By Chris Beall, May 30, 2025
Democratic societies face increasing threats in the global information space from authoritarian regimes like China and Russia. These actors exploit digital platforms to undermine trust, polarize societies, and weaken democratic institutions. In contrast, democracies rely on collaborative, rules-based responses that leverage civil society, academia, and government partnerships. Canada and Japan, as leading democracies, have developed complementary strategies to address these challenges through initiatives like Canada’s Digital Citizen Initiative (DCI) and Japan’s National Security Strategy. This brief argues that building resilience requires a federated, networked approach grounded in civil society collaboration and backed by evidence-informed policy.
Canada and Japan are working alongside their global partners to safeguard their citizens from ever increasing levels of toxic, deceptive material in our global information environment. Among the multiple contributing elements to the declining quality of our information landscape, the actions of foreign powers are a key factor. Since Russia’s attempts to undermine the 2016 U.S. election raised “disinformation” to the popular consciousness, evidence indicates that China, Russia, and their allies are using the global information system to pour a steady stream of poison into open, democratic societies.
Indeed, authoritarian regimes continue to take advantage of the still largely unprotected information space to undermine social cohesion and weaken trust in democratic institutions and democracy itself. In doing so, they exercise an asymmetrical power advantage: unlike democratic societies, they maintain centralized command and control structures that allow them to marshal resources and launch hybrid information attacks (e.g., disinformation, cyber-attacks, traditional and online media manipulation, and attacks against their critics) that cut across existing policy domains and operations. They possess the attacker’s advantage: striking where, when, and how they choose. They are free from the constraints of democratic checks on power or any need to adhere to the truth.
The nature of the global information system strengthens authoritarians’ hands. Its interconnected, networked infrastructure and shared media and messaging platforms enable massive data capture and exploitation, and deliver tools that streamline and simplify coordination and management. These tools—automated decision making and an open, connective tissue across regions and subject areas—provide a ready-made authoritarian tool kit that minimizes the intrinsic weaknesses of authoritarian regimes, such as lack of trust, creativity, flexibility, and co-operation. It allows these regimes to take advantage of the modern digital environment to pick their targets, as well as equip and fund their proxies. As a result, their information attacks are coordinated across a range of platforms—including search, social media, traditional media, and messenger applications—and effectively target Canada and Japan and their allies, largely from outside their borders. It’s a sad fact that every available measure indicates their approach is proving effective, as Canada and its allies witness declining belief in democracy and increased polarization, year-over-year.
There’s a growing sense on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border that something is very wrong when it comes to our security. From compromised institutions to the flow of drugs and organized crime, a web of foreign influence and transnational operations has been emerging as concern.
Democratic governments, conversely, work from a rules-based, collaborative approach. Instead of central control, democratic societies leverage laws, regulations, social capital, partnerships, and a ‘marketplace of ideas’ to manage threats, risks, and drive social good in the information environment and beyond.
Rather than try to mimic authoritarian approaches, democratic societies should continue to double down on their strategic advantages, primarily taking a more collaborative approach to these challenges through support for information integrity and resilience, which prioritizes a broader, “whole-of-society” approach to countering the toxic information environment. Governments cannot manage these issues alone: media, civil society organizations, academics, think tanks, and information system partners (like libraries and educational institutions), all have an essential role to play.
Canada and Japan have both recognized the benefits of building societal resilience to counter information threats through meaningful collaboration and partnership, both between governments at an international level and with civil society partners domestically. Japan’s recently updated National Security Strategy, for example, commits the government to international cooperation and the active engagement of civil society in achieving its security objectives
The Digital Citizen Initiative (DCI) at the Department of Canadian Heritage provides an excellent example of the benefits of a collaboration-by-design approach. The DCI was launched as part of a series of measures to prepare for Canada’s 2019 federal election, designed to safeguard the campaign and protect democratic institutions. The DCI was unique: it demonstrated the benefit of linking government, civil society, and academic organizations in their work addressing election-related foreign influence operations. It fostered a community by connecting Canadian and international thought leaders and others working to address parallel challenges. From the start, its most innovative grantees combined researchers, trusted civic partners, and tech developers working together to tap into hard-to-reach communities.
The paucity of evidence about what works, and decreased public trust in potential government responses, remain a striking feature of current efforts to address authoritarian attacks across the information space. At the same time as it was launching citizen engagement programming and international cooperation, the DCI created an academic funding stream, in partnership with Canada’s pure research funding arm, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to create incentives to build an evidence base to support action. In parallel, the DCI empowered civil society to act as the interlocutor between government and at-risk citizens, which is essential: if people do not trust the government, they are even less likely to trust government communications that claim a particular story is false. Having trusted communicators is key. This “virtuous circle” of research-led practice and activity-informed applied research enabled partners to deliver results-driven solutions that strengthened Canadian resilience.
