CIRA’s vision is a free and open internet that empowers all Canadians to achieve their economic, social and cultural potential. Understanding how Canadians actually use the internet is an important piece of making this vision a reality.
To help advance the national conversation about the internet’s role in our lives, CIRA publishes its Canadian Internet Trends report—previously known as Canada’s Internet Factbook—on an annual basis.
Keep reading to learn more about Canadian internet trends in 2025.
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Executive Summary
The internet is irrevocably intertwined with every part of our lives— and any disruption to our lives online has a direct impact on our offline experience. The 2025 Canadian Internet Trends report helps shed light on the many ways Canadians are using this indispensable resource in their lives and tracks the evolution of those habits and opinions over time. To help bring the findings to life, we’re publishing a four-part blog series of the most significant insights from our annual survey of 2,000 Canadian internet users. Each article will highlight a particular trend or theme uncovered in the survey and delve into what it tells us about where we are today and where we may be headed.
Buy Canadian
Online shopping remains wildly popular among Canadians, with 86 per cent of us saying we’ve made an online purchase in the last year. When we have a choice, buying Canadian is a priority, with 64 per cent of shoppers expressing a preference for Canadian retail sites over U.S.-based outlets such as Amazon. For more than half of us (55 per cent), benefitting the Canadian economy and supporting local businesses are the top reasons cited for this preference.
While the buy Canadian movement has gained momentum in recent months in response to the trade war with the U.S. and ongoing threats against Canadian sovereignty, less than a quarter of Canadians (22 per cent) mention tariff threats as the reason for their retail patriotism. Overall, regardless of where they’re choosing to spend their online shopping dollar, the most important factors are cost/savings (62 per cent), availability of items (54 per cent), and ease/convenience (52 per cent).
Elon Musk’s X platform
While many Canadians are still spending time on popular social media and messaging platforms like Facebook (66 per cent), YouTube (55 per cent) and Instagram (45 per cent), their views on the value and overall safety of social media reveal some significant concerns.
Take Elon Musk’s X platform. As the seventh most popular social media site, just 19 per cent of Canadians say they use the site, but many regard it as highly problematic. Of all the social platforms, X ranks highest among Canadians for promoting polarizing content (31 per cent), up significantly from 16 per cent in 2024. At 11 per cent, Facebook is a distant second in this category, followed by TikTok at just six per cent. X is also more likely than its competitors to be viewed as promoting misinformation and disinformation (33 per cent), as well as the most likely to remove content that the site owner disagrees with (19 per cent), followed by Facebook at 15 per cent.
Despite reports of Canadians fleeing X en masse to join social media newcomer—and X competitor—Bluesky Social following the U.S. election in November 2024, just five per cent of Canadians say they’ve made the switch.
Generative AI
As the AI revolution continues to gain momentum, adoption rates of generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini and DALL-E have soared among Canadians. In fact, more than twice as many of us (33 per cent) say we’ve used these kinds of tools in the past year compared to 2024, when just 16 per cent of us had.
As our comfort level with this rapidly evolving technology increases, we’re taking advantage of it to perform a wide range of tasks. At work, 36 per cent of us say we’re using it to create written content, 35 per cent to save time, and a third of us are looking to generative AI to help brainstorm new ideas. Outside the workplace, the most common applications of generative AI among Canadians are for experimentation (52 per cent), as a search engine (47 per cent), and to create written content for their own personal use (42 per cent).
Yet despite the ubiquity of the technology and the overall uptick in usage, a significant share of Canadians have yet to jump onto the AI bandwagon, citing a lack of interest (42 per cent), a lack of need (39 per cent) and because they simply don’t trust it (34 per cent).
Deepfakes, disinformation and data breaches
For all its countless benefits, the internet continues to pose significant and growing risks for many Canadians. Deepfakes and disinformation are now pervasive features of the online landscape, and Canadians admit they sometimes fall victim to these and other types of misleading content, even unwittingly distributing it themselves on occasion. More than one in ten Canadians (13 per cent) say they have liked, shared or re-shared fake, misleading or untrue content in the last year.
With deepfakes now commonplace, the share of Canadians who have encountered them over the past year has climbed to 34 per cent, up from 20 per cent in 2024. To make matters worse, data breaches and cyberattacks remain a source of anxiety for many of us, with two in ten Canadians saying they’ve been the victim of a successful cyberattack or data breach in the past year. The most common cause of these incidents was a data breach by a company or service people used.
Conclusion
As AI technology rapidly permeates every aspect of the internet, Canadians are becoming gradually more comfortable with this revolutionary technology and beginning to experience its benefits, including increased convenience and efficiency. But concerns remain, not only with the long-term implications of AI, but also with misinformation, disinformation and deepfakes, cybercrime and data leaks, and the ongoing challenge of staying safe from online harassment.
Stay tuned for the upcoming blog posts that will dig deeper into all the key findings from the 2025 Canadian Internet Trends report.
