Ahmed Al-Rawi, Simon Fraser University and Yasmin Jiwani, Concordia University

Russian troll activity on Twitter aimed at influencing public opinion has attracted a lot of attention in the United States and other western democracies. Canadians may feel it’s not an issue here. But a recent examination of Twitter data suggests there are reasons to be concerned as the country heads into a federal election.

Here’s why: Our research shows Russian trolls were trying to stoke divisions among Canadians by tweeting fake news stories and Islamaphobic statements after the Québec mosque shootings in 2017. The Russians have used similar techniques to disrupt and sow dissent in other countries. It’s reasonable to assume the same thing could happen in advance of the October election.

The Québec mosque terrorist incident on Jan. 29, 2017, was a horrific event that created a great deal of fear among Muslims living in Canada and elsewhere. Although Alexandre Bissonnette, a man with links to white nationalism, confessed to murdering the six Muslim victims and injuring many others, some media outlets initially focused on a Moroccan man as the alleged terrorist on the first day, reinforcing the stereotype of Muslim men as terrorists.

Read more: Media portrays Indigenous and Muslim youth as 'savages' and 'barbarians'

We decided to examine the social media debates about the Québec mosque shooting, so we collected 18,533 tweets from Jan. 30 to Feb. 12, 2017, using the hashtags #QuebecShooting and #QuebecMosqueShooting. In our study of these hashtags, we found two main polarized communities making claims about their positions towards the Québec mosque shooting.

We also found the majority of social media users on Twitter showed sympathy towards the victims. To a lesser extent, we found that fake news stories were discussed mostly in relation to Fox News channel’s initial promotion of a Moroccan shooter (mentioned 1,335 times). The Moroccan discussed was in fact a witness to the shooting.

An antagonistic community promoted this false news as a way to attack mainstream media, especially CNN (referenced 119 times) for allegedly hiding facts and information about the identity of the fictitious Moroccan shooter.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office asked Fox News to take down the post on its website.

Read more: A national day of remembrance: Lessons from the Québec massacre

Russian trolls on Québec

The most retweeted post, ranked No. 102, retweeted 19 times and recorded in our notes, was from @SouthLoneStar: “RT @SouthLoneStar: "Seems like #QuebecShooting suspect is a Moroccan Muslim who claims to be a white nationalist. Sorry for spreading m… https://t.co/JJvdcMTl3b.”

To further investigate, we did a simple Google search and found that SouthLoneStar was actually a Russian troll whose account was later removed by Twitter. This user had posted highly divisive messages and fake reports about Muslims, including a viral photograph of a Muslim woman in a hijab, wrongly characterized as casually talking on her cell phone while ignoring a victim of the Westminster terrorist attack on March 22, 2017.

We decided to examine this user in more detail, so we followed three procedures.

First, we used the Twitter dataset released on the 3,836 Russian Internet Agency trolls. We found that SouthLoneStar created an English account on Nov. 25, 2015, describing himself as: “Proud TEXAN and AMERICAN patriot #2a #prolife #Trump2016 #TrumpPence16 Fuck Islam and PC. Don’t mess with Texas!” As a self-proclaimed alt-right member who followed the account of Pepe the frog (@pepethetroll), he used the display name of “Texas Lone Star” and had 53,999 followers and was following 49,272 other users. In comparison to other Russian trolls, he is ranked No. 22 in terms of the highest number of followers.

Then we used the Internet Wayback machine that provides a historical snapshot of the internet and so therefore includes some suspended users. We found a few captures and saved them to share.

