September 26, 2025 | Taylor Owen, Max Bell Professor at McGill University and Founding Director of the Centre for Media, Technology, and Democracy, has been appointed to the Government of Canada’s AI Strategy Task Force. The Task Force, composed of experts from industry, academia, and civil society, will provide advice to the Government of Canada on its renewed AI strategy. Taylor Owen will contribute his expertise to advancing safe AI systems and strengthening public confidence in their use.
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Published on: 30 Sep 2025
June 25, 2025 | Professor Taylor Owen, founding director of The Center for Media, Technology and Democracy has come together with other advisors to build an application, called Gander. It’s a social media platform that lets you post videos, write updates, and tailor your feed to what you actually want to see — minus the trolls, conspiracy theories, and the “why is this even in my feed?” content.
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Published on: 26 Jun 2025
April 7, 2025 | Taylor Owen and Helen A. Hayes wrote an opinion piece arguing that Canada’s failure to regulate its digital space is no longer just a tech policy issue—it’s a national security concern. With rising disinformation and direct interference from the U.S., Canadians now view the United States as a greater foreign threat than China or Russia. Although the Trudeau government introduced several digital policy bills, including those addressing online harms, AI regulation, and cybersecurity, most were abandoned after Parliament was prorogued.
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Published on: 9 Apr 2025
April 1, 2025 | Professor Taylor Owen spoke on the new social media regulations as the elections approaches closer. If social-media companies wanted to help improve election integrity, they could share what’s happening on their platforms with researchers, said Owen. X used to give researchers access to its application programming interface (API), or data, but now its most in-depth access level costs about $40,000 a month, mentioned Owen, which effectively shuts out Canadian researchers.
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Published on: 3 Apr 2025
March 24, 2025 | With trust in journalism eroding, disinformation once fringe is now mainstream. Much of it is spreading on social media. Professor Taylor Owen says the online media environment in Canada is more fragile and vulnerable to manipulation than ever before. A dangerous situation at the best of times even more so during an election.
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Published on: 25 Mar 2025
March 6, 2025 | Taylor Owen explains Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s public inquiry into foreign interference that has identified disinformation as the most pressing danger to Canada’s democratic institutions. But what led to the creation of the Foreign Interference Commission in the first place? And how does social media platforms influence Canada’s information landscape and its sovereignty?
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Published on: 6 Mar 2025
February 12, 2025 | Professor Taylor Owen writes about the "vibe-shift" of AI as he comes back from the Paris AI Action Summit. Owen explains how the governments are pivoting from regulating AI risks to aggressively pursuing foreign direct investment, and Europe faces a new era of AI adoption.
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Published on: 17 Feb 2025
May 7, 2024 | We are living in an age of breakthroughs propelled by advances in artificial intelligence. Technologies that were once the realm of science fiction are now transpiring into our reality. Machine Like Us is a technology show where every other Tuesday Taylor Owen sits down with the people shaping this rapidly approaching future.
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Published on: 7 May 2024
March 17, 2024 | In this episode of The Sunday Magazine, Taylor Owen joins a discussion on digital discourse and the future of online safety regulation. The US House of Representatives voted to pass a bill that could lead to a nationwide ban against TikTok. Professor Owen speaks on Canada's standpoint with this decision, and how the federal government has launched a national security review of the video-sharing app.
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Published on: 19 Mar 2024
March 5, 2024 | In this episode of GZERO AI, Professor Taylor Owen takes a look at the Canadian government’s Online Harms Act, which seeks to hold social media companies responsible for harmful content.
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Published on: 6 Mar 2024
July 23, 2023 | In this opinion piece by Taylor Owen and Supriya Dwivedi, they reflect on the passage of Bill C-18, the Online News Act, where the government is hoping that Google and Meta would expand the deals they currently have with some Canadian publishers to a wider range of outlets. On the other hand, tech companies are clearly using Canada as a trial to other jurisdictions in the process of enacting similar policies. The piece the highlights where to go from here.
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Published on: 2 Aug 2023
June 20, 2022 | With the Canadian Commission on Democratic Expression's new report hot off the press, Commission co-chair and Max Bell School professor Taylor Owen sat down for an interview with CBC Radio to discuss the recommendations on curbing online harm that he and his colleagues have proposed.
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Published on: 23 Jun 2022
In an interview with CBC Radio, Max Bell School professor Taylor Owen—who leads the School's Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy—opined on the role regulation can play in safeguarding free speech and online safety.
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Published on: 2 May 2022
April 27, 2022 | Taylor Owen and Supriya Dwivedi of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy write that Elon Musk's recent purchase of Twitter might strengthen the democratic governance that social media companies have fought against.
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Published on: 28 Apr 2022
It’s one of the most pressing questions for researchers and families today: How are children affected by digital technology? Parents, caregivers, experts and policymakers are struggling to understand what’s best for kids online in an effort to keep up with the rapid pace and scale of technology. Screen Time is a new podcast where we search for answers to the biggest questions out there on kids and technology.
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Published on: 10 Mar 2022
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