Phony YouTube Accounts Promote American Annexation of Western Canadian Province

TORONTO — Canadian researchers say they have uncovered a network of some 20 YouTube accounts using AI avatars or voice actors pretending to be Alberta residents to promote the annexation of the oil-rich western Canadian province by the United States.Several of the flagged videos contain obvious errors that would not be made by a Canadian — such as mispronouncing the name of a major Canadian city — and the narrator of one video has been identified as a voice actor in Pennsylvania, according to the report released Tuesday by the Canadian Digital Media Research Network, a federally funded enterprise led by McGill University and the University of Toronto.“A network of inauthentic YouTube accounts is targeting Albertan audiences, exploiting genuinely-held grievances and repurposing them to advance narratives that normalize the prospect of secession and U.S. annexation,” says the report, which characterizes the content as “slopaganda.”“The AI avatars or paid American voice actors featured in these videos frequently mispronounce, miscontextualize, and misunderstand the politics they cover,” it says. “These videos contain frequent and obvious lies, drawing on real news stories to reach exaggerated conclusions designed to exploit political divisions.”The apparently coordinated campaign, in which virtually identical scripts are used on multiple accounts, seems intended to encourage an existing separatist movement in the province, sometimes described as the “Texas of the North” because of its oil- and cattle-based economy along with an affinity for Stetson hats.A drive to force a referendum on secession from Canada is underway in the province, led by a group called Stay Free Alberta which has until May 2 to collect more than 177,000 signatures on a petition.Organizers of the campaign say they have met with Trump administration officials in Washington three times and have asked the United States Treasury for a $500 billion line of credit to bankroll a new country if they are successful.The group said in January it had scheduled another meeting with American officials, but after Prime Minister Mark Carney urged the Trump administration to “respect Canadian sovereignty,” the State Department told Reuters there would be no future meetings.However America has an economic interest in the roughly 5 million barrels of oil per day that Alberta now sends to refineries in Texas, Louisiana, and the American Midwest. Prime Minister Mark Carney has been working to shift more of that production to China and other Asian countries in response to American tariffs.While frustration with environmental and other federal policies is real in the province, considered the most conservative in Canada, a May 2025 poll showed Albertans were twice as likely to favor full independence as annexation by the United States. The fake YouTube accounts are 10 to 12 times more likely to promote annexation than are authentic Alberta separatist accounts, the researchers said.Among the obvious errors noted in the videos, the report cites the mispronunciation of Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan; a reference to the “Atlanta prosperity project” instead of Alberta prosperity project; an incident in which a voice actor speaks the word “cough” instead of performing one; and the misidentification of a well-known politician as a man instead of a woman.“The channels we analyzed used a variety of script voiceover approaches. Five use real humans that record themselves performing the content with the videos frequently cutting to news clips while they narrate videos. Others use obvious AI voice-overs and a few use AI-generated body avatars that read the scripts,” the report says.The authors acknowledge they have been unable to confirm the origin or intent of what they describe as “a potential covert influence operation,” in part because of the use of VPNs to disguise the locations where the videos are being posted. But they say the potential scale “of a daily political operation targeting Albertans and Canadians nonetheless compelled us to publish these findings without delay.”

Phony YouTube Accounts Promote American Annexation of Western Canadian Province

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