatization, or facing punishment for expressing pro-Palestinian views.

As Nihad Jasser of the Association of Palestinian Arab Canadians, an Ottawa-based community collective, said:

“It feels that institutions in our society will support all human rights except Palestinian human rights, celebrate all cultures except Palestinian culture, and condemn all forms of racism except anti-Palestinian racism.”

Unfair targeting, censorship and discipline of those speaking out for Palestinian rights — or merely perceived as Palestinian, Arab or Muslim — is a common theme in our report and particularly disturbing in terms of young people’s experiences.

A pattern of targeting young people

According to our research, young people in schools, universities and early careers are facing Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism and anti-Arab racism in the form of employment discrimination, doxing, hate-motivated violence, bullying and the suppression of their democratic rights.

The HDSB keffiyeh incident reflects a wider reality: a treatment of suspicion toward Palestinian expressions.

Another example that drew attention was a Toronto District School Board (TDSB) field trip to the Indigenous-led Grassy Narrows River Run in September 2024. During the march, some participants used chants connecting settler colonialism in Canada to the experiences of Palestinians.

This led to social media backlash from parents who claimed the trip exposed students to pro-Palestinian political activity and compromised safety. The Ontario education minister’s office demanded an investigation — an unusual move that many felt revealed a double standard compared to other incidents.

The TDSB issued an apology for the “harm” caused and pre-emptively cancelled another planned field trip for National Day for Truth and Reconciliation — ironically undermining commitments to decolonization.

Patrick Case, a former Ontario Ministry of Education chief equity officer, conducted an independent review, interviewing 146 parents, students, Indigenous leaders, staff and trustees. His report found that the Grassy Narrows event was not overshadowed by pro-Palestinian activism and that the TDSB’s reaction reflected a broader pattern of erasure and suspicion toward Palestinian identity.

Indigenous leaders also noted that media outrage diverted attention from pressing issues of environmental justice in Indigenous communities.

Despite these findings, the education ministry has not promoted the report and has rejected some of its key recommendations.

Punishment over pedagogy

Our report raises concerns about a growing political culture that punishes rather than engages young people advocating for Palestinian human rights. Instead of fostering critical thinking, institutions are choosing repression.

Another striking example is the treatment of students at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Toronto Metropolitan University, who were accused of antisemitism for signing an open letter in solidarity with Palestinian people and critical of Israeli state actions. Several law firms and the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General blacklisted them from recruitment as punishment for signing the open letter.

In an external review, Justice J. Michael MacDonald condemned this response as a “rush to judgment” that unfairly targeted “young idealists motivated by immense human suffering.” He ruled that the students’ actions were a “valid exercise of freedom of speech” and criticized the administration for negatively impacting the students.

He also criticized members of the legal community for fuelling the backlash against these students. Some of these students are now suing Toronto Metropolitan University for defamation.

Many young people have shown resilience in the face of such repression, but the harm is undeniable. Being punished for expressing solidarity with Palestinians — and witnessing peers being punished — affects young people’s sense of safety, intellectual curiosity and career prospects.

Protecting Canadian multiculturalism

Two years into the brutal genocide in Gaza, there is a notable shift in public discourse and policy related to Palestine. Yet many remain deeply skeptical of the sincerity of this shift.

Earlier this fall, the federal Liberal government introduced the Combating Hate Act, proposing amendments to the Criminal Code.

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Critics warn these changes could further curtail civil liberties, particularly around expressions of Palestinian identity and solidarity.

The amendments would ban the public display of “hate symbols” and criminalize protests near places of worship, schools and community centres. The government defines hate symbols as those associated with terrorist entities such as the Nazi swastika and SS (Schutzstaffel) bolts. And so, understandably, questions abound about whether this means that Palestinian flags or the script of the shahada (Muslim declaration of faith) could be deemed hate symbols.

