It has been just over a year and a half since Meta began blocking all trace of Canadian news media from its platforms. The current federal election campaign is the first to take place within this new media landscape, where biased, unverified, and – dare I say it – fake news is splashed across users’ “newsfeeds.” It is unfortunate and irresponsible, especially considering recent moves by Meta to drop its fact-checking program.
The federal inquiry on foreign interference has said entities aligned with China and India have already attempted to interfere with elections, without much luck. The inquiry concluded that disinformation campaigns are a threat to this country’s “long-term democratic health.” Hyper-partisan or misleading content has invaded Canadian Facebook and Instagram feeds over the last several weeks in the lead up to the end-of-April vote. Artificial intelligence-generated scams and advertisements mimicking legitimate news articles are also all too common, and sometimes hard to discern.
The problem is not so much that Facebook and Instagram are now non-news platforms. The issue is that most Canadians still do not know that legitimate news media have been wiped from existence on these outlets. In 2023, when Meta first began blocking news, around four-fifths of Canadians used Facebook and over 50 per cent of those said they relied on the platform as a source for news.
Access to reliable, objective, and verified news is always of utmost importance, but especially during an election when we are being called to make an informed decision about who will run this country. Citizens looking for trusted coverage of the election that goes beyond general polling predictions or is more than a daily tally of where each party leader will be campaigning will have to go back to traditional sources. This means unplugging from social media, so that when standing before the ballot box on April 28, Canadians can be confident they are making the right decision.
Sarah Rennie