In 2019, an election year federally and in Alberta, what if we could all resolve to be better consumers of online content? Could we train to become sommeliers of social media news shares, carefully discerning the provenance of a piece and determining whether it is authentic or just swill \u2014 or even poison?<\/p>\n
The implications of not taking more care about what we absorb and then distribute online can\u2019t be overstated. Information is being used as a weapon not just against parties and politicians but also against our sense of trust in institutions and our social harmony.<\/p>\n
A report<\/a> by the Oxford Internet Institute\u2019s Computational Propaganda Research project, released in mid-December, said Russia used social media posts to suppress the African-American and Hispanic vote during the 2016 American elections. Russia\u2019s Internet Research Agency used the segmentation of advertising markets offered by social media platforms such as Facebook to tell those voters that they should boycott the election. It encouraged right-wing voters to vote for Trump and shared posts with them designed to kick up anger around minorities and immigration. The Russians also sought to drive a wedge among liberal voters, trying to \u201creduce trust in the political system.\u201d<\/p>\n The Russian attack also spread \u201csensationalist, conspiratorial, and other forms of junk political news and misinformation.\u201d If that doesn\u2019t make you queasy enough, the Russians didn\u2019t stop their online activity once they had been caught.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re still not convinced that these campaigns are a threat in gentle and polite Canada, consider that during the 2018 Swedish election, 22 percent of news content shared online<\/a> with political hashtags was \u201cjunk news,\u201d defined as deliberately misleading, deceptive or incorrect information.<\/p>\n In Mexico, the team of journalists behind Verificado<\/a> monitored the misinformation that was circulated during that country\u2019s recent presidential election on popular social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter and also shared as news items. Some of the cases were straight-out false stories about candidates, others misrepresentations of photographs. In one case<\/a>, a video was manipulated and then presented on social media as evidence that presidential candidate Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador (now the President) refused an interview because he was drunk. The majority of the misinformation in Mexico came from domestic actors, and not from Russia, analysts have suggested<\/a>.<\/p>\n These acts are not harmless. Beyond potentially swaying the results of an election, and poisoning our democratic process, they can also create dangerous tears in our social fabric. The idea is to polarize us and make us angry and distrustful.<\/p>\n \u201cWith all of the attention to \u2018Nothing is true, and nothing is real, and everything is biased,\u2019\u2026our worry is that we\u2019re shifting to an \u2018I don\u2019t believe anything\u2019 culture,\u201d says Kathryn Ann Hill, executive director of MediaSmarts, a not-for-profit organization that promotes digital and media literacy. \u201cThat\u2019s not a good thing because it\u2019s a clear road to apathy, feelings of a lack of ability to have any investment in our political system or our electoral system \u2014 it\u2019s a bad thing for democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n Sure, we can look to our leaders and public servants to do something about this. Elections Canada, for example, has said it will be using artificial intelligence<\/a> to try to stamp out as much disinformation about the electoral process as possible. The agency is also consulting with other countries<\/a> to find out what they are doing. France passed a law against misinformation<\/a> this past summer that would allow content to be removed from the Internet after a quick judicial review. The legislation has been criticized as infringing on free speech.<\/p>\n The Public Policy Forum, in an August 2018 report<\/a> on disinformation, recommended the creation of a \u201cnimble organization outside of government for ongoing and long-term monitoring, research and policy development\u201d around the issue. It also called for a legal requirement that all digital producers and disseminators of content identify themselves and their beneficial owners clearly on their platforms.<\/p>\n But we as citizens also have an important role to play. If only we could regard the triage of online content as something we do as routinely as separating the plastics from the paper for recycling.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not going to be easy. A recent study<\/a> published in the journal Intelligence<\/em> linked susceptibility to misinformation to cognitive ability \u2014 something that wanes as we get older<\/a>. In a December 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center<\/a>, 23 percent of respondents said they had shared misinformation online, either deliberately or unwittingly.<\/p>\n Political scientist Thierry Giasson, the lead researcher at the Research Group on Political Communication at Universit\u00e9 Laval, recently convened experts on media education at a conference in Montreal. The goal was to answer some key questions about news literacy, media education and citizenship, and ultimately to produce a white paper for the Quebec government on expanding media literacy into the curriculum as a stand-alone area of instruction. The Canadian experts brought together for the conference hope to create a network that is focused on the issue.<\/p>\n Giasson points to the \u201c30 seconds\u201d campaign<\/a> by the F\u00e9d\u00e9ration Professionnelle des Journalistes du Qu\u00e9bec, which urges people to take 30 seconds to read a piece of online content before sharing it. \u201cLook at the source: where is this coming from? Usually a source is clearly identified. Is it a legitimate news organization?\u201d says Giasson.<\/p>\n \u201cYou need to check it out before you share it. Where is the link taking you? Is it taking you to the original source or to another website? If you doubt for a single second that it\u2019s not legitimate, don\u2019t share it.\u201d<\/p>\n MediaSmarts has developed a range of resources<\/a> for the public and for educators on authenticating information online. Says Hill, \u201cCheck the original source. Don\u2019t assume it\u2019s true because a lot of people shared it, or it\u2019s going viral on social media\u2026or it\u2019s the first result that came up in your search engine. People assume that\u2019s a ranking, and it\u2019s not.\u201d<\/p>\n Plenty of us feel indignant when we get the calls from the telephone scam artists claiming to work for the bank or Windows or the Canada Revenue Agency. How dare they try to pull one over on me! But we\u2019re not angry or smart enough yet about the foreign and domestic players who are trying to distort our democratic process and just make everything we trust feel wobbly.<\/p>\n Our New Year\u2019s resolution as citizens should be to declare ourselves the first line of defence against the weaponization of lies.<\/p>\n Photo:\u00a0Shutterstock\/By Sergey Nivens<\/span><\/p>\n Do you have something to say about the article you just read? Be part of the\u00a0<\/em>Policy Options\u00a0discussion, and send in your own submission.\u00a0Here is a\u00a0<\/em>link<\/em><\/a>\u00a0on how to do it.\u00a0<\/em>|\u00a0Souhaitez-vous r\u00e9agir \u00e0 cet article ?\u00a0<\/em>Joignez-vous aux d\u00e9bats d\u2019<\/em>Options politiques\u00a0et soumettez-nous votre texte en suivant ces\u00a0<\/em>directives<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 2019, an election year federally and in Alberta, what if we could all resolve to be better consumers of online content? Could we train to become sommeliers of social media news shares, carefully discerning the provenance of a piece and determining whether it is authentic or just swill \u2014 or even poison? The implications […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":275024,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","ep_exclude_from_search":false,"apple_news_api_created_at":"2025-10-08T02:21:36Z","apple_news_api_id":"5f4ba38b-4073-4aa1-a7cc-d59cfa61bf59","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2025-10-08T02:21:36Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AX0uji0BzSqGnzNWc-mG_WQ","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false},"categories":[9385,9372],"tags":[9187,8413],"article-status":[],"irpp-category":[],"section":[],"irpp-tag":[7136],"class_list":["post-266830","issues","type-issues","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-medias-et-culture","category-recent-stories-fr","tag-desinformation","tag-journalism-fr","irpp-tag-medias-et-culture"],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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