An Examination of How Social Media Narratives Affect Trust in Government

Harnessing the Power of Artificial Intelligence to Make Meaningful Change in Approaching Complex Issues

We are exploring how social media impacts Canadians’ trust in government. Using Artificial Intelligence, we are reviewing available online posts of some 300,000 Canadians to examine the drivers of trust and how those drivers affect the general public’s trust in the government as a democratic institution to achieve policy outcomes.

The project assesses Canadian views against five OECD government ‘trust indicators’: reliability, responsiveness, openness/inclusiveness, integrity, and fairness. We will link this information to six key and challenging policy areas:

A green economy
Climate change
Immigration
Western alienation
The future of healthcare
Social justice and systemic racism.

We will propose approaches that will allow public institutions to build bridges between policy silos, reach consensus on divisive and complex issues, and drive systemic trust and confidence in the legitimacy of the federal government as a democratic institution.