Advertisement

The contagion of COVID conspiracies in Quebec

How did disinformation become so prevalent and what is it doing to us? Part 1 of a 5-part series.

Article content

To read every story in this series, visit montrealgazette.com/infodemic.

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content


In January 2020, Jeff Yates watched his inbox overflow.

Yates, a disinformation reporter with Les Décrypteurs — a team at Radio-Canada tasked with investigating online hoaxes and questionable social media posts — usually received a steady trickle of emails notifying him of some new lie on the internet. Yates and his colleagues would fact-check them, publishing their results on the web and in a weekly television segment.

But as information spread about a new, mysterious illness in China, the steady trickle became a flood. Two to three emails a day turned into more than 100.

“It started going bonkers,” Yates said. There were too many claims to fact-check: the virus was stolen from a Canadian lab in Winnipeg, one theory claimed; American soldiers brought it to Wuhan during a military exercise, another asserted; Bill Gates was using it to start a new world order.

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

“I started kinda freaking out,” Yates said. He told his colleagues: “This is an information crisis without precedent. We haven’t seen anything like this before. … The information ecosystem is going to collapse.”

Looking back now, Yates admits his prediction was only “half right.”

“Even then I could not foresee how bad things would get,” he said. “Even in January. We were kind of freaking out looking at this wave coming and we thought it was big, but it was actually a tsunami on top of a tsunami.”

Of course, there had been warning signs: clues over the years that had pointed to the increasing vulnerability of our information systems to mistruths and lies.

“Researchers had been saying it’s inevitable,” Yates said. “That some event will happen that will create an information apocalypse, like a black hole of information where the system breaks down, no one knows who to believe, what to believe — and a major international crisis could create the perfect ground zero for something like this. And that’s exactly what happened with the pandemic.”

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content


SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, took the world unawares, challenging the information ecosystem at every level.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, took the world unawares, challenging the information ecosystem at every level. Photo by Phil Noble /REUTERS

By now, more than a year into that devastating pandemic, it’s become evident that the spread of disinformation, fake news, outright lies and misleading speculation surrounding COVID-19 has created deep fissures in Quebec, Canada, and all over the world. At the Montreal Gazette, we have decided to take a step back and examine this issue: How did disinformation become so prevalent and what is it doing to us?

In 2014, when he worked for Métro, a free daily newspaper in Montreal, Yates became curious about online disinformation and began blogging about it, hoping to publish an article a week debunking or fact-checking a story spreading on the internet. As he recalls those early days, he laughs.

He remembers his editor asking: “’Well it’s a good idea, but do you think you’ll be able to do at least one article a week?’ I don’t know,” Yates replied. “I don’t know if there’s that much crap going around online but I’ll give it a shot and see how it works.”

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

There was.

For his first post, he targeted a viral story that stated Cesar Millan, the so-called dog whisperer, was dead. The news was shared more than 14,000 times on social media before Yates got around to writing about it. It was easy to debunk: Millan posted on social media, saying that he was still alive.

His story did well. People read it, so he wrote more. He never lacked content because, as it turns out, even in 2014 there was more than enough disinformation spreading online to fill a weekly column.

He used humour and wrote in the third person, using the moniker “l’inspecteur viral” (the viral inspector, in English; he admits it sounds better in French). He played the part, acting as a kind of detective, delving not just into fake news stories and debunking them, but also investigating the business of fake news and how it spreads online.

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

The tools of his trade were simple: He Googled things and did basic research.

If an image purported to show a politician in a compromising position, he would double-check if that picture had appeared on the internet before. It was easy to see which photos had been doctored or cropped — and which were possibly legit.

On the set of Radio-Canada’s Les Décrypteurs, clockwise from right: Jeff Yates, Alexis De Lancer, special guest Brigitte Noël and Nicholas de Rosa.
On the set of Radio-Canada’s Les Décrypteurs, clockwise from right: Jeff Yates, Alexis De Lancer, special guest Brigitte Noël and Nicholas de Rosa. Photo by Pierre Obendrauf /Montreal Gazette

Despite how easy it was to debunk much of the fake news on the internet, disinformation (intentional fake news) and misinformation (fake news that may be misleading or false, but not intentionally so) continued to spread because few people bothered to double-check the facts.

