FEDS’ TRUTH TROUBLES

Federal Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan is sounding the alarm against fake news. But while there’s value in what he’s saying, there’s also much left unsaid. “We have taken this into account very seriously in our defence policy,” Harjit Sajjan said in a recent interview with The Canadian Press. “We need to further educate our citizens about the impact of fake news. No one wants to be duped by anybody.”

Sajjan’s comments were made while he was attending a defence conference in Halifax that discussed cyber-warfare.

The type of cyber-warfare he referenced wasn’t dangerous attacks on critical infrastructure, such as power grids.

No, Sajjan meant disinformation campaigns from the likes of Russia designed to redirect public opinion.

It’s the sort of stuff that’s caused significant hand-wringing in the United States and led to concerns the Russians somehow swayed the outcome of their presidential election.

While security sources agreed the Russians attempted to meddle in the election, there is no serious evidence they effectively managed to sway the vote.

What we’re ultimately talking about here is money spent producing thousands of fake accounts and ads on social media that misrepresented facts intentionally to sow chaos and dissent on both sides of the political spectrum.

Make no mistake about it, that’s a problem we can’t let flourish in Canada. But it’s not on the same troubling scale as, say, foreign agents stealing ballot boxes.

One thing Russian bots do is amplify views that already have been voiced by domestic voters. So in addition to falsifying entire narratives they primarily amplified existing ones, presumably with the intention of leading droves of dim-witted voters astray.

Sajjan is certainly right that our defence forces should be on guard against election meddling and educating the public to separate fact from fiction.

We’re not convinced, however, that government is the best champion for the job, given its own troubling relationship with truth.

In the past couple of years, among other things, we’ve seen the federal government attempt to cover up Justin Trudeau’s Aga Khan vacation, hide data about the carbon tax costs, and argue there is no such thing as illegal border-crossers (they prefer “irregular”).

We all need to be on guard against all misinformation, and that includes misinformation from our own government.