From COVID conspiracies to rigged voting machines, misinformation plagues the election – Vancouver Sun

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Misinformation linked to the COVID-19 pandemic is playing a larger-than-expected role in the federal election, fuelling protests and support for the People’s Party of Canada, experts say.

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Aengus Bridgman, a McGill University PhD candidate who is part of the Canadian Election Misinformation Project, said earlier in the campaign that he didn’t think COVID-19 misinformation would play an enormous part in the election.

“But it turns out actually it has, and it has in two ways. One is through motivating people to go protest,” he said. The other is in rising support for the People’s Party of Canada.

Throughout the election, hostile protests have dogged the campaign of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau. On Monday, anti-vaccination protests targeted hospitals across the country. The ongoing protests have also garnered significant media coverage — getting more attention than issues like Afghanistan or gun control, researchers at the misinformation project found.

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Misinformation is polarizing and motivating, according to Bridgman.

“The people who are taken in by it, come to believe it very deeply and really it can cause them to act politically in a very potent way.”

The misinformation that’s being spread includes false narratives about the necessity of vaccines and effectiveness of lockdowns, or bogus cures that purportedly treat COVID-19. People who have been taken in by those beliefs have found themselves drawn to the PPC; the party’s platform itself contains misinformation about how effective lockdowns were in combating the spread of COVID-19, Bridgman said.

“It’s very clear that this is the party that is going to be of interest to somebody who has anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine, anti-mask, anti-science views,” he said. The PPC received 1.6 per cent of the vote in the 2019 election – polls from Ekos Research and Mainstreet had support for the party as high as eight per cent at the end of the fourth week of the campaign.

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None of the mainstream parties are anti-vaccination or interested in engaging those narratives, and that kind of consensus would normally mean these issues wouldn’t be up for debate, Bridgman said.

“But what’s happened with these protests and with the associated rise in the PPC is that these issues are kind of front and centre, continue to sort of polarize Canadians and be a hot topic,” he said. “This misinformation has forced that issue onto the national agenda and has kept it there for two weeks.”

COVID-19-related misinformation also extends to conspiracy theories about the “new world order” and the “great reset,” involving baseless narratives about how world leaders orchestrated the pandemic and there is work underway to install a totalitarian world government.

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Carmen Celestini, who has been monitoring social media platforms and posts as part of Simon Fraser University’s Disinformation Project, says the conspiracy theories are linked to supporters of and candidates from the People’s Party of Canada, as well as the wider anti-vaccination, anti-lockdown movement.

The conspiracy theorists believe that “some of the lockdowns and restrictions that we have around COVID are actually part of this idea, to link to a great reset.”

Celestini said there are candidates for the People’s Party of Canada who are “talking directly about this idea of the great reset, and that this is actually happening under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and would continue, even if the Conservative Party or the NDP came into power.”

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Those who believe in the conspiracy theories are “positioning that this isn’t an election just for the prime minister, but it’s also a battle against tyranny.” She said that includes memes where the NDP, Liberal Party and the Conservative Party are shown as representative of this system, and “the only party that will save Canada is the People’s Party of Canada.”

Bridgman noted that “any sort of conspiracy theory of the last 20 years has found a little bit of a home in the COVID-19 misinformation space. And so that’s a very complicated ecosystem in its own right. But really, what we’re seeing in terms of the common thread is mistrust that is anchoring all that stuff.”

The COVID-19 conspiracies aren’t the only ones circulating. Celestini pointed to false narratives about voting machines being used in the Canadian election, which are “already putting out ideas that the election is going to be rigged.”

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Bridgman categorized those narratives as U.S.-inspired misinformation. “There’s been a lot in the last couple of days about writing implements to use…to bring your own pen. This is word-for-word, what was being circulated in the run up to the U.S. election.”

He called the rigged voting machines “upsettingly comical,” given that in Canadian federal elections, paper ballots are counted by hand.