At the time, few rules existed to limit the spread of disinformation online, and aside from a growing public awareness to “not believe everything you see online,” the issue did not seem to attract much attention.

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

Yates was one of only a handful of people in North America doing this type of work. Reporters at BuzzFeed had been focused on the issue for years, but there appeared to be little concern elsewhere.

At first, most of the stories Yates debunked for his Métro column were crazy, unlikely and outrageous: there is no bull urine in Red Bull energy drinks; archeologists did not find an 800-year-old cellphone; a study does not show that Canadians have bigger penises than Americans.

But then, as the Syrian refugee crisis grew, something changed: Yates began to see more political disinformation. He started debunking more posts spread by far-right groups. Their posts, which Yates frequently found to be false, accused the Liberal Party of Canada of being infiltrated by Islamists and charged the federal government was spending more money to care for Syrian refugees than seniors, among other claims.

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

There was something nefarious in this fake news.

“You could see this whole ecosystem start to get built where people were amping themselves up with completely made-up stories,” Yates said. “That’s when I realized the power of disinformation to actually generate attention and traffic. … Disinformation is like a cheat code to generate attention.”

“Once upon a time, everyone listened to one of the three major networks around suppertime to ‘get the news,'” said Kimiz Dalkir, director of McGill’s School of Information Studies.
“Once upon a time, everyone listened to one of the three major networks around suppertime to ‘get the news,'” said Kimiz Dalkir, director of McGill’s School of Information Studies. Photo by Allen McInnis /Montreal Gazette

A new media ecosystem had emerged, and, while we were more connected than we had ever been in history, some experts have suggested that these new connections actually drove us further apart.

“All of a sudden, anyone could create and share news. Anyone can be an author, a journalist, an influencer,” said Kimiz Dalkir, director of McGill’s School of Information Studies and co-editor of the book Navigating Fake News, Alternative Facts, and Misinformation in a Post-Truth World. “Once upon a time, everyone listened to one of the three major networks around suppertime to ‘get the news.’ Now there are so many to choose from, we have become much less synchronized as a society.”

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

Social media platforms profited off this new ecosystem. By the middle of the 2010s, Facebook, a site originally founded by Mark Zuckerberg for his fellow students to rate one another’s attractiveness, had blossomed into an internet colossus.

Other platforms like Twitter and YouTube, which is owned by Google, were also undergoing transformations, morphing from popular websites into internet behemoths with the ability to rake in billions of dollars in ad revenue. User bases were skyrocketing. Facebook had 500 million users in July of 2010. Five years later, it had 1.4 billion. YouTube users were watching 4 billion videos each day in 2012, up more than 30 per cent from the year prior.

Since, like most websites, these platforms’ revenue streams were tied to advertising, they thrived off users spending time on the site regardless of what content they were consuming.

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

Developers at Facebook and YouTube built algorithms designed to show people more videos or posts they were likely to watch or read, with the goal of keeping them on the site, consuming content, and — by extension — advertisements.

Yates dove into these algorithms, performing a makeshift experiment in 2017. He created two Facebook accounts and exposed them to conspiracy theories and other radical content. One of the accounts, which he named Gérard Engagé, interacted with the content, liking the posts, while the other, Herbie Neutre, abstained. Facebook’s algorithm then promoted more extreme content to Gérard Engagé, leading ‘him’ down a rabbit hole — and allowing Yates to eventually conclude that the algorithm had tried to “radicalize” Gérard Engagé.

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

It was all a bid to keep people online. Facebook has tweaked its algorithm over the years, now prioritizing interactions and posts from real people in a user’s network to keep them engaged. YouTube is also constantly tweaking its own algorithm.