We found another post tweeted by SouthLoneStar which said: “Media say that #QuebecShooting was organized by ‘white supremacists.’ Here are the names of the shooters: Basheer Al Taweed & Hassan Matti https://t.co/dMpBEPl3cC”. Numerous other Russian trolls tweeted similar messages to support this conspiracy theory, including wadeharriot, who retweeted a story by Rebel Media, the Canadian-based far-right outlet, that read: “RT @JackPosobiec: Rebel Media: Canadian Govt Covering Up 2nd Shooter Role in Quebec Mosque Attack, Shouted "Allahu Ackbar” https://t.co/L8R….“

Lastly, to provide even more depth to our analysis, we examined the dataset offered by Twitter on Russian trolls that contains 9,041,308 tweets. We extracted the relevant tweets that referenced "Québec” and found 211 messages posted by Russian trolls about the province.

This dataset contains a variety of messages, including some irrelevant ones and a few that blamed Trump for not condemning the Québec mosque shooter. The majority of posts were similar to those spread by SouthLoneStar.

For instance, one Russian troll named John Larsen (J0hnLarsen) retweeted the following message from Rebel Media: “RT @JackPosobiec: Rebel Media: Canadian Govt Covering Up 2nd Shooter Role in Quebec Mosque Attack, Shouted "Allahu Ackbar” https://t.co/L8R….“ This user’s profile says: "stand 4 conservatism, patriotism & optimism. Protect our Kids! #WakeUpAmerica.”

Another example is from another Russian troll called ravenicholson who retweeted this message to support the conspiracy theory regarding the Québec mosque shooting: “RT @BlckGirlsMatter: Shooters shouting ALLAHU AKBAR: Basheer Al Taweed & Hassan Matti-entered last week as a Syrian Refugee #QuebecShooting.”

Canada needs to pay attention

As others have asserted elsewhere, many Russian trolls supported Donald Trump in his bid to become president of the United States, but we also found evidence that they aligned themselves with the far-right community in Canada.

This is mostly done through retweeting fake news stories, conspiracy theories and controversial or sensational stories that the far right thrives on. To give an example of a sensational story, another Russian troll calling herself Celestine Baker (cellsstitr) retweeted Faith Goldy’s post on Québec’s refugees:

“RT FaithGoldy: What in the ACTUAL F*CK? Many refugee claimants found in possession of child porn at Quebec border https://t.co/P8HgiHCZ3V.”

Goldy was recently banned from Facebook and Instagram because of her controversial views regarding immigration, religion and race.

The far right in Canada and elsewhere who refused to acknowledge that the mosque shooter was a white nationalist were actually supported by Russian trolls like SouthLoneStar and many other ones who worked together in a tightly knit online community that promoted a Russian conspiracy theory as well as many other anti-immigration views.

Another Russian troll named Ten_GOP, who had the third highest number of followers (147,767) among all Russian trolls, stated his objection to Canadian social diversity on Nov. 19, 2015, when he tweeted: “Multiculturalism inevitably leads to conflict, division and terrorism… #Quebec.”

This view closely aligns with Vladimir Putin’s ethno-nationalistic policies and media strategies in Russia.

We think that more in-depth analysis of other Canadian-related issues needs to be conducted to understand the nuances of each issue and how other fake news stories spread. This is especially important before and during Canada’s federal election this October.

Fake newsmakers will likely focus on immigration, LGBTQ, climate change, employment and the economy: these issues can influence voters’ sentiments towards Canadian political parties. More critical eyes are needed with independent observers that can identify fake stories without being swayed by their biases.

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Ahmed Al-Rawi, Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University and Yasmin Jiwani, Professor of Communication Studies; Research Chair on Intersectionality, Violence and Resistance, Concordia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Xu Zhao, University of Calgary

As international migration continues to grow in scope, complexity and impact, social integration of newcomers has become an issue of global concern. It’s particularly a salient issue for Canada, a country with one of the highest global rates of immigration.

During the five years between 2006 and 2011, more than one million foreign-born people immigrated to Canada. Researchers across Canada agree that existing integration policies in Canada have focused primarily on newcomers’ socio-economic integration, and paid less attention to social and emotional integration.

It is generally assumed in major host countries that children and adolescents who are educated in the host country will be automatically integrated into society and develop a sense of belonging.