Those narratives have the potential to play a large role, because there is the possibility an increase mail-in ballots means they will take several days to count. In that case, the danger would be that this “ugly form of misinformation that really questions the legitimacy of our democracy comes to the fore.”

While Bridgman doesn’t believe that “misinformation being shared around voting integrity can affect the outcome of this election,” he said it does “have very dangerous downstream consequences for belief and trust, faith in democracy.”

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Ahead of the 2021 election, Canada’s security agencies warned about the potential for foreign interference. A month before the election was called, the Communications Security Establishment cautioned it’s “very likely that Canadian voters will encounter some form of foreign cyber interference,” while Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) said it has “observed persistent and sophisticated state-sponsored threat activity targeting elections for many years now and continues to see a rise in its frequency and sophistication.”

Over the past five years, the vast majority of cyber threat activity aimed at democratic processes has come from “state-sponsored cyber threat actors,” according to the CSE — with Russia, China and Iran “very likely” responsible for most of that activity. The CSE warned it’s “very likely” the election will see circulation of false information that links mail-in votes to voter fraud.

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Researchers following misinformation being circulated in this election say they haven’t seen evidence that foreign actors are playing a part. Ahmed Al-Rawi, an assistant professor of news, social media and public communication at Simon Fraser University, said there “might be foreign state interference,” but he hasn’t collected any proof of that.

“We have the reports from the Canadian national security agencies about who the malicious foreign actors are,” University of Ottawa associate professor Michael Pal said. “They were quite explicit about that. It wouldn’t be a shock if some of the false information that’s circulating comes from there.”

Bridgman said he views what’s happening as “primarily a domestic phenomenon, as opposed to one that’s produced elsewhere.” People who are posting it have a longer history of social media posts than accounts used in disinformation operations tend to have, he noted.

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“That’s not to say that there isn’t some troll farm somewhere trying to attempt to increase the severity of the spread of it. Obviously, we can’t preclude that. But we don’t have any indication that that’s a driving force behind these things.”

David Salvo, the deputy director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy housed at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, worked with the Canadian government and Microsoft on an election security project and independently studied Canada’s preparedness efforts.

“The Canadian government, we really see it as a real leader on a lot of these issues in terms of international best practices,” he said. “There’s a lot that we in the States can learn from what’s happening in Ottawa.”

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That includes the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol, and its approach to putting in place thresholds for informing the public about threats. “The other aspect that I really value in what the government did is it took the decision making for communicating with the public out of political hands,” and into the hands of civil servants, who had the legal authority to make decisions about how to communicate those threats to the public.

“Especially sitting here in Washington, where it’s just a total circus and intelligence can be politicized and election security issues were politicized…. the fact that Ottawa sort of recognized the dangers of descending into that trap and actually putting in place a policy mechanism to avoid it, I thought was really smart.”

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There are challenges that limit how much we know about what kind of misinformation is being spread. One information gap is around non-English and non-French campaigns aimed at immigrant communities. “We are not doing enough when it comes to monitoring what’s going on,” Al-Rawi said.

Another is that researchers are dependent on limited data that online platforms release. While large companies like Twitter make some information available, disinformation is also spread using alternative platforms like BitChute, and messaging apps like WhatsApp, which Al-Rawi said is a “dark spot.”

Bridgman said in an interview ahead of the 2021 campaign researchers get “some limited visibility” on information that has been approved by social media companies.

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“We don’t have all the information, or even a small fraction of the information.”

He said in a later interview that one thing that makes the 2021 campaign different than the 2019 election is that a lot of misinformation has moved off mainstream platforms like Facebook or Twitter to platforms like Telegram or Rumble.

“If you are primarily using the major social media platforms…and you are trying to use keyword searches or trying to identify misinformation in those spaces, you are not going to find sort of the real stuff, the real genuine conversations of people who believe this,” he said. If one platform is taken down, the conversations move to another, he noted.

“This is not a problem that can be moderated away, or can be addressed through conversations or governance of major social media because, basically, the cat is out of the bag. And these conversations are happening in very diffuse ways all over the social media space.”