Although misinformation was present in the last federal election, it did not affect the outcome of the election, a study by the Canadian Election Misinformation Project concluded.
The integrity of the electoral process and COVID-19 were by far the two themes most prone to misinformation, explained project director and political science researcher at McGill University, Aengus Bridgman, in a telephone interview. He considers the volume of misleading publications to be similar to that of the 2019 election.
According to the study, 13% of Canadians believe that some form of voter fraud has taken place. A similar percentage believe the Chinese government (16%) or Bill Gates (17%) purposely developed the COVID-19 virus, and 27% believe “the pandemic is part of a global effort to force everyone to get vaccinated.”
But the abundance of misleading claims on social media “doesn’t mean it had a meaningful impact on the election,” Bridgman qualified.
Indeed, the study concludes that even when exposed to a variety of true and false claims, “Canadians were generally able to detect fake news, and truthful news was more likely to be believed.”
It must be said that there were only a few intentional lies ― what is called “misinformation” ― that circulated, compared to honest errors, qualified as “misinformation”.
Although about a third of survey respondents said they were “little” or “not at all” confident that the elections were protected from possible foreign interference, in fact, no major campaign such as that deployed by Russia in the US elections of 2016 took place, the report said.
“There was a very small attempt, which involved little or no effort,” Mr. Bridgman said. This was directed only at Chinese nationals living in Canada, to convince them not to vote for the Conservatives, wrongly accused of wanting to cut off all diplomatic contact with China or of wanting to implement discriminatory laws against Canadians of origin. Chinese.
But even if the outcome of the last ballot was unaffected by the misinformation, Mr. Bridgman warns that this does not mean that it does not have important long-term consequences: “If you have a sphere public and information ecosystem that are saturated with misinformation, this will over time erode trust in democratic institutions like Elections Canada, political parties, politicians and experts. This can be very damaging to democracy. »
Conspiratorial medley
So few Canadians have been affected by the misinformation, “there is a small percentage of the population whose factual understanding of the world is further and further removed” from the rest, Bridgman said.
“If you have one conspiratorial belief, you tend to have them all,” a phenomenon no older than the onset of the pandemic, he explains. Before, “you could believe there’s a secret cabal controlling Canada,” while another group “believed vaccines were a Big Pharma conspiracy,” but “the ties between these two groups and the overlap between these two beliefs were limited”.
“People who were more likely to say they had been exposed to misinformation during the election were also the most misinformed,” he said. Statements that they believed to be misleading “were often what I would consider to be factually correct information.”
Moreover, even if these people represent “5 to 10%” of the population, they tend to “be very militant, they believe in it deeply and try to convince others”. They can thus have a non-negligible impact on local elections where many people tend to be less involved, or even “monopolize the national discourse for a few weeks”, as we saw with the freedom convoy.
The Quebec particularity
These conspiratorial beliefs, and the resulting misinformation, are heavily influenced by what’s happening in the United States, where fake news is much more prevalent, Bridgman said.
This could partly explain why the report reveals that Quebec respondents were less likely to say they had been exposed to misleading information.
It’s likely that “the language difference creates some kind of barrier that, albeit imperfect, slows and inhibits the transfer of misinformation,” Bridgman theorized, arguing that claims about mail-in voting security, subject much debated in the 2020 American elections, had been very little present in the French-speaking communities.
Quebec is not immune to this kind of movement, however, but risks being more influenced by countries like France, he said.
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This article was produced with the financial support of the Meta Fellowships and The Canadian Press for News.