Jeff Yates is a journalist with Radio-Canada, Canada's French-language public broadcaster. He has been covering online disinformation since 2014. Jeff is one of the founding members of Décrypteurs, the only team from a major Canadian news outlet solely devoted to covering online disinformation.
On March 16th, 2020, a bright and sunny Monday morning, we sat staring at our computer screens, paralysed, wondering what to do next.
The World Health Organization had just declared coronavirus a pandemic and, over the weekend, world governments had started scrambling to offer some type of response. Lockdown orders had started being put in place. People were getting scared. The internet lost its mind.
We woke up to our inbox melting down. We usually got two or three emails a day from people asking us to fact-check something or other. On that fateful morning, a new email would pop up every few minutes, faster than we could ever read them.
It was then that we realised that the long-prophesied Information Apocalypse had arrived.
Décrypteurs is part of Canada’s French-language public broadcaster, Radio-Canada. We’re the only team from a major Canadian news outlet solely dedicated to covering online mis- and disinformation. In 2021, after over a year of information disorder on a massive scale, this is sadly still the case. We’re a relatively small outfit, with two journalists working full-time on web articles. A larger - yet still bare bones - team also produces a weekly half-hour Décrypteurs TV show which covers these topics.
Our inbox barely slowed down over the first five months of the pandemic, during which we received over 5200 emails from some 4000 people and saw the membership of our Facebook group increase fivefold. The ratings to our TV show also skyrocketed as people sought what few lighthouses they could find in the haze of rumours, half-truths and outright lies online.
One thing that struck us in the first few days of the pandemic was the truly global nature of disinformation. Videos shot in the United States of tanks on trains would be shared in Western Canada and be passed off as proof that the Canadian army was about to enforce martial law; a video purportedly proving that a French health institute had patented the emerging coronavirus in 2004 would bounce around in local Quebec Facebook groups mere minutes after it was first published in France; a video showing an Asian woman eating a bat and shared on Chinese social media would find its way here, with the woman being accused of having started the pandemic.
I have been covering online disinformation for over six years, and I’ve written before that French Canada is in many ways insulated from the online disinformation sphere. The lingua franca of the internet is English. For disinformation to jump here from English-language sources, it first has to be translated. This usually takes time and effort and adds some friction to viral pieces of disinformation.
In the midst of a full-blown crisis, that friction was gone. Translations were appearing almost instantly, thanks to Google Translate (intelligibility be damned). Videos, often shown without proper context, became a form of universal language in themselves. English (or German, or Italian) videos could be massively shared without translation, as long as someone framed it in French: “this video from another country proves that They are lying”. No matter if people here didn’t understand what the video actually said.
The flow of disinformation is not only one sided. Quebec, Canada’s only majority French-speaking province, has become a major international hub for the spreading of false narratives.
CBC has reported on how a Montreal-based website was identified by the U.S. State department as being part of a network of proxy sites that, while having no visible ties to Moscow, "serve no other purpose but to push pro-Kremlin content". Early in the pandemic, it published an article claiming that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had been created by the US military and brought to China. The article was then shared on Twitter by a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry.
More recently, Quebec became a bastion for the QAnon conspiracy. As anti-mask protests raged in Montreal, peppered with QAnon adherents shouting the movement’s slogans, French researchers noted that Quebec-based conspiracy influencers had been heavily responsible for the spread of that conspiracy theory in France.
In December, we found a curious case where an anonymous “whistleblower” sent an email to conspiracy-minded people in Western Canada. The email contained what was purportedly a leak from the Canadian government which detailed its plans for the coming months, including creating COVID-19 concentration camps, abolishing private property and preparing for the emergence of a “COVID-21” virus.
This false information quickly spread in Canada, but also found an audience overseas. The email was translated into French and passed off as a leak from the French government in that country. It was even mentioned in a video in the Philippines, which was watched over 3 million times.
Covering disinformation in the infodemic age
Covering disinformation is not an easy task. Here are some tips for journalists looking to wade out into the disinformation fever swamp.
Ask yourselves: “why are we covering this?” At Décrypteurs, we evaluate two factors before deciding to debunk or cover a piece of disinformation: virality and potential risk. If a piece is incredibly viral, but it doesn’t pose a serious risk - say, a doctored image of the Curiosity Mars rover -, we might choose to debunk it, because so many people have been exposed to it. On the other hand, if something is not so widespread but it poses a serious risk to the public - say, some dangerous fake COVID-19 cure -, we may choose to nip it in the bud before it goes massively viral. If a piece of disinformation is both viral and dangerous, we won’t hesitate to debunk it.
Foster a good relationship with your audience. No matter how well plugged-in a journalist is, she can’t see everything. Your audience is your eyes and ears “on the ground”. Encouraging readers to send you tips is crucial to know what is circulating online. Prioritising questions from your audience in your coverage is a good way to foster a sense of trust and reciprocity.
Be mindful of how your coverage will appear on social media. People often don’t read articles, despite our best efforts to convince them to. When covering disinformation, be the opposite of clickbait. Make it so that someone who sees your article or your video on social media without reading or watching it knows exactly what is true and what is false. Be clear in your title and your first few lines. Ensure that the image accompanying your article can’t be used out of context to further propagate lies. At Décrypteurs, our article titles are always framed as: “No, such and such is not true”. The images in our articles contain a “FALSE” tag.
Know the lay of the land. Disinformation in 2021 is often born in tight-knit online communities before making the jump to more mainstream channels. Know who the key players are in your area and follow them. Join their Facebook groups and their WhatsApp chatrooms, follow them on Twitter, subscribe to their video streaming platforms. Not only will this allow you to get the jump on pieces of disinformation before they go viral, but it will give you a sense of how these communities operate.
Amplify the manipulation, not the bad actors. When you cover disinformation peddlers or extremists, they win. They suddenly get a huge boost in popularity and attain an audience they never could reach on their own. This is why it’s important to cover these people properly. Don’t amplify their messaging and don’t allow them to state their case with more lies. Showing how they manipulate and abuse social media, for example by exposing how they game the algorithm or use deception to grab attention, is usually a better framing.
Stay safe and ask for help. Any journalist covering disinformation will unfortunately face abuse online. It’s okay to feel overwhelmed. Do not tolerate hateful messages or insults. Seek out emotional support. The community of journalists occupying this space have seen it all. They’re a great bunch of people who are usually extremely helpful. Don’t hesitate to reach out with questions or simply to commiserate. Don’t face the Information Apocalypse alone.
