Earlier this year, when U.S. President Donald Trump was making a lot of noise about Canada becoming the 51st state, Ben Waldman was engrossed in his own sovereign exercise: launching a Canadian-built social media platform.
A digital product lead based in Ottawa, Waldman embarked on this project with a clear set of parameters. He wanted to create something that operated within the country’s borders, employed its citizens and used its Charter of Rights and Freedoms as its north star. Cue Gander Social, which is set to release its public beta by the end of this year.
Here, Waldman weighs in on countering misinformation, protecting democracy and seizing the moment to launch ethical homegrown initiatives.
Tell me about the name.
This past March, I was working on a project for which I’d designed a logo that had a goose in it. The U.S. election had just happened, our own federal elections were looming, and the madness of social media was really getting to me. There was disinformation and misinformation everywhere, and I was finding myself arguing with bots. I wanted another option. Looking at the logo, the phrase “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander” came out of my mouth. One of our national symbols is the Canada goose. And I’d just seen “Come From Away,” which is set in Gander, Newfoundland and Labrador.
Things have moved quickly for you since then.
My driving thought was, Social media has to change. Bluesky is open source, so I had proof of concept within a few days. Nothing releasable, but enough to say that if I could get a team together, this could be a real thing. I launched the website to test the waters and see if anybody cared. We had roughly 6,000 people sign up in the first week or so for our early access program. About two weeks in, we had our first adviser: Blaine Cook, Twitter’s founding engineer. By the following week, Taylor Owen was on board. Then, late one night, I got a text from Arlene Dickinson asking if I was the guy who was starting a social media platform. We’ve had a lot of buzz, but in terms of funding, we’re still figuring stuff out. I’m not a millionaire. For now, we’re self-funded and have help from friends and family. We’ve incorporated as a public benefit company in B.C., which means we’re a for-profit but we’re tied to a mission. We’re talking to government officials and applying to various government programs and looking at ways we can involve Canadians and see how they want this funded.
Around the time of the “51st state” comments, there was a lot of talk online about what would happen if the U.S. attacked us. I got involved in conversations around our sovereign tech and how almost everything that’s run on our computers and phones is American. Not only that — the cloud hosting is subject to the U.S. Cloud Act and to the Patriot Act. There are certain legal controls between Canada and the U.S. regarding how people can be subpoenaed and data can be extracted and all that, but that only works when there’s a president who follows the rules. All it would take is an executive order to shut down Amazon, Google and Microsoft in Canada. Overnight, we’d be shut out. That was the first thing that led to Gander. The second was my involvement in the unity rallies that took place in cities across the country.
The Elbows Up movement …
Yes. I supported them by offering the logo and by running the social media channels in Ottawa. The day went spectacularly. It was the most wholesome, non-partisan Canadian thing I had ever participated in. When I got back home, I decided to look at the comments. Everything was politicized. The trolls had landed, and they were posting repeatedly on every single post with the same comments. Things like, “Where were you when the truckers needed you?” and “This is a liberal ploy.”
We’re going to moderate the platform under the Charter. We’re using Bluesky’s approach, which includes community moderation. It’s moderated by organizations that monitor and label content for hate, or monitor and label for racism, and you subscribe to these labellers. We’re operating on a parallel network — it’s the sovereign Canadian version. Not everything’s going to get caught, but it’s a far sight better than what you might see on other platforms. You choose the labels you want to accept or not, but they need to fall within Canadian law. We’ll also have tools that address credibility and fact-checking.
Who will be your typical user?
If you want to comment or get involved in chats, you have to verify. We have to know you’re a human who is of age. There’s plenty of research to show that social media is hugely detrimental to kids’ mental health. And I don’t want to be kept up at night worrying that there’s grooming happening on our platform. So we’re doing everything we can to make sure we’re dealing with human adults, which also greatly reduces bad bots — bad actors, foreign actors, that come in and manipulate communities through disinformation.
Picking and choosing who gets to be a part of your community means you’ll likely face accusations of gatekeeping or censorship. How will you respond?
Ultimately, I’d say that you don’t have to sign up with Gander. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that if you can’t be verified as human, you can’t post. We want people to engage in a sane and healthy way, so that differing opinions can actually be cross-referenced and people start to feel more comfortable on social media. One of the problems right now is that people are scared to post or comment because they’re going to get torn apart. We’re hoping to change some of that. The possible flaw in our plan is that people really seem to love hate — they love a dopamine roller-coaster.
Maybe you can be joy baiters instead of hate baiters.
We have talked about specifically seeking out “hope core creators” to give people that dose when they want it. We’re really focused on bringing “social” back to social media. That includes functionality that makes people feel comfortable to post and comment. We also want to make it so you can actually focus on content from things and people you care about through a “for you” page designed by you — not the platform.
One of your tag lines is “Standing on Guard for Thee (and thy data).” Let’s dig into the Canadian-ness of your approach.
Everyone on our team is either Canadian or working on their way to citizenship. In many ways, it would be easier and quicker and more inexpensive if we outsourced the work. But I’m not in any rush. This is about democracy and people’s safety; it’s not about growing and exploding a platform as fast and as cheaply as possible.
How central is digital sovereignty to your mission?
One of the primary goals is to make it difficult or impossible for a foreign body to shut us down. We need the ability to have our own controls in place — because identifying Indigenous hate in the U.S. may not look the same as labelling similar content in Canada, for example. Our Charter is not the same as someone else’s charter or constitution.
Do you see Gander as a tech company, a social movement or something else?
It’s definitely not a tech company, because we’re building Gander on proven tech, not from scratch. This is a project about policy (trust and safety in a Canadian context) and marketing (I’m not in a rush to have rapid growth). The only caveat is: the faster we can get more Canadians on the platform, the safer we will all be when it comes to our democracy and our mental health.
You’re early in your founder journey with Gander, but do you have any advice for other Canadians who are looking to build products that reflect their values — and those of their country?
I wake up thinking about how there are no Canadian word-processing platforms! There’s so much opportunity right now to do something good, valuable, ethical. There’s a hunger for it. The government needs and wants this stuff. Businesses need and want this stuff. More and more we’re going to see sovereignty as a service. Open-source technology for your office that is completely sovereign, for example. There are a ton of opportunities — founders just have to grab them.
So, what you’re saying is that the moment to strike is now because of patriotism, a desire to work within the country’s borders and money and interest from Canadians — various levels of government included.
There’s no way we could have launched Gander eight months ago. It wouldn’t have been a thing.
To hear more from Ben Waldman about the importance of digital sovereignty, check out his session on Thursday, Oct. 9 at the Elevate Festival in Toronto.
Stéphanie Verge writes about technology for MaRS. Torstar, the parent company of the Toronto Star, has partnered with MaRS to highlight innovation in Canadian companies.
