Join us for the 3rd and Final Webinar as we continue bringing diverse perspectives together on “Affect and Relationality in the Contexts of Critical AI Literacies” October 16, 12–2 p.m. (RSVP via previous link).

Our first Webinar, “Canadian Context of Critical AI Literacy in Education” ( September 30 2026) brought together leading experts in education, critical media studies, and AI literacies for a timely conversation about Canada’s educational landscape in the era of AI. Moderated by Jason Lay, the panel featured Carol Arcus from (AML), Laura Morrison, Paolo Granata, and Andrew McConnell, whose diverse perspectives sparked critical discussion and engaged more than 130 attendees in exploring the opportunities, challenges, and broader implications of AI for education in Canada.

On October 9, we hosted the Second Webinar on Equity & Diversity in the Context of Critical AI Literacy,” featuring Leslie Chan (Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of Global Development Studies and Director of the Knowledge Equity Lab at the University of Toronto Scarborough), Marie Heath, (Associate Professor of Learning Design and Technology at Loyola University Maryland; Co-Founder and Executive Director of Civics of Technology (www.civicsoftechnology.org), and recent co-author of the award-winning book, Critical AI in K-12 Classrooms: A Practical Guide for Cultivating Joy and Justice); Skylee-Storm Hogan-Stacey (Senior Research Officer in Critical Data Studies at the First Nations Information Governance Centre; she conducts critical inquiry and applied research with the Data Sovereignty Research Collaborative, examining data’s role in Indigenous governance and colonial control); and Jutta Treviranus (Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre; professor, OCAD, where she founded an innovative graduate program in inclusive design; Chair of the Accessible and Equitable Artificial Intelligence standards committee for the Accessible Canada Act, Jutta was recognized for her work in AI by Women in AI as well as by Women in AI Ethics. )

Please do join us for the 3rd and Final Webinar as we continue bringing diverse perspectives together on “Affect and Relationality in the Contexts of Critical AI Literacies” October 16, 12–2 p.m. (RSVP via previous link).

These webinars are funded by Canadian Heritage, hosted by the Centre for Media and Culture in Education (CMCE) and the McLuhan Foundation, organized by Primary Investigator Dr Megan Boler, and the research team members Shiva Boloursaz Mashhadi, Noah Khan, and Amanda Trigiani, the event highlighted the importance of situating conversations about AI within Canada’s educational contexts.

On November 13 we convened a three-hour Summit with delegates from thirty 2SLGBTQ organizations from across Canada, a key element of our Queering Digital Tools Project, funded by the Canada Heritage Digital Citizen Contribution Program, which has been underway since February. The aim of the Summit was to solicit feedback and insights regarding how 2SLGBTQ leaders perceive the well-being of their communities, the challenges posed by online harm and mis-& disinfo targeting 2SLGBTQ communities, amongst other topics related to queer and trans* digital experience. The afternoon concluded with a demonstration of Campfire Voices, a 2D digital game designed for high-school audiences and educators that we have been working on for the past 6 months. The game, titled Fireside Voices, highlights narratives of queer and trans* joy to counter online violence and disinformation.

Here’s a snapshot of Tara, Eddie, and Wren, the three awesome trans characters in our Fireside Voices Game!

(artwork by Yoon-Ji Kweon)

Stay tuned for more!!

I am delighted to have been awarded a 2024-25 Grant from the Digital Citizen Contribution Program of Canadian Heritage, titled Queering Digital Tools Against Hate: Countering 2SLGBTQI Mis-/Disinformation with Community-Informed Digital Stories, Gamification, and Resources (PI, M. Boler; co-investigator Dr Mark Lipton University of Guelph; community partner Egale Canada), of $290,000. This project examines and develops digital tools to combat mis-/disinformation and online violence that targets 2SLGBTQI+ individuals (i.e., that cause harm and weaken 2SLGBTQI+ people’s rights and freedoms) and their allies (i.e., that undermine or prevent allyship by perpetuating myths). The project will develop an innovative multimedia storytelling tool that amplifies experiences of trans and gender joy and additional tool/s that gamify learning to identify and disarm mis- and dis-information targeting trans and gender issues, along with providing original and curated educational resources.

I have also received a $10,000 award from the Inlight Project at University of Toronto, in support of a major literature review regarding artificial intelligence anxiety. we seek to understand how the deluge of content affects student anxieties about what’s real, what to focus on, where to find it, within the context of generative artificial intelligence and its transformation of the landscape of information.

I am also collaborating on two other major research projects: a SSHRC Insight Grant entitled “Capturing care work: Making visible women’s emotional work in families through participatory video,” with PI Olga Smoliak, Professor at Guelph University; and a New Frontiers Research Project titled “Rebuilding Public Trust after COVID-19: Examining Public Health Measures and Their Impact on Disabled Persons” with PI and Professor Trudo Lemmons, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto.