This is apparently not the case. Countless studies in major global host countries have documented that newcomers’ social integration does not happen spontaneously in school. Many young newcomers who graduate from high schools continue to feel alienated from mainstream society.

To better understand what supports or hinders meaningful peer interactions between newcomers and local students, my colleague Nancy Arthur and I from the Werklund School of Education at University of Calgary interviewed over 50 young newcomers and local Canadian students in three Calgary high schools to understand their experiences and perspectives.

We defined newcomers as children who had arrived in Canada in the last three years who all spoke English as a second language and lived and were educated in another country before arriving in Canada. Canadian students were those who were born in Canada, or came to Canada before the age of six. Despite our efforts to recruit a representative and diverse sample of Canadian domestic participants in the study, we attracted mostly girls in this sample.

Friendship offers mutual benefits

Our research has focused on potential friendship relationships between newcomer and domestic teens, because intercultural friendships offer multiple benefits for both: in racially and ethnically diverse schools, students who have more cross-ethnic friendships feel safer, less lonely and less vulnerable to social distress.

Intercultural friendships are associated with stronger leadership skills and better perceived social competence. But for new immigrants making friends with domestic peers is the most difficult task in their adaptation process.

Research with international students in western societies has consistently found that, despite international students’ desire to be socially engaged with domestic students, the latter are largely uninterested in initiating contact with their international peers, and the level of intercultural interaction is low.

Our preliminary findings suggest that the newcomer students we spoke with experience multi-layered barriers in their social integration, particularly in making friends with local students. These barriers range from linguistic and psychological to social and cultural.

Cliques and comfort

Interviewees frequently mentioned newcomers’ lack of English proficiency as a key factor that limits the opportunities and depth of peer interaction.

But behind this simple explanation are complicated psychological, social and cultural factors that interplay to influence individual human behaviour.

A salient barrier is the human tendency to socialize with similar others — what sociological theory calls homophily.

Both newcomer and Canadian participants shared their observations of how friendship groups formed by newcomers and Canadian students work to hinder intercultural peer interaction. Interactions between them are often limited to classroom activities and saying “hi” in the hallway.

Cynthia, a Grade 10 Canadian student of European descent, shared the observation that international students “prefer to speak in their mother language because it feels more comfortable with them. Then they develop almost, like, cliques … ”

Some international students, however, experienced the social inclusion and exclusion related to cliques for the first time in Canadian schools. April, a Grade 12 international student, shared the following observation:

“You know I learned about cliques for the first time in Canada … I’ve lived in many countries, like Tunisia and Nigeria, Algeria … Like I’ve been in a lot of places and I’ve never experienced the cliques before. It was, like, very exclusive.”

One challenge frequently experienced by some newcomer students is the feeling of discomfort and anxiety when talking to Canadian students. Similarly, Canadian students also feel either they do not know what to say to newcomers, or worry they may say something wrong and offend the newcomers.

For both, it takes motivation as either self-interest or kindness, cultural open-mindedness, interpersonal skills and sometimes support from teachers to leave comfort zones.

Newcomers’ strengths

Contrary to general perceptions of newcomers as vulnerable and needing help, our study strongly suggests newcomers are also truly assets to Canadian schools and society, bringing in new experiences, perspectives, skills and strengths.

Win, a Grade 12 student who had arrived from China six months earlier, told us:

“The Canadian students found that we can be good friends because I can help them with math and science and they can help me with English … We found that if it’s worth to make friends with each other.”

Aya, a Syrian refugee who could not yet speak fluent English, formed a group with her friends and named it “Giving Back from Your Heart.” Together, they give out flowers at the Chinook Mall, visit nursing homes to talk with elderly people and help other newcomers to Canada. Aya said they do these things because they enjoy the freedom in Canada, and see Canadians as kind and respectful of different religions.

Prejudice and stigma

While Canada is generally regarded globally as being a tolerant and liberal country, the domestic Canadian participants in our study acknowledged prejudice and stigma among themselves toward newcomers. They believe media coverage of religious extremism, terrorism and the high influx of refugees played a role in their view of newcomers.

