Who has been leading the conversation?
What is unique about the Alberta referendum, compared to other sovereignty movements Canada has seen in the past, is that no elected party is campaigning on the leave side. Instead, the online referendum conversation is dominated by influencers.
We've identified 114 accounts that receive half of all engagement over five platforms (Instagram, X, YouTube, TikTok, and Bluesky), mostly on X. Of these, 66 argue for an independent Alberta and 29 for Alberta to remain in Canada, with the rest taking no side. Explore some of these accounts yourself below. For the methodology of how we identified them, see our report.
Each handle is from the platform where they got the most engagement in our search, which is indicated in the top corner. If you click on them, you'll also see a sample of their posts (on X) that were used to identify their stance. Overall, pro-independence accounts receive about 80% of the engagement versus about 10% for anti-independence.
*Only public accounts with at least 50,000 engagement are shown here.
*Engagement numbers for the posts are not live and were collected before August 31st, 2026.
Grassroots discussions
Aside from these major voices, there is a lot of discussion across the platforms about the referendum, covering a variety topics. Most of this discussion is also on X and leans pro-independence, but conversations on other platforms with other perspectives are also present.
The topic map below shows posts from the keyword searches we performed on each platform. This data isn't discussed in detail in our report, but it was used to identify our list of major influencers. Explore it to see what people are discussing.
Each bubble represents a post and its size is related to the number of likes it received. Posts with the same colour belong to the same topic and grey posts are ones that don't fit naturally into any of the topics. The menu at the bottom left corner allows you to see and filter the posts by platform. To filter, select "Platform" in the bottom-left menu, and click the coloured icon for the platform in the legend.
These topic maps are best explored on a desktop browser.
*These topics are automatically generated and may contain errors or not perfectly represent the underlying posts.
*All of these posts are public and were retrieved via keyword-search. All the same, they may contain private or personal information, and as such, we have taken steps to remove sensitive data, including phone numbers, email addresses, private names, and business names.
*On a Mac, mouse scrolling may be recommended if scrolling on a trackpad is too slow.
*Topics and visualizations were generated using Toponymy and DataMapPlot.
How consistent are AI answers?
As voters seek to understand their options and the potential outcomes for the referendum, they may look to search engines or chatbots for information, like Google or ChatGPT. But AI models remain sensitive to how searches are phrased as well as what sources they pull from.
We tested these AI tools to see how consistently they answered questions about Alberta secession and found that they sometimes show significant variability in their answers to key questions. You can see for yourself below.
Our recommendation is that, while they can still be valuable sources of information, they should be used alongside other sources.
Pick a question and a framing to see how Google AI Overview and ChatGPT answered it.
What sources are cited by AI?
The AI models also cite different sources in their answers. These are the top 5 sources each system used for their answers, and shows that Google tends to use forums and social media as sources, unlike ChatGPT which leans towards official websites.
Select the source below to see some sample answers using each. For Google search, the links provided by the search are provided.