“We live in these crazy times where everything we do and say online is in large part filtered through these algorithms,” said Fenwick McKelvey, associate professor in the department of communication studies at Concordia University and an advocate for greater transparency for social media algorithms. “I’m not saying they are some kind of mind control, but they do raise questions and concerns and demand more attention.”

Opportunists learned to manipulate those algorithms by using fake stories to earn money, and political forces that wanted to stoke fear or sow anger also began taking advantage of them.

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

“The incentives are baked into social media,” Yates said. “Some people realized somewhere along the line if you make up some crazy story about (dog whisperer) Cesar Millan, you can get 100,000 views easily and now they thought, ‘Well what if I invent something about Muslims?’”


Tech giants like Facebook were unprepared for the pandemic and the wave of disinformation it unleashed, experts say.
Tech giants like Facebook were unprepared for the pandemic and the wave of disinformation it unleashed, experts say. Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS /AFP via Getty Images

On Jan. 29, 2017, Alexandre Bissonnette consulted a fringe conspiracy website and read a story that claimed “radical Muslims” were a “dark, powerful, hidden force” in American politics plotting to get women to wear hijabs. It was not the first time the 27-year-old had read such stories. Later that day, he killed six people and injured five others at a Quebec City mosque.

The shooting itself became a target for conspiracy theorists. It was a “false flag” attack, well-known U.S. conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed, carried out by militant Islamists for propaganda purposes. Jones’s theories gained little traction online, but the shooting provided a glimpse of the harm disinformation could cause.

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

At the helm of Facebook, Zuckerberg faced mounting criticism over the unchecked spread of falsehoods on the platform. The election of Donald Trump, who rose to power as president of the United States with the help of battalions of Russian trolls spreading dissent and fear online, had revealed to the general public the social engineering potential of disinformation.

In response, Zuckerberg touted the creation of new teams of third-party fact-checkers, who would comb Facebook posts and label false or misleading content. The program kicked off in 2017. A year later, Canada got its first journalist as part of the program: Louis Baudoin-Laarman, a Montrealer who worked for Agence France-Presse (AFP).

He combed through hundreds or even thousands of flagged posts from Facebook users each day and chose to write about ones that were likely to go viral and cause harm, much in the same way as Yates.

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

“I was working on the same themes,” he said. “Refugees, Islam, immigration and how much Trudeau is hated.”

He was alone, at first — the only journalist devoted to fact-checking Canadian content for Facebook. Luckily, he didn’t notice anywhere near as much disinformation in Canada as he did in the United States. But there was enough to keep him occupied writing 10 to 20 articles a month.

It’s hard to say how much of an impact the fact-checking program has had. Viral misinformation tends to be read at 10 times the rate of any fact-check.

“That’s just how it goes,” Baudoin-Laarman said. “Nuance is less interesting to online users than divisive stuff or clickbait.”

He added: “Five years ago, fact-checking wasn’t really a beat. False information on social media could just be shared ad infinitum without anyone really trying to put a stop to it. … It’s so hard to stop the flow of misinformation. But it’s hard for me to imagine another system.”

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

Facebook has continued to point to its third-party fact-checker program as an example of real action it is taking to combat disinformation on its platform.

But some have criticized Facebook, arguing that the presence of fact-checkers is nothing but a topical solution. In January 2020, on the eve of the pandemic, Facebook’s fact-checking partners conducted a total of just 302 fact-checks on American content, according to a tally by Popular Information, a political newsletter, even as thousands of posts (a very conservative estimate) containing potential misinformation continued to spread unheeded each day.

“It is probably more pieces of content than any team can reasonably look at in a day,” said Marisha Goldhamer, the senior verification editor for AFP in Canada, “but because we’re trying to focus on the most viral claims, that can be manageable if you tell yourself, OK, we’re just going to look at the 20 most viral posts and see if any of those require us to fact-check them.”

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

A few humans can only debunk so many posts. Facebook does have algorithms working to prevent the spread of disinformation, harmful content and content spread by fake users known as bots, but the algorithms aren’t perfect either. They can sometimes be late to react to new types of content that they have not yet been programmed to remove.

