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Helpful Places

Government of Canada – DTPR AI Register

AI-Powered News and Social Media Monitoring for Diplomacy

Safety & Security · Planning & Decision-making

What it collects

Operational data
Anonymized data
  • News articles and RSS feeds ingested via the Factiva API at scheduled 15-minute intervals. These are publicly available media records; the register confirms no personal information is involved.
About behaviour
Anonymized data
  • Tweets retrieved via the Twitter API at 15-minute intervals. Treated as public social media content; the register states no personal information is collected.
Run by
Global Affairs Canada (GAC)
Where
No fixed location
Kept
Not stated by the Helpful Places.
Shared with
Accountable organization
Your copy
You cannot see the data it holds about you. What you can do

What it is for

Safety & SecurityPlanning & Decision-making

This system allowed Global Affairs Canada to automatically monitor traditional news and social media sources for relevant international developments. It used machine learning to score and rank articles by relevance and sentiment, and displayed results as maps, ranked lists, and stance matrices for government analysts. The system did not process personal information and has since been retired.

What it collects and what happens to it

Data taken in

Operational data
Anonymized data
  • News articles and RSS feeds ingested via the Factiva API at scheduled 15-minute intervals. These are publicly available media records; the register confirms no personal information is involved.
About behaviour
Anonymized data
  • Tweets retrieved via the Twitter API at 15-minute intervals. Treated as public social media content; the register states no personal information is collected.

Processing

Classification & Prediction
  • Support Vector Machine (SVM) libraries score each ingested article and tweet for relevance. VAD (Valence-Arousal-Dominance) scoring classifies the sentiment of quoted statements.
Language Models
  • Machine translation is applied to non-English text to enable cross-language analysis. Named entity recognition and quotation attribution are also applied as part of the textual analysis pipeline.

What it does

Deciding (Analytical AI)
Human decides
  • A Support Vector Machine scores and ranks ingested news articles and tweets for relevance; VAD scoring quantifies valence, arousal, and dominance of quoted statements. Human analysts review the ranked outputs to make judgements.
Sensing (Perceptive AI)
Human decides
  • Textual analysis pipelines perform machine translation, geo-tagging, named entity recognition, and quotation attribution to extract structured signals from raw news and social media text.

Outputs

A recommendation or prediction
Anonymized data
  • Results are presented as ranked lists of relevant articles and tweets, interactive geographic maps with geo-tagged content, and stance matrices showing valence and dominance for quoted statements. These are advisory outputs reviewed by GC analysts.

Run by

Global Affairs Canada (GAC)
  • Global Affairs Canada deployed and operated the Situational Awareness platform to proactively monitor international news and social media for foreign-policy-relevant information.

Government of Canada AI Register — Situational Awareness

Built by

National Research Council of Canada
  • The National Research Council built the custom Situational Awareness application on behalf of Global Affairs Canada.

Government of Canada AI Register — Situational Awareness

Kept for

Not stated by the Helpful Places.

Shared with

Available to the accountable organization
  • Outputs (ranked lists, maps, stance matrices) are accessible to GC employees — the primary user group identified in the register. No indication of third-party sharing.
Not available to me
  • This is an internal government analytical tool. Members of the public have no access to the system's outputs or configurations. The system has also been retired.

Stored

Not stated by the Helpful Places.

How to read the colours

Can it identify you?

Anonymized data
Data about people with the link to who is broken. Stripped of identifiers, blurred, aggregated, or noised so this system can’t reasonably tie a record back to an individual.
Pseudonymous data
Each person’s data is tied to a token (hash, ID, template) that lets this system recognise the same person across events, but the token itself doesn’t reveal a name. Reidentification is possible with extra information.
Identifiable data
The data either contains a direct identifier (name, address, account name, recognisable face or voice, plate number) or carries a token this system uses to look up legal identity during processing.

Who completes the loop?

Human decides
This mode suggests; a person decides what to do next. The AI is always advisory — a human is in the loop on every decision. Example: a triage tool ranks cases for a clinician who chooses which to see first.
Human executes
This mode decides; a person carries out the result. Example: an optimizer plans the day’s trash-collection routes, and drivers run them.
Autonomous
This mode decides and acts on its own. No person reviews each decision or carries out the resulting action.

Definitions from the DTPR standard. Amber is about your data, violet about who decides. The fuller the shape and the deeper the colour, the more identifying the data or the less a person is involved.

What you can do

Ask about this system

Questions go to the Helpful Places, not the vendor.

Your rights

  • Right to Algorithmic TransparencyThe system processed only public news and social media content and involved no personal information. As a retired internal government tool, individual rights of access or explanation do not apply in the standard sense. The existence and general logic of the system are disclosed via the Government of Canada's AI Register.

Risks and safeguards

  • Societal & cultural harmAutomated sentiment and relevance scoring of news and social media content could introduce biases into diplomatic situational awareness, potentially over- or under-weighting certain sources, regions, or viewpoints. Machine translation errors could further distort the picture.Safeguard: Outputs are advisory only — GC analysts review ranked results rather than acting on automated decisions. The system has since been retired, and no personal information was involved.