Sam, a Canadian boy of Chinese descent, pointed to a negative influence of media shaping stereotypes of people from the Middle East:

“There’s definitely stigma. I’ve heard people say different things about different cultures … like Syrian things or the terrorism in the Middle East right now. I feel like the Canadian people here have kind of gone like backwards with racist things, after hearing all of that bad stuff on the media.”

Read more: Arab Muslim Canadian high school students call for globalized curriculum to change stereotypes

Jane, a Canadian girl of European descent, said she disagreed with the way her Canadian friend treats newcomers — as “lower.” We noted that the differences between Jane and her friend mentioned here were their levels of exposure to other cultures and languages, encouraged by their respective families, and consequently their understanding of newcomer peers and motivation to interact with them.

Broadening the comfort zone

Our preliminary research shows that despite significant efforts to welcome and support young newcomers in Calgary and Alberta schools, similar to schools in other Western countries, social and emotional integration of newcomers remains a challenging task.

Our research suggests this challenge can be overcome if there is a societal-wide effort by schools, parents and government-funded programs to promote intercultural and interpersonal motivation, knowledge and skills of both newcomers and Canadian students to make friends with peers different from themselves.

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Xu Zhao, Assistant Professor and Director of Research in Chinese Mental Health, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It is now clear that there will be no question about citizenship on the 2020 U.S. Census.

After the Supreme Court ruled against the Trump administration, President Trump vowed to find a way to include the question. But with no legal path forward and time running out, the administration ultimately backed down.

Opponents of the citizenship question remain concerned about the census, though hopeful that more immigrant households will respond to the census now that the question has been removed.

But others worry that it will be much harder to keep track of undocumented immigrants. President Trump argued that a citizenship question was needed, saying: “I think it is very important to find out if somebody is a citizen as opposed to an illegal.”

However, a citizenship question wouldn’t actually help the government distinguish between who is an undocumented immigrant and who is not. The question distinguishes only between citizens and noncitizens, and noncitizens are not the same as undocumented immigrants. For example, three out of five noncitizens are in the country legally.

Even more importantly, demographers have figured out a simple and effective way to estimate the number of unauthorized immigrants – even without information on citizenship. In the last five years, my colleagues Frank D. Bean, James D. Bachmeier and I have conducted a series of studies that evaluate this method and its assumptions.

Our research on the methods used to estimate the size of the group indicates that existing estimates – putting the undocumented population at about 11 million – are reasonably accurate.

Here’s how it works.

What’s the formula?

Beginning in the late 1970s, a group of demographers consisting primarily of Jeffrey Passel, Robert Warren, Jacob Siegel, Gregory Robinson and Karen Woodrow introduced the “residual method” for estimating the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the country.

At the time, Passel and his collaborators were affiliated with the U.S. Bureau of the Census and Warren with the Office of Immigration Statistics of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Much of this work was published in the form of internal reports, but some of it appeared in major journals.

The residual method uses an estimate of the total foreign-born population in the country, based on U.S. Census data. Researchers then subtract from it the number of legal immigrants residing here, estimated from government records of legal immigrants who receive “green cards” minus the number that died or left the country. The result is an estimate of the unauthorized population.

Various adjustments are typically made to this formula. Most adjustments are minor, but a particularly important one adjusts for what researchers call “coverage error” among the unauthorized foreign-born. Coverage error occurs when the census data underestimate the size of a group. This can occur when people live in nonresidential or unconventional locations – such as on the streets or in a neighbor’s basement – or when they fail to respond to the census.

Coverage error could be particularly high among unauthorized immigrants because they may be trying to avoid detection. The Census Bureau’s own research suggests that asking about citizenship would likely aggravate this issue.

Currently, the Department of Homeland Security, the Pew Hispanic Center and the Center for Migration Studies are the major producers of estimates of the unauthorized foreign-born population.