Given recent institutional responses to pro-Palestinian expression, there is little confidence these sorts of laws will not be weaponized to criminalize Palestinian identity, dissent and criticism of the Israeli state.

In large part, this pervasive suspicion stems from the widespread experience of Palestinian identity and pro-Palestinian positions being treated as inherently suspect, even dangerous. Such exceptional treatment exposes the profound fissures — and in fact the limits — of Canadian multiculturalism and its professed commitments to democratic freedoms.

Nadia Hasan receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Canadian Heritage, The Muslim Fund, the Bay Tree Foundation and The Olive Tree Foundation.

Sarah Abou-Bakr does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism is on the rise in Canada – https://theconversation.com/anti-palestinian-and-anti-arab-racism-is-on-the-rise-in-canada-266637

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Emilda Thavaratnam, PhD student, Leadership and Higher Education, University of Toronto

The establishment of Ontario’s colleges of applied arts and technology 60 years ago marked a pivotal moment in the province’s educational history. The founding vision was based on principles of accessibility and community, as colleges were designed to strengthen Ontario’s growing social and economic fabric.

Today, this promise is unravelling. Students now face limited program choices with the cancellation or suspension of 600 programs over the past year, rising fees and mounting debt, while faculty and staff contend with precarious contracts and widespread layoffs.

As students settle into fall semesters, it’s essential to reflect on the history of Ontario’s colleges in order to envision a future that safeguards the public mission on which these institutions were founded.

Founding vision

Ontario redefined post-secondary education in 1965 by creating a new college system under the leadership of William G. Davis, then the province’s education minister, later its premier. This marked a turning point in Ontario’s educational history and the birth of the college system.

In response to the province’s rapid demographic and economic shifts, Davis proposed a model of affordable, accessible vocational education aimed at preparing students for the workforce.

The foundational principles emphasized that college programs should be “occupation-oriented” and “designed to meet the needs of the local community”;
Additionally, the plans highlighted there should be a “close relationship between any college program and the long-term economic development plans for a particular region” to respond to immediate labour market demands and broader societal needs, including arts, health, science and technical fields.

This approach ensured that the founding vision was connected to regional development, allowing colleges to address Ontario’s diverse social, economic and cultural needs across multiple sectors.

In a 1967 Department of Education publication, Davis cited an earlier 1964 report that named the unique role that colleges would play:

“In the present crisis .. we must turn our attention to the post-secondary level, where we must create a new kind of institution that will provide, in the interests of students for whom a university course is unsuitable, a type of training which universities are not designed to offer.”

This mandate gave colleges their distinctive purpose of filling gaps that universities were never meant to address.

Economic and social development

There are now 24 colleges with campuses in 200 communities throughout Ontario. This college system plays a vital role in the province’s education and economy.

Davis’s legacy is evident in the generations of students who have attended these institutions. Since 2018, an average of 140,000 people have graduated annually from Ontario’s colleges.

It is reported that an average of 83 per cent of Ontario college graduates are employed within six months of graduation. These outcomes highlight the pivotal role that colleges play in contributing to Ontario’s economic and social development.

Shifts in funding

The financial foundation of Ontario colleges has shifted dramatically over the past six decades. When colleges were first established most operating expenses were financed by the province, with tuition contributing to a lesser extent.

By the late 1980s, however, per-student funding had already fallen by roughly one-third. The trend accelerated in 1995 when $120 million was cut. Rather than raising tuition directly, colleges responded by introducing ancillary fees, expanding international student enrolment, postponing capital projects and turning to private funding.

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From the 1990s onward, tuition increasingly replaced public investment as the financial backbone of the college system. Data from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario illustrates that between 1992 and 2008, total college revenue rose from $972 million to $1.6 billion, but this growth was driven primarily by student fees. Tuition revenue more than tripled during this period, while government funding shrank as a proportion of overall revenue.

This reliance on student-paid fees deepened in the following decade. Between 2010-11 and 2022-23, provincial grants per student operating revenue (adjusted for inflation) declined by 29 per cent, while tuition revenue once again tripled.

