Editorial: Information wars are underway and our political leaders must step up and fight back.
At the height of our recent federal election campaign, someone threw gravel at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when he was campaigning in London, Ontario. Subsequently, the police charged the president of a nearby riding association of the People’s Party of Canada.
In March, a Manitoba man was sentenced to six years in prison for crashing his truck through the fence around Rideau Hall in Ottawa. He was looking for Trudeau and believed that Bill Gates is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.
A Laval, Que., QAnon believer was recently arrested for posting a threatening message about his daughter’s school after a Canadian QAnon influencer urged his followers to “shoot to kill anyone trying to inject children under the age of 19 years with vaccines against the coronavirus19 “.
Anti-vaccine protesters are causing increasingly serious risks to public safety: they protest at the homes of public health officials, hang politicians in effigy, and bother outside hospitals and businesses. Yet their silent work is arguably the most dangerous: the misinformation they spread online is lengthening and making the pandemic worse.
Anti-vaccines have every right to express their views, but it is increasingly clear that the nature of their beliefs poses a risk that our leaders are not addressing. The central problem is that they believe things, that they alter things, that they are demonstrably false. If you believe, as followers of QAnon do, that a secret conspiracy of child sexual predators is operating at the top of our society, you would be correct in wanting to take action. The fact that the central tenets of the conspiracy theory are outrageously ridiculous (the predictions of the anonymous cult leaders never come true) does not diminish its appeal.
It seems clear that our traditional framework for thinking about public debate, the market for ideas, can’t do the job on its own, in part because so much of the conversation on social media isn’t really public. Consider the case of the audio recording that convinced a Canadian woman not to get vaccinated, as described in the story by Stephen Maher. It appears to be a skillful, professionally produced piece of disinformation designed to confuse and mislead the listener, and was shared via Facebook Messenger, a private communication. This is not the kind of thing John Stuart Mill envisioned in 1859 when he came up with the concept of the market of ideas, where the competition of ideas in transparent public discourse inevitably results in truth.
While our media landscape changed dramatically in recent decades, creating new avenues for malicious actors and street vendors to mislead the public, legislators were left in their hands. Canada’s policy makers must make it easier to track toxic misinformation, seek voluntary compliance from big platforms, regulate where necessary, and empower public health communicators to reject dangerous lies faster and faster.
Take, for example, the @scienceupfirst initiative. It is an innovative Canadian collaboration working with researchers, scientists, science communicators and healthcare experts to stop misinformation by amplifying and promoting evidence-based science on social media. It’s a quick answer to nonsense, delivered at Internet speed, and it can offer an important path to take; sunlight, after all, is always the best disinfectant.
This editorial appears in print in the February 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “Why sunlight is always the best disinfectant and how to let the light in.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.
Reference-www.macleans.ca