The images on television and in our social media feeds are striking: Canada’s capital city reduced to grid lock. Hundreds of tractor trailer trucks block border crossings between Canada and the United States.
Trade is shut down. Police are called up. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invokes far-reaching, never-before-used emergency powers. So-called “freedom convoy” protests are also planned for Washington, D.C., for Paris, for Brussels, and other European capitals.
It seems a COVID-inspired revolution is upon us. At least, that’s what some people want you to believe.
In reality, what the world is seeing is really two protests: The first, a true grassroots protest organized by a small group of anti-vax Canadian truckers. The other, bigger and more global, is pushed by social media agitators and the usual suspects of America’s far-right outrage machine.
Consider the facts. The chief of police in Ottawa told reporters that “we are now aware of a significant element from the United States that have been involved in the funding, the organizing, and the protesting.” That statement was later corroborated by hackers who leaked fundraising data from online platforms that showed almost half of the financial support for the protesters originated in the United States.
CNN correspondent Daniel Dale – himself a Canadian – noted the “remarkable” amount of coverage the protests are receiving from America’s right-wing media, in particular FOX News and its nightly stable of opinionators. He could recall no story emanating from Canada ever receiving so much attention from FOX.
Finally, the most viral social media posts on the protests have not come from the protestors, but from the heavy-hitters of the American alt-right such as Donald Trump Jr., former U.S. politician Mike Huckabee, and current U.S. lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Indeed, researchers from Penn State University who have studied the protests concluded that “amplification through media coverage has made the truckers and their supporters seem like members of a mass movement, distorting the truth about how most Canadians feel about vaccines and public health measures.”
At the Reboot Foundation, we have seen this playbook before, and offer some advice for those of you who are watching these developments, both here and abroad. Ask yourselves: Why?
Why would a small protest in Canada capture the attention of the American right-wing media? Why would a dispute over vaccine mandates for Canadian truckers spread to Paris?
And now ask yourself: Who benefits from protests spreading, and the disruptions that are sure to follow? Who profits?
To answer these questions, be sure to expand your information sources. Read widely and think deeply. It’s not enough to only get your news from a few outlets. To think critically, people must challenge their assumptions and be flexible in their thinking. These are the keys to fighting misinformation, to determining what’s real and what’s concocted to scare us. These are the crucial first steps to keep ourselves from falling into the trap of “fake news.”
I offer this advice because our work at Reboot has shown that so many people do not take these steps. Indeed, too many people think they’re too smart to be duped by online misinformation campaigns or by partisan websites.
Our research team sees this fact in study after study. In 2020, the Reboot Foundation conducted research that found most people are wildly over-confident in their abilities to identify “fake news” and partisan websites: Only about 1% of our participants used what we deemed to be “true fact checking techniques” when verifying information online. We also found that the more time users spent on social media, the worse their news judgment was, and this was true regardless of a person’s age, income, or political affiliation.
Meanwhile social media companies have perfected their algorithms to feed us emotion-driven content that’s easy to share and amplify, regardless if it’s true or good for society. Unfortunately, this is all a perfect storm for the spread of misinformation like we’re seeing with the truckers protest in Canada.
To fight this, we all need to do far more to teach and learn how to think for ourselves, how to evaluate sources. We need to teach children and adults alike how to be better critical thinkers to protect ourselves from misleading information. As a society, fixing this will require that we think beyond our divisions and make a serious commitment to deeper thinking and self-questioning at all levels. And it requires that we rethink how we relate to technology that has serious negative effects on the public sphere.
We’ll know soon enough if these trucker protests spread widely beyond the U.S.-Canadian border. But in the meantime, people must begin to strengthen their thinking so that they can better understand the legitimate frustrations voiced by authentic protestors, and not fall prey to the manufactured outrage that is meant to divide us.
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February 17, 2022 at 10:17PM
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