By 2022-23, Ontario colleges received approximately $11,081 per full-time-equivalent student, compared to the national average of $19,292. This figure is just 56 per cent of the Canadian average across provinces.

A 2023 provincial report, Ensuring Financial Sustainability for Ontario’s Post-Secondary Sector, confirms the crisis surrounding underfunding.

What does this mean for students?

These funding changes have reshaped the classroom experience. For students, this means higher tuition and shifted program priorities that limit access and opportunity.

For the public, it’s the loss of an original promise of accessible vocational education. Rising tuition fees have created barriers to access, especially for low-income, first-generation Canadian students.

At the same time, the Ontario government has framed college funding heavily around immediate provincial and national economic pressures, for example in trades and construction, as well as STEM and health care.

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While public funding of colleges has been eroded, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union reports that Ontario has also spent significant funds cultivating “non-college training providers and projects” through a Skills Development Fund.

It also notes that while public colleges are required to disclose a great deal about their funding and outcomes:

“… very little is known about the funding levels, training quality or employment outcomes of SDF-funded projects. Instead, the province relies on campaign-style funding announcements, often showcasing private companies receiving multi-million dollar training grants.”

Move away from founding vision

Davis’s founding vision was rooted in regional development. Programs were designed to serve the long-term needs of communities, including the arts, local culture and community services. The goal was to strengthen entire regions and broaden opportunities through a balanced system that reflected both economic and social priorities.

This shift reflects the broader marketization of higher education. Education is valued less for cultivating critical thinking, civic participation and community life and more for producing workers to meet short-term market needs.

For students, this means diminishing autonomy as their choices are increasingly shaped by labour market pressures rather than broader civic needs and personal vocational interests. These funding trends raise concerns about the fate of a broader range of programs that sustain the social fabric of communities.

Ongoing college support staff strike

Finally, these policy shifts ignore the immediate impact on students, faculty and staff. The ongoing support staff strike at Ontario colleges is one expression of these pressures, and its complexity deserves discussion beyond the scope of this piece.

The question remains: where is our government in all this, and what will be done to save our colleges?

Today, Davis’s legacy is being dismantled by chronic underfunding. The future of our colleges depends on renewal. We must reclaim these values and call on our federal and provincial leaders to support a truly public system of higher education that serves the communities it was created to serve.

Emilda Thavaratnam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Ontario’s colleges were founded to serve local and regional needs — have we forgotten that? – https://theconversation.com/ontarios-colleges-were-founded-to-serve-local-and-regional-needs-have-we-forgotten-that-262760

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Charlotte Nau, PhD Candidate in Media Studies, Western University

Law enforcement agencies across Canada are sounding the alarm over a rise in sexual extortion (“sextortion”) against young people.

The problem goes far beyond sextortion, as this is only one form of many variations of online sexual harms that target youth today. Teenagers in Canada can be victims of sexual catfishing, AI-generated sexual deepfakes and violent extremism.

Some high-profile sextortion incidents include the deaths by suicide of Rehtaeh Parsons, Amanda Todd, Daniel Lints and a boy in British Columbia.

The scale of the problem

Technology-facilitated sexual violence (TFSV) includes harmful practices such as sexual name-calling and rumour spreading, non-consensual distribution of intimate images (nudes) and other forms of sexual harassment.

Our research team recently conducted a survey with more than 1,000 teens aged 13 to 18 across Canada to learn about youths’ experiences with TFSV.

Our findings underscore how widespread these harms are: more than a quarter of the teens (28 per cent) reported experiencing at least one form of TFSV.

In addition to so many youth experiencing TFSV, almost half (47 per cent) said that TFSV had happened to someone they knew. The most common forms of TFSV reported in our survey were receiving unwanted sexual images (15 per cent), encountering unwanted porn (13 per cent) and being sexually harassed online (11 per cent).