At long last, our research essay drawn from our multi-year research project funded by Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council:

“Digital Affect Culture and the Logics of Melodrama: Online Polarization and the January 6 Capitol Riots through the Lens of Genre and Affective Discourse Analysis” is now published in Social Media and Society https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241228584

Drawing on our 3-year digital ethnography of cross-partisan debates in the context of the 2020 US election and January 6 Capitol insurrection, this essay examines the affective and discursive dimensions of online polarization, contributing new understandings of how genre functions as a system of norms that shapes emotional performance online. Through a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework, we demonstrate melodrama’s role as a fundamental storytelling structure responsible for the production of polarized cross-partisan debate on social media platforms. Our multi-method analysis of 5000 posts from Twitter, Facebook and Gab reveals users’ adherence to melodramatic group identities, enforced through emotional policing and mimetic identification with political influencers. Adopting roles of victim and villain, users channel emotions into archetypal and ritualized narratives of good and evil that in turn polarize political debate. Finally, this essay outlines our innovative methodology of “affective discourse analysis”, a multi-method approach to tracking and coding the social materiality of emotion through digital linguistic practices.

Delighted to share a new essay, “Cruel, Convenient, and Intimate Publics: Berlant’s Lessons for Loneliness and Digital Media Commons“, co-authored with Ali Azhar, in a Special Section ‘Lauren Berlant and Media Theory‘, edited by Carolyn Pedwell & Simon Dawes on of the open access journal Media Theory (December 2023).

Had an amazing time attending two conferences in San Francisco this February– Creating Change 2023 which ran Feb 17-21, organized by the National LGBTQ Task Force, and the San Francisco Writers Conference (Feb 15-18, 2023). It was amazing going back and forth between the two venues, from workshops on publishing to panels on Education as Radical Activism. I was struck by the impressive integration of BIPOC issues and attendees in the Creating Change program, with much less such representation at the other conference. But the workshops at the SF Writers Conference were really incredible and inspiring for writing of all genres and interdisciplinary work, as well as extensive information on indy publishing and indy editors!

How social media echo chambers influence your emotions and your political compass

An expert explains how Facebook lives on psychology, politics and your attention, by Megan DeLaire, Dec 22, 2020

“The fact that we no longer have privacy in the digital sphere means our political system is increasingly being run by algorithms, by social media operations that are influencing what news we receive and what political ads we receive according to what they know about us,” she said.

“And they are reinforcing what we’ve told them about ourselves until we are a more rabid version of ourselves.”

What is an echo chamber?

An echo chamber is an environment in which a person encounters mostly beliefs and opinions that support and reinforce their own. These beliefs “echo” continuously, while alternative ideas are largely absent or ignored.

Facebook produces echo chambers in two ways: by using algorithms — coded instructions that automate the platform’s functions — to filter the content users see, and by relying on users’ tendency to interact with people whose opinions align with their own.

Since Facebook earns revenue through ad space on the platform and posts that capture users’ attention also draw their attention to ads, Facebook places content that will generate an emotional response in front of the users most likely to react.

“A really emotional story is going to be profitable for advertising because a lot of people look at it,” Boler said. “And those are eyeballs on ads.”

As Facebook gathers sophisticated data about a user through their activity on the platform, as well as on third party apps and websites that are linked to their Facebook account, it learns what kind of content is most likely to hold that user’s attention, which leads to more ad revenue.

One topic that tends to inflame passions is politics. Since showing people consistently partisan content tends to nudge them toward either end of the political spectrum, she said Facebook can, and does, influence how people vote.

Users also create their own echo chambers by befriending people they share opinions with and blocking and “unfriending” people they don’t. The result is that users’ Facebook feeds show content that reinforces their beliefs rather than content that presents alternative viewpoints.

What can you do about it?

Boler believes Facebook users can weaken the impact of echo chambers on the platform in a few ways.

They can limit the amount of information they feed Facebook’s algorithms by adjusting their privacy settings to remove Facebook’s access to their data on third party websites and apps, and they can close the app on their phone when not actively using it, to prevent it from gathering data in the background.

They can also make an effort not to ignore, “unfriend” or block Facebook friends whose perspectives don’t align with theirs.

Most importantly, she said, they can develop a healthy, diverse independent media diet that includes “ideally five to 10 media sources, including publicly owned sources such as CBC, international sources like the Guardian and independent and corporate media.”

If we don’t take these steps, she said, our democratic system could suffer.

“People should care about this,” Boler said. “Because it’s very clear social media is eroding democracy and it is eroding our capacity to have conversations across the political aisle.”

https://www.toronto.com/news-story/10292506-how-social-media-echo-chambers-influence-your-emotions-and-your-political-compass/

Trump would have done ‘terrible damage’ in second term: Political experts in Canada sound off on the future of U.S. politics under Joe Biden, Kamala Harris

“Once disinformation or misinformation goes out, the opportunity to correct it is extremely difficult,” Boler told Yahoo Canada. “Even if people do see that correction, a very small percentage tend to change their opinion and some studies have shown that it even just reinforces the original misinformation.”

“We’ve known from the beginning that the Republicans have had a systematic strategy around voter disinformation that is probably the primary disinformation of this election, whereas in 2016 it was Russian interference.”

Another interesting component of this election has been the discourse around “fake news,” which wasn’t as much of a significant factor in the 2016 election.

“It’s very hard to know where to turn and what to trust,” Boler said. “This has been part of the systematic propaganda work of Trump to create this whole discourse on fake news.”

“That really didn’t exist prior to 2016,…not this really quick, knee-jerk presumption that all of the trusted news sources that arguably are part of what constitutes United States democracy, are now distrusted by huge swathes of the population.”

full story: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/us-election-joe-biden-kamala-harris-us-election-donald-trump-canada-032402767.html

Some of my least incendiary remarks regarding Twitter’s 11th hour decision to finally suspend Trump from Twitter (Global TV National News January 8):