How accurate are the estimates?

The residual method has been widely used and accepted since the late 1970s. Within a reasonable margin of error, it predicted the number of unauthorized immigrants to legalize under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which, among other things, granted permanent residency status to unauthorized immigrants who had been living in the country since 1982. The residual method predicted that about 2.2 million met the residency requirement; the actual number to come forward was about 1.7 million.

Both Department of Homeland Security and Pew have used the residual method to estimate the unauthorized population since 2005. Despite using slightly different data and assumptions, Pew’s, Department of Homeland Security’s, and the Center for Migration Studies’s estimates have never differed by more than 1 million people, less than 10% of the total unauthorized population.

Nevertheless, skeptics question a key assumption of the residual method, which is that unauthorized immigrants participate in census surveys. All three organizations listed above inflate their estimates to account for the possibility that some unauthorized immigrants are missing from census data. For example, Pew inflates by about 13%. But is this enough?

My colleagues and I estimated coverage error among Mexican immigrants, a group that composes 60% of all unauthorized immigrants.

Even if they are not counted in a census, populations leave “footprints” of their presence in the form of deaths and births. Because people give birth and die with known regularity, regardless of their legal status, we were able to use birth and death records of all Mexican-born persons to determine the number of Mexican-born persons living in the U.S. We also looked at changes in Mexican census data between 1990 and 2010 to gauge the size of Mexico’s “missing” population, most of whom moved to the U.S.

We then compared these estimates with the estimated number of Mexican immigrants in census data. We found that the census missed as many as 26% of unauthorized immigrants in the early 2000s.

We speculated that this could have been due to the large numbers of temporary Mexican labor migrants who were living in the U.S. at the time. Because many worked in construction during the housing boom and lived in temporary housing arrangements, it may have been particularly difficult to accurately account for them in census surveys.

However, when the Great Recession and housing crisis hit, many of these temporary workers went home or stopped coming to the U.S. in the first place, and coverage error declined. By 2010, the coverage error may have been as low as 6% and does not appear to have changed much since then.

If current levels of coverage error for all unauthorized immigrants were as high as 26%, then the number living in the country could be as high as 13 million. But if coverage error were as low as 6%, then the figure could be as low as 10.3 million. The true number likely falls within that narrow range.

What this boils down to is that demographers already have a pretty good idea of the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S., even without relying on citizenship data. If coverage error has declined as much as we think it has, then the truth is at the lower end of this range.

Will administrative records improve the estimates?

Looking ahead, methods could change as new data become available.

In the wake of its Supreme Court loss, the Trump administration issued an executive order directing government agencies to share administrative data on citizenship.

They want to link information on citizenship and immigration status in administrative records to everyone’s census responses. For example, the executive order requests the Department of Homeland Security’s records on refugee and asylum visas, as well as Master Beneficiary Records from the Social Security Administration. They want to use this information to estimate the undocumented population at very detailed levels of geography for purposes of redistricting, reapportionment and the allocation of public funds.

(It is worth noting that the Census Bureau is a fortress when it comes to protecting your data. Under federal law, the Census Bureau cannot share your personal information with anyone, including other government agencies such as ICE.)

Regardless of how anyone feels about these policy proposals, administrative data may not be up to the task. In my view, administrative records are complicated to use. They can provide inconsistent information about the same person depending on which agency’s records are used.

Additionally, the records will be of limited value for describing those who fall outside of the administrative records system, which can happen for all kinds of reasons. Even if the Trump administration uses administrative records to estimate the undocumented population, researchers will still need to make assumptions about coverage error, just like they do for the residual method.

Overall, I suspect that administrative records could help answer some narrowly defined questions about immigrants and improve national estimates. The jury is still out about their ability to provide definitive answers about the precise numbers of undocumented immigrants, particularly at detailed levels of geography.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Nov. 1, 2016.

Jennifer Van Hook, Roy C. Buck Professor of Sociology and Demography, Pennsylvania State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.