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users on social media leads to oversimplification of the issues discussed on these platforms. Often, the headlines will involve the aspect of the policy which is most newsworthy. Long-form content exploring the intricacies of the issue are often ignored altogether. In an attempt to regulate content, social media platforms have created algorithms to flag content that may be hateful, using certain keywords. However, machine learning algorithms are not always intelligent enough to understand the contextual nuances of words and ideas. Such use of algorithms can be harmful to activism and constructive discussions on issues that involve these keywords, even if the discourse is well-intended. At the inception of social media, it was hailed as a democratizing force which would allow people to express their opinions and be heard freely. While this still remains true in most contexts, it is important to acknowledge the money and muscle power that is exercised by political parties to pay social media campaigners, data aggregators and misinformation networks to spread computational propaganda. In general, it can be noted that younger democracies with weaker institutions and great inequality could be more susceptible to the pitfalls of social media use in electoral politics. While the United States and Brexit referendums were the instances that made world news and attracted the attention of the public to this phenomenon, the socio-political landscape since then has forced governments and social media regulators to enact specific provisions against misinformation and propaganda in a concerted manner. In this regard, state capacity and the political awareness of citizens plays a huge role in curbing this problem. A reason why Canada saw lower levels of misinformation campaigns and bots could have been the proactive addressal of the issue by the then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, (Subverting Democracy to Save Democracy: Canada’s Extra-Constitutional Approaches to Battling 'Fake News', 2019) and the use of soft law instruments that encouraged compliance by social media platforms. This could have also been largely influenced by the fact that their neighbour, the United States, had their President allegedly implicated in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
5 Impact on minorities and marginalized communities As previously elucidated in subsection 4.1., co-ordinated misinformation campaigns and bots are used to create an illusion of mass support for politically divisive issues in order to sway the opinions of the social media users. This is particularly damaging the case of rhetoric which is used to stigmatise minorities and marginalised communities in the populace. For example, the immigration debate in the 2018 Italian election was rooted in sentiments of xenophobia and Islamophobia. Allowing these campaigns to weaponize these prejudices for their own electoral gains is harmful to the country as a whole, but more so to the minorities as discrimination becomes more acceptable when such views are seen as popular.