Online platforms

We also asked the teens which social media sites and online gaming services had the most sexual harassment. The platform they mentioned most often was Snapchat, followed by TikTok and Instagram. Snapchat has been known for its potential risks to youth and privacy concerns.

Girls experienced TFSV at a higher rate (32 per cent) than boys (23 per cent), which is consistent with research from Statistics Canada.

Teens who said they were neurodivergent or had a learning disability were more likely to be subjected to TFSV (39 per cent). TFSV was also higher among teens with a mental health condition (40 per cent).

These findings are consistent with previous research that showed higher victimization rates among people with disabilities.

A small but significant number of teens (seven per cent) reported committing at least one form of TFSV. This was more common among boys (nine per cent) than girls (six per cent).

Insufficient support

Parents and guardians were the most relevant source of support for teens who had been subjected to TFSV. Nearly half (44 per cent) of the teens turned to them, and most of these teens found them helpful.

The teens were much less likely to seek support from institutions. Only about one in 10 (12 per cent) told someone at their school, with only seven per cent telling the police. Unfortunately, these numbers are consistent with other statistics, as most people do not report sexual violence to the police.

Young people showed little confidence in the reporting tools and moderation systems of social media platforms. As little as five per cent of the teens had used these to report sexually harmful materials. Almost one in three teens (29 per cent) thought that the digital platforms should do a better job supporting them.

This finding is important to consider as social media companies are dropping content moderation, making their platforms possibly more hazardous for youth.

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Teens’ misconceptions

Most teens (90 per cent and up) knew that several forms of TFSV were illegal in Canada. However, they were less certain when asked if it was legal to create a fake sexual video of someone. This is unsurprising: legal views of sexual deepfakes vary by province. Some allow civil action, while others treat it as child pornography.

The teens’ knowledge of the law was incomplete in other areas. Almost two-thirds (61 per cent) thought that sending a nude picture of themselves to other youth was illegal. This is not true. Minors can share sexual images with each other as long as they are consensual and kept private between them; that most teens don’t know this is troubling.

Sexting and sharing nudes is a common form of sexual expression among teens. In our survey, teens who though that nude image sharing was illegal were less likely to seek help with TFSV.

Some teens (26 per cent) thought that taking a nude picture of themselves was illegal. This is also incorrect.

These misconceptions matter, as young people need to be informed about their legal rights to sexual expression. Proper education will prevent shame, fear and other barriers to seeking support when someone is distributing their images against their will or coercing them into harmful practices.

An urgent issue

Social media and other forms of digital communication are central to young people’s lives, which means that addressing TFSV is an urgent issue. While the federal government and some provincial governments have taken steps or proposed legislation aimed at protecting youth, some responses have been proven to be unrealistic and ineffective.

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Governments — and tech companies in particular — need to do more to prevent TFSV and support youth who experience it.

Schools can also take action to help youth. However, there is considerable variation in the TFSV responses and interventions within educational curricula, policies and legislation across the provinces and territories. This means that even though TFSV is a common problem, most parents, teachers, police and frontline workers lack the resources and strategies needed to respond effectively and promptly.

Our findings highlight the impact of these shortcomings on teens, as many youth in our survey did not receive help for TFSV, even when they sought it out. In many instances, telling others actually made the situation worse.

TFSV is a gendered problem that disproportionately impacts certain groups. It is important to keep in mind who is most at risk when developing TFSV resources and interventions.

We believe that with evidence-informed and co-ordinated action from the private and public sectors, young people can live in a digital world where they feel safe online and can easily access effective resources and support.

Charlotte Nau receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Christopher Dietzel receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Estefanía Reyes receives funding from the International Development Research Center (IDRC).

– ref. More than a quarter of Canadian teens have experienced sexual violence online – https://theconversation.com/more-than-a-quarter-of-canadian-teens-have-experienced-sexual-violence-online-265625