Posted at 11:00 a.m.
Tristan Péloquin has been investigating the Quebec conspiracy movement since the start of the pandemic. Journalists know this: beat is worthy of an extreme sport.
In two years, Tristan received a formal notice demanding 2 million dollars. He saw his personal phone number published on Facebook to harm him. A netizen has insinuated that he deserves a bomb in his car. And that’s not counting the countless online insults to which he is the subject…
But no, it doesn’t cross his mind to throw in the towel.
“When someone attacks me personally, by insulting me or threatening me with reprisals because I wrote about him, that does not discourage me, summarizes Tristan Péloquin, seated in a Montreal café. On the contrary, it motivates me to continue writing. »
Tristan Péloquin has even written a book, therefore, which will be published on Tuesday. Through the (often bumpy) journeys of characters from the Quebec conspiracy who have made the news, the journalist explains how conspiratorial thought weaves its web on social networks, with expert testimony in support.
The journalist takes readers into the world of Alexis Cossette-Trudel, apostle of the QAnon conspiratorial movement, and that of ex-accountant Stéphane Blais, who called the pandemic an “international coup”. He also recounts the setbacks of Mario Roy, this vexatious litigant who wanted to arrest politicians, and those of the “people’s policeman”, Maxime Ouimet, among others.
“It’s a wheel that turns,” says Tristan Péloquin about prominent conspiracy figures on social networks.
What happened in Ottawa was essentially the same people, but from English Canada. These are the same patterns that come back.
Tristan Peloquin
Characters appear suddenly, quickly reach tens of thousands of people with their videos, often make a media splash, then disappear from the radar, sometimes suddenly. Some come from far-right or identity-right movements, others from pseudoscience or the pseudo-legal world, and still others from religion.
“When we start to dig a little, we realize that these people had clashes with the authorities or with democratic institutions long before, he underlines. They had already hitched their feet against the system before going all out. »
The power of the internet
As a journalist, why give them attention, importance?
“Readers ask me this question a lot, agrees Tristan Péloquin. At first, even, they were disgusted that I gave them attention. But I think that the further it goes, the more they understand the seriousness of the phenomenon and the importance of putting the spotlight on it. If we pretend that they don’t exist, they continue to grow, but in the shadows. »
Conspiratorial thinking is not trivial, insists the journalist, who gives the example of the assault on the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump galvanized by a wave of hateful disinformation on Facebook. In the United States, conspiracy theories have even won over part of the political class.
Tristan Péloquin is interested in a story and publishes it when the conspiracy leaders confront a democratic institution, such as the courts, schools. “What comes to pick me up is not their non-compliance with health measures: it is when these people claim to speak on behalf of the people by saying that it is they who represent the truth”, summarizes Tristan Péloquin.
According to him, these movements would not exist without one tool in particular: live videos on social networks. Thousands of Internet users gather to listen to the conspiracy leaders speak to them for 45 minutes with falsehoods or half-truths. Their audience (which usually does not have a deep knowledge of politics and science) comes to break the loneliness, but also to express their anger by commenting on the live videos.
“The Internet is such a powerful tool for propagation,” summarizes Tristan Péloquin, who is sorry that neither politicians, nor the courts, nor social networks do much to counter the deployment of conspiratorial thinking.
Social networks have community standards and breaking them can lead to action (Alexis Cossette-Trudel, for example, was banned from Facebook for a reference to QAnon and from YouTube for medical misinformation surrounding COVID-19). However, this management is done without any transparency on their part, deplores Tristan Péloquin.
“It’s one of the only bits in my book where I felt like speaking up,” he said. That doesn’t make sense! It’s not normal that it’s just them who control who has the right to broadcast on their platform, just them who put the brakes, it’s just them who know how it works. It’s a black box. Yet this is where our democracy is played out. »
In bookstores March 15
Doing Your Research – Conspi Thought Mapping
Tristan Peloquin
Quebec America
200 pages