Protest art on Capitol Hill in Washington portrays Google CEO Sundar Pichai, left, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, centre, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, far right, as January 6th rioters.
Protest art on Capitol Hill in Washington portrays Google CEO Sundar Pichai, left, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, centre, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, far right, as January 6th rioters. Photo by JONATHAN ERNST /REUTERS

Ultimately, experts say the systems at Facebook, YouTube and Twitter that were designed to prevent disinformation were unprepared for an event like the pandemic. But many argue there was no way they could have been. The virus took the world unawares, challenging the information ecosystem at every level, including the news media, where the volume of new information left us overwhelmed.

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

For fact-checkers like Yates and Baudoin-Laarman, those early months passed in a blur. Like a group of hospital emergency physicians, Yates and his team had to prioritize content by performing a sort of triage. They focused on stories that were most likely to go viral and on disinformation most likely to cause harm.

“It was hopeless,” Yates said, “It’s like those videos you see of a hurricane or a flood in some southern American town and there’s a guy putting down sandbags and you’re like, ‘What the hell are you doing? The water’s going everywhere around. That one sandbag is not going to do anything, right?’ But you have to do something. And eventually, if you put enough sandbags there, you hope that it’s going to help someone.”

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

He was witnessing the start of a parallel crisis to the coronavirus. It was the start of the infodemic, as experts came to refer to it — an event born from a dangerous clash: uncertainty about a new virus, one that is unknown to the scientific community, and the new, lightning-fast pace at which information now travelled. People wanted answers to questions that were only just being asked. The appearance of truly reliable information — Exactly how effective are face masks? How deadly is this new disease? — would have taken weeks, months or longer. We still lack some of these answers. But to some, answers were easy to find: Bill Gates is behind the virus, it was created in a lab, the globalists are trying to control us.

COVID conspiracy theories set off a chain reaction, sparking a movement of people united in their rage against the government’s public health measures.
COVID conspiracy theories set off a chain reaction, sparking a movement of people united in their rage against the government’s public health measures. Photo by Pierre Obendrauf /Montreal Gazette

The truth was — and is — more complicated.

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

The groundwork had been laid. The cascade of false or misleading information that filled this void set off a chain reaction, sparking the growth of a movement of people united in their rage against the government, health officials and the media, convinced they were being lied to and that they had access to the truth.

“All the disinformation problems and sources were already out there and were already active (before the pandemic),” said Colette Brin, director of the the Centre d’études sur les médias at Université Laval and co-editor of a recent report, Portrait of an Infodemic.

“All these narratives that feed into social anxieties, these conspiracy theories about Bill Gates taking control of the world and so on through vaccines, these kinds of narratives were just kind of repurposed during the pandemic.”

It was, Brin added, the first major global crisis in the information age.

“The pandemic was really unique in the sense that it hit the whole world almost at the same time,” she said. “I don’t think there’s been anything quite like it.”

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.
Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified Brigitte Noël in a photo taken on the set of Radio-Canada’s Les Décrypteurs. She was a special guest for that episode. The name of Louis Baudoin-Laarman was also misspelled. The Montreal Gazette regrets the error.

Latest National Stories

Advertisement

Story continues below

This Week in Flyers
https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/the-contagion-of-covid-conspiracies-in-quebec?utm_campaign=Misreport&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter
montrealgazette.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-39
376601
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5VSDNTGSVWZFNRHDU3D3QKKVKWMB6VUO
<urn:uuid:818c698f-5abd-4999-8fb1-92452a6828cd>
2021-09-20T07:10:50Z
35.183.138.169
text/html
sha1:QIME7PPUJTYDS2KY52AO4TJF6LOPM5M2
<urn:uuid:3ec1a871-4619-421b-b007-53a114646431>
https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/the-contagion-of-covid-conspiracies-in-quebec?utm_campaign=Misreport&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter
response
<urn:uuid:68dc9576-1d41-4a99-adfc-07a7064f1aeb>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-39
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-150
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/