Shown here are the always-present swans in Burano, outside of Venice; the convoy protest on Parliament Hill in February 2022 (photo: Véronic Gagnon) and an Elections Canada sign. During the 2021 federal election, there was widespread COVID-19 misinformation from those who opposed vaccine mandates and lockdown measures.
Kimiz Dalkir wrote a book on misinformation and she has a PhD in educational technology. And yet, she fell for a bit of fake news during the pandemic.
An associate professor and the director of the school of information studies at McGill University in Montreal, Dalkir was surprised she believed the relatively harmless good news story about swans and dolphins returning to Venice’s canals as a result of reduced pollution thanks to lockdown measures. In fact, the swans regularly appear in the canals of Burano, which is within the greater metropolitan Venice area. As for the dolphins? They were photographed at a port in Sardinia, which is hundreds of kilometres away from Venice.
“I think I first saw it on Facebook,” Dalkir recalls. “There was this lovely image of swans swimming down the canals of Venice. And because everybody was staying home, apparently the environment cleaned itself up. It was kind of nice to think that maybe there’s a silver lining.”
That particular piece of fake news was harmless enough, but often it’s not.
The dangers of misinformation
Misinformation is defined as false or misleading information while its subcategory — disinformation — includes the intent to deceive.
It’s easy to tell ourselves that misinformation and disinformation are the purview of countries such as the U.S. and Russia, but Canada is not immune.
Just this autumn, during the Quebec provincial election, a piece of fake news was circulated first as a Facebook post. It alleged that François Legault, the leader of the Coalition Avenir Québec and the incumbent, was so virulently booed at a restaurant in Beauceville, Que., that he had to leave before he received his lunch order. It was posted on the LibreChoix Facebook group and shared more than 1,000 times. It garnered nearly that many comments.
But it was complete fiction. Legault was actually warmly received at the restaurant. The LibreChoix group’s leader, Carl Giroux, meanwhile, has often spoken out about pandemic measures, including mandatory masks and the province’s QR codes for vaccination proof.
Dalkir says the further danger of such posts is that the mainstream media will usually report on their falseness as a news story, and while it’s admirable to set the record straight, it’s still repetition of the story, which then cements it in people’s minds. And if a doubter posits that it was proven false, the believers will say “Well, of course that’s what the other side will say.” And then the doubters are accused of orchestrating a coverup of what really happened.
Other Canadian incidents have included the 2021 federal election, for example, during which widespread COVID-19 misinformation was perpetuated by protesters who opposed the pandemic health measures, such as mandatory masks, and vaccination policies. There were also claims of widespread voter fraud on social media platforms that were comparable to the stories told south of the border that culminated in an attempted coup at the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021. The attempted coup was fuelled by supporters of former U.S. president Donald Trump, who believed, and convinced his supporters, that he’d
Why do people fall for it?
In her studies, Merlyna Lim, Canada research chair in digital media and global network society and a professor of media and communication studies at Carleton University, finds that susceptibility to misinformation is often due to the kinds of information and groups to which a person is connected.
“Young people become radicalized because [of their associations] with social groups that are radical,” Lim says. “This is more about the limited social network they have and their distance from a community that is more likely to have robust discussions on technology, social media and information in general.”
Studies have shown that seniors are a group that’s particularly susceptible, especially those over 65, but Stanford University researcher Ryan Moore found these results perplexing.
“[Older people] tend to be among the best democratic citizens,” Moore says. “They turn out to vote. More than younger people, they pay way more attention to the news. They say that civics and those kinds of things are really important to them. And there’s a bunch of research in political science that says when they’re asked factual questions about issues and how government works, they know way more.”
Given all of that information, he was perplexed by the findings of the early misinformation studies.
“You could imagine predicting that older adults would be the most immune to misinformation, but [according to the research] it seemed as though it was reversed [in the] online [world], where older people were the most likely to engage in misinformation.”
He figured it had something to do with digital literacy and the evidence shows he was right. To that end, he worked with the MediaWise Initiative through the Poynter Institute to develop a digital media literacy skill program — a short course on how to spot misinformation online — for seniors specifically. The uptake has been good and the results have been even better, Moore reports.
Seniors can be part of the answer
Moore says seniors have a number of strengths that can be leveraged in society’s fight against misinformation. He says we know from psychological studies that as we age, we get better at spotting when people are lying, for example.
“That’s because we have a lifetime of experiences of [determining whether] information is right or wrong. Older people are civically minded, they’re more likely to have free time because they’re more likely to be retired, and they’re better at detecting deception under other circumstances,” Moore says. “It’s for all these reasons that I’m so excited to be working on efforts to help this population with their internet skills and digital skills. I think if we can bolster those, our older adult population can be a massive asset for the fight against misinformation.”
Top 10 tips to avoid falling prey
To avoid it, the experts we spoke with, as well as the MediaWise course, had some basic tips.
Here’s a shortlist of the 10 best:
- Determine who’s behind the information. If you’re reading an article on the New York Times website itself, it’ll be more trustworthy than a Facebook post that claims to contain New York Times information. Seek information straight from the source.
- Determine what evidence exists for the claims you’re reading. Do some double-checking with credible sources. Snopes.com is a reliable fact-checking service that will often expose hoaxes.
- Become familiar with red flags. MediaWise advises that if the information creates strong feelings — especially of surprise or disgust — it could be designed to upset you and thereby compel you to share it. Other red flags: articles with no date and viral posts from an unverified account.
- Social media has algorithms that create a bit of a utopian world where all the views you see are similar to yours or legitimize yours. As such, you’re more likely to share without fact-checking. Beware of your own confirmation bias. This was borne out in the Legault example, where his opponents shared a meme that made him look bad.
- Slow down. “[When we’re] accessing things with our fingers on a small device, we move too quickly,” Lim says. “We need to stop and ask questions. Where does it come from? Who shared it? If it’s not trustworthy, move on, or, if it’s in your messages, just delete it.”
- Use the rule of three, Lim advises. If you can check the facts you’re considering believing or even sharing with three credible sources, they’re likely true. Without that, they’re more suspect.
- Read laterally. MediaWise advises readers to open a number of tabs across their browser and check sources they trust to see what they’re saying about the same story. With the swan story, a quick Google search with the terms “swans, dolphins, Venice” turns up several that discredit the claims made in the memes.
- Be vigilant. Dalkir says misinformation spread about organizations such as the Canada Revenue Agency will often be discredited on their own websites.
- It’s better to be skeptical. Using artificial intelligence, nefarious actors can take “deep fake” software that will learn a person’s facial movements and, when it can access their voice, which is easy to do with politicians, they can basically make them say anything they like. Be aware of this when sharing videos.
- Use common sense. As Serge Blais, executive director of the University of Ottawa Professional Development Institute, says, ask yourself if you would accept and take a pill, without knowing what it is, from a stranger on the street? And would you pass on that pill to a family member or friend? “We have to have the same approach with online information,” Blais says.