Misinformation is turning into a meme.

Society needs to be fighting the spread of true propaganda. But the institutions charged with doing so are playing a dangerous game.

Last month, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau why many Canadians may pay more carbon tax costs than they receive in rebates. In his question, he cited a statistic prepared by the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

In response, Trudeau accused Poilievre of spreading misinformation.

Misinformation is false information that is intentionally spread to mislead people. But labeling fact-based evidence that goes against the grain of a politician's narrative as misinformation is becoming standard practice. Searching for the term in the Hansard, the official record of Parliamentary debate, proves as much. And on this front, things have gotten worse.

For example, the Liberal government recently introduced a last-minute amendment to a gun control bill. The amendment was supposed to define what constitutes a military assault rifle but instead listed several firearms primarily used for hunting. The list of affected hunting firearms is publicly available for all to see in the amendment. When confronted with this fact, instead of attempting to justify the inclusion of these firearms in the amendment, the Liberals simply accused the amendment's opponents of spreading misinformation. 

Politicians weaponizing the term "misinformation" when propaganda is on the rise, particularly from autocratic nations and legitimate extremist groups, is a big problem. 

The spread of misinformation can potentially undermine economic and democratic processes. It's a serious issue that deserves a serious response. But many will scoff at this notion because people that are supposed to safeguard the public in these situations have themselves been devaluing the concept for political gain. This erodes trust from the public that the problem of misinformation is genuine and not an imagined issue designed to denigrate non-conforming schools of thought. It also vaporizes the ability of certain institutions to set about fixing the problem. 

A perfect illustration of this is the person tasked with protecting the Canadian public from hostile agents who use propaganda to sow discontent, Liberal Public Safety Minister Marco Mendocino. Mendocino is guilty of gaslighting those who questioned the Liberal decision to attempt to ban certain hunting rifles by accusing them of spreading misinformation. He also has been accused of misleading Parliament on whether or not there were legal grounds to invoke the Emergencies Act, which grants the federal government massive powers, during the 2022 trucker convoy. 

How can the public trust Mendocino to address these issues and protect the fundamentals of free speech if he uses the term to gaslight his opposition and engages in the spread of misinformation himself? How can the government be trusted to address misinformation when they have changed its definition to be anything that might undermine its political position?

It's not just politicians that are to blame.

Last week, Twitter's new management gave journalist Matt Taibbi access to records showing that the platform's former management involved themselves in a decision to suppress a politically damaging story related to American President Joe Biden's son, Hunter. Yesterday, similar records confirmed that the platform uses tools to suppress the reach of accounts. These reports also confirm that a Stanford professor of economics and medicine, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, had his account reach suppressed when he started raising questions about the impact of pandemic-related school closures on children's long-term health. 

The types of accounts, views, and information suppressed raise questions about whether Twitter acted primarily against voices that expressed right-of-center views. In all the reported instances, these actions were allegedly taken without the platform notifying users or posting objective criteria about circumstances when Twitter would opt to suppress accounts. Worse, before Musk's buyout, Twitter maintained that it did not express bias in suppressing the reach of user accounts, specific news stories, or ideas. Instead, Twitter has attempted to justify these actions by suggesting the platform was trying to combat the spread of misinformation.

With these new revelations, how is the public supposed to trust that social media platforms are being honest when they claim that they are suppressing certain content to prevent the spread of misinformation when they're more likely suppressing certain political viewpoints? How can we be equipped to discern political bias - left or right - from fact?

We now find ourselves at a juncture where we should consider how we can safeguard ourselves from forming opinions based on false information. But we're facing the added complexity of having to discern whether the institutions that are supposed to be neutral arbiters of fact and justice are themselves guilty of deliberately spreading lies and half-truths to hoodwink us into complacency.

In this, the Liberal government has a moral obligation to cease blithely using the term misinformation to gaslight political querents. Social media platforms need to quit using tools to suppress contrarian views, particularly without disclosing these practices to the public. And each of us needs to objectively conclude what is right and good by considering multiple viewpoints and data sets.

Or, we can be content to let Putin’s bots win.