This approach can be replicated elsewhere. Civil society as an interlocutor can and should play this role and there are mechanisms to achieve this. The need to build meaningful, effective collaboration between governments and between government and civil society, both domestically and around the world is more important now than ever.
Where the DCI demonstrated what’s possible at the national level, Project CONNIE (Coordination & Open Networking Needs for the Information Environment) is scaling that vision by identifying global chokepoints, promoting mutual visibility across sectors, and enabling more fluid cooperation between governments and civil society. With support from the Omidyar Network, CONNIE has been consulting global partners to identify barriers to collaboration and work through potential strategies to address them. Key to these efforts, CONNIE advocates for a “federated” approach to managing threats in the information space. This means meeting government, civil society, and industry organizations where they are, and ceding the responsibility for emerging threats to those best able to address them.
CONNIE’s global consultations uncovered a common pattern: promising initiatives often operate in silos, unable to see or build on each other’s efforts. Many organizations lacked clear points of contact inside government or faced funding models that discouraged transparency. These structural weaknesses—rather than lack of will—limit democracies’ ability to scale effective responses.
The Japan-Canada working relationship in this area addresses one key challenge CONNIE identified: connecting domestically focused policy and operational activities across disparate geographies. But others remain at play. Notably, and often underacknowledged, the ever-present power dynamics between governments and civil society partners can have a detrimental effect on true engagement; non-governmental partners are often unsure about the right entry points into government and can be unwilling to share setbacks or concerns, for fear of risking funding opportunities. In parallel, the impact of the traditional, procurement-based approaches to openness and collaboration, can also hamper meaningful cooperation.
To illustrate, traditional government procurement creates a winner-takes-all culture that limits collaboration and mutual learning. This “marketplace-of-ideas” approach works to ensure value for money across a range of government policy areas, from agriculture to transportation. It is less effective in policy areas requiring urgent responses, like the current crisis in the information space. The need to always be winning bids limits civil society’s willingness to openly share their plans and activities, or to reflect publicly on their setbacks and challenges. Smaller organizations fear having their ideas taken while larger organizations feel the need to secure bids to promote their reputations. As an example, 2024’s “year of elections” saw more than a dozen large-scale, international events focused on AI and election campaigns. They were not building from each other, cascading lessons learned, and identifying promising leads; instead, they were competing for scarce resources and targeting the same, overworked policymakers who should have been devoting their time to addressing the challenges we face.
Recommendations
At its core, this is a horizontal governance problem. Addressing the risks to democracy in the information space requires sustained effort focused on enabling and strengthening connections across governments, and with non-governmental partners. Japan and Canada have an opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of this kind of approach in building resilience across individuals, communities, and governments.
The current upheaval across the system is creating opportunities for new global leadership. Canada, Japan, and their allies face an urgent need to realign their partnerships to secure a strong, healthy information system. Learning from consultative networks globally, like the recently established Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FIMI ISAC) the two countries should take steps to accelerate existing efforts, developing a learning network and open-source information exchange platform for government and civil society colleagues working to secure the integrity of the information system. Driving this collaboration from a civil society lens, rather than a government one, presents the opportunity for more frank discussions, fosters trust, and offers additional opportunities to truly engage with non-governmental partners. Both countries recognize the value in collaborating with like-minded nations across the Asia Pacific. Launching this effort from a strong Canada-Japan bond would allow partners to work together to address the transnational scourge of foreign influence operations, online harms and hate, and hybrid and cyber-attacks.
Beyond efforts to counter disinformation or identify and expose authoritarian influence operations, Canada and Japan—learning from the DCI experience—must redouble efforts to foster a healthy, inclusive information space that privileges connection and the whole-of-society approach that both nations seek to advance. Building stronger connections between the two countries around domestic co-operation would enable media organizations and civil society partners to deliver the tools to build resilience and develop, strengthen, and amplify existing work already focused on information integrity operating on a smaller budget and scale.
Finally, despite significant expenditure of resources over the past decade, disinformation continues to play a detrimental role on both Japanese and Canadian societies and their place in the world. Taking advantage of heightened global awareness, Japanese and Canadian thought leaders in government and civil society should step back and think through their goals, understand success, and develop the right measurement tools required to gauge progress. Providing leading Canadian, Japanese, and allied thought leaders in the G7 and beyond the opportunity to meet, understand, and chart their goals in concrete terms, and to set out a roadmap to achieve them, will strengthen their efforts and benefit all those working to address the challenges in the information space.
Concluding thoughts
Ultimately, Japan and Canada and their allies need to focus on the information environment that they want to achieve, and on supporting the partners who are already working to deliver an open, inclusive, and safe online space. This includes collaborating with actors like grass roots civil society members, and local, independent media organizations. Building stronger connections locally and regionally, and enabling organizations to more easily tap into existing expertise, enables other governments and civil society members to deliver community-driven, field-tested consultative solutions to engage citizens in both democratic and authoritarian-leaning countries.
Chris Beall is a senior fellow at the Montreal Institute for Global Security, and a contributor for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
