Q&A: U.S. scholar Ethan Zuckerman wants Canada to lead a global research effort on web giants

Ethan Zuckerman, the newly-named Canada Research Chair for the Digital Public Sphere, won’t start teaching at McGill University until 2027 — but he’s already making plans. Zuckerman, currently plying his trade at the University of Massachusetts, was part of the Canadian government’s first intake of an initiative designed to poach leading researchers from around the globe. In an exclusive interview with The Wire Report, Zuckerman spoke about his idea for Canada to enshrine a right to research powerful social media and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, as well as his desire to escape the Trump administration’s hostility to academia. I wanted to start on a personal level. You’ve spent your career working in the U.S., so I’m wondering if you have any ties to Canada? I come to Canada quite often. I have family tied to Atlantic Canada and my grandmother, to whom I was very close, was born in St. John’s. There’s also other branches of my family that came down from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. I’ve had the pleasure of visiting all the Atlantic provinces except P.E.I., though I promise I will get there. But we go to Montreal all the time. I work very closely with McGill professors Taylor Owen and Aengus Bridgman at the Max Bell School of Public Policy, and I also often go to see concerts in Montreal. Turning to your new position, the Liberal government unveiled its initiative to recruit more international researchers last year. What was it like being part of that process? I think the government did a fascinating process because they did not put out a general call. You couldn’t apply for these jobs, but rather you had to be invited. So, the first step of the process was getting an offer from a Canadian university that had access to the funding mechanism. Taylor Owen called me up last year and told me about this new mechanism. I had to talk quite a bit with my wife about whether we were willing to make the change, and I also have a 16-year-old son who has two more years of school. On the flip side, McGill is a magnificent institution. I’ve got a bunch of friends there who I love spending time with, and I think everyone in academe in the U.S. is aware that it’s a weird and somewhat scary time. There has been a lack of support at the federal level that’s been going on for some time, but now a real active hostility to certain types of research, including at least two topics that I spend a lot of time on. So, the notion of going to an institution I admire and respect, and working with friends—that was extremely appealing. But I hadn’t gone shopping for it because I’m coming from a terrific university. The University of Massachusetts is a great school filled with wonderful scholars and better people. What are those two specific areas of study that you feel face hostility from the Trump administration? Broadly, I work on this question of the digital public sphere, which relates to newspaper and broadcast journalism, to social media, to AI, and how all of that affects how we learn about the world, how we vote, how we organize, and how we get politically active. That’s my topic. There are two subfields in that where I do a decent amount of work. One is around these questions of how media platforms deal with misinformation and disinformation, and how they handle content moderation. That topic, weirdly enough, has become very sensitive to the Trump administration. One of Trump’s early executive orders declared that conservative voices were being censored by the platforms, and that’s not entirely wrong, but it’s gotten rather crazy. Jim Jordan, a House representative who chairs the judiciary committee, has done a set of investigations about what he calls the ‘censorship industrial complex,’ and some of the work I’ve done building tools to allow people to study journalism have been named in his reports. So, evidently, I am part of the censorship industrial complex, and that work is a little hard to support at this point under the Trump administration. And the other? I do a lot of work on how the same tools get used in different cultures. Like, how does YouTube get used by people in India who speak Hindi versus people in Canada who speak English? I think that comparative work is incredibly important. I think it’s great to see the diversity of how people use these tools, but there’s that word—diversity—which has become a difficult word to use in American academe. So, writing grants where I talk about doing cultural cross-comparison around digital media is raising flags in all sorts of federal agencies around diversity, cultural studies, and content moderation. There are real challenges in doing this work and looking for federal funding, so I’d like to work in a place that’s more supportive of these rights. For a more straightforward example, a lot of the work I’m planning on bringing to McGill is around what we call the ‘right to research.’ If a company, like Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook or OpenAI, has a real effect on our civic discourse, we have a right to research those platforms. There’s a group we founded called the Coalition for Independent Technology Research that ended up suing the Trump state department because it was denying visas to researchers on the grounds they were studying misinformation and disinformation. They basically said to non-U.S. researchers that they were part of a global censorship cabal, so they wouldn’t let them come into the U.S. anymore for conferences or research. That’s the sort of thing that will damage the ability to do meaningful research in a field. Fortunately, we just won in our first round of court, which is nice, but I think a lot of people like me still bump against sensitive subjects to the Trump administration, so we’re trying to be thoughtful about where we can effectively get that work done. What indications have you received that you’ll enjoy more academic latitude in Canada? There are two sets of signals. First, I came to McGill last year and gave a talk about the idea that Canada should position itself as a centre of research on platform power. We’ve got all of these social media and AI platforms from the U.S. and China, but they also have real influence on the public sphere in Canada, France, India, and all over the world. Someone is going to have to stand up and say, ‘we are influenced by these things, but we don’t have the direct conflicts because these aren’t our companies and we’re not directly funded by them, so we’re going to make it possible to research these things.’ When I gave this talk, there was a lot of interest from people in the room, including some government folks. So, I decided to make that the centrepiece of my application for this funding, which went to the Canadian government. I am not going to guarantee that any legislation about this will pass, but there’s certainly been a receptivity. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. dlegree@thewirereport.ca

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By Davis Legree
|September 4, 2026