DIGITAL TRACE
Measuring Canada's Media Ecosystem
Our Mission: From Data to Actionable Understanding
We are the Digital Trace team at the Media Ecosystem Observatory (McGill University). Our mission is to bridge Applied AI and Computational Social Science by building scalable infrastructure to collect, process, and analyze cross-platform social media data. Our insights inform policy, journalism, and public understanding of information flows.
Technical Power:
Infrastructure & Analytics
- 7 Major Platforms: Continuous data ingestion from X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Bluesky, and Telegram.
- 24/7 Automated Pipelines: Near Real-time (72 hours) crawling, indexing, embedding generation, and normalization.
- Applied AI: We support advanced natural language and network analytics, enabling large-scale understanding of information dynamics.
- Seed List: 5,366 tracked entities with comprehensive metadata
Key Figures
- 35M+ records since 2022
- 5,366 entities tracked across seven platforms
- Real-time data availability
- Historical archives for longitudinal research
Applications & Research Highlights
- Federal Elections (2025): Showed that influencers, AI-made false content, and different groups using different platforms shaped the conversation and created emerging risks for public trust.
- Tenet Media (2024): Tracked how key influencers connected with Canadians online and who amplified their messages across platforms.
- Meta News Ban (2023): Used AI to examine 133,000 images from political groups and measure how the ban changed what people saw and shared.
- Ongoing Initiatives: Detecting coordinated campaigns; measuring where communities stand on issues; mapping political influencers; rapid-response incident analysis.