Detoxing Democracy with SAMbot

Recording

Online toxicity is a key reason that people are leaving politics, are not entering politics, or are steering clear of political conversations entirely. The Samara Centre of Democracy is attempting to quantify the online toxicity problem in Canada with SAMbot, a machine learning bot, to track toxic tweets received by Canadian political candidates.

Speakers

Alex MacIsaac

Alex is the Senior Research Coordinator at the Samara Centre for Democracy. His work focuses on technology's influence on Canadian democracy and civic engagement, digital platform governance and prosocial design, and mitigating digital information threats. He currently is the project coordinator for VERIFIED and previously led the SAMbot project from 2022-2025.

Topic: Detoxing Democracy with SAMbot: Using Machine Learning to Measure Canada’s Online Political Conversation

Online toxicity is a key reason that people are leaving politics, are not entering politics, or are steering clear of political conversations entirely. The Samara Centre of Democracy is attempting to quantify the online toxicity problem in Canada with SAMbot, a machine learning bot, to track toxic tweets received by Canadian political candidates.

Speakers: Alex MacIsaac is the SAMbot Project Coordinator at the Samara Centre of Democracy. He’s a recent graduate from McMaster University’s Master of Public Policy in Digital Society program.