It took less than a day after the official launch of Canada’s 45th federal election campaign for the zone to be flooded with nonsense—or rather, more flooded than it already was.
Even as an infrequent user of social media, the increase was immediately noticeable—an endless parade of bad-faith memes, conspiracy theories posed as harmless questions, YouTube videos with misleading, out-of-context taglines.
Opposing armies of faceless, digital information warriors, all frantic, desperate for us to validate their political views.
It’s embarrassing, really—and enough to inspire just a little bit of nausea in even the strongest of stomachs.
If you’re unfortunate enough to still have a Facebook account in 2025, you likely have a friend or friends who have spent the last few days, weeks or even months (hell, maybe they started during COVID and never stopped) spamming their partisan political views for whatever friends they still have left.
They’re not bots, but they might as well be, spreading their preferred party’s messages of the day through the digital grapevine, to be picked up and shared by other useful idiots in the neverending war for our minds, our dollars and our votes.
Almost always in lowest-common-denominator meme or video form, designed to elicit an emotional reaction but lacking in any of the necessary context. Politics is too big, too complex, too nuanced to be faithfully translated by the meme-generating partisans—yet more and more, that’s how the public is engaging with it. The simplicity of it all only serves to dumb down the discourse (at best) and feed extremism (at worst).
For those of us fortunate enough to remember a time before the internet—and how strange is it to consider our generation is the last who can make that claim?—seeing through the bullshit is easy enough (or it should be… evidently not all of us possess this superpower).
But as Canada’s election campaign ramps up, it’s worth taking a few moments to steel ourselves for the torrent of misinformation to come. And that means all of us, on all sides of the political divide—ignorance and confusion is not a partisan trait, and with today’s threats of foreign interference and advances in AI, none of us are truly immune.
One handy online guide for spotting fake news consists of eight tips: Consider the source; read beyond the headline; research the author; confirm the supporting sources; check the date; make sure it isn’t satire; consider how your own biases could be affecting your judgment; and ask the experts.
If it sounds like homework, that’s because it kinda is. But if you don’t do your homework, chances are you’re gonna bomb the test.
It’s especially important here in 2025, when we know for a fact foreign actors are trying to influence our electoral outcomes. Sadly, many of us are easy pickings.
In a Statistics Canada report released in July 2024, more than two in five Canadians (43 per cent) reported it was becoming harder to distinguish between true and false news or information in 2023, compared with three years prior.
A different survey conducted by the Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2022 found almost half of respondents (47 per cent) were unable to correctly identify at least 75 per cent of a series of misinformation statements they were presented with. Meanwhile, about one in six respondents (15 per cent) could correctly identify just 25 per cent or fewer of the misinformation statements.
Unsurprisingly, the latter group was “less trusting of mainstream news, more likely to trust social media and use it for news, and less likely to fact-check.”
As with all elections, Pique Newsmagazine, inanimate object that it is, does not care who you vote for, has no interest in influencing you one way or the other (and because it seemingly needs to be repeated two or three times a year, an opinion columnist is one person giving their opinion—it’s up to you to take it or leave it).
As its editor, I only wish for readers to be as informed as possible before making their choice. But the timeframe makes things tricky. This being a snap election, voters will be slammed with information from all sides in a very short campaign—a lot of it misleading, or just plain wrong—and the reality is voters need to do some of the heavy lifting themselves.
Don’t rely on viral links or your friends’ memes to inform your vote—and for the love of all things Canadian, don’t be a useful idiot and start sharing things blindly yourself. Fact-check, verify (with at least three sources if you can), confirm, and where at all possible, have your political discussions in person—for the most part, the meme-spamming trolls ain’t changing anybody’s minds, they’re mostly just muddying the water and begging for a reaction. Ignore them.
Read up on your local candidates, their party platforms, and consider the realism of their promises. With incumbents, consider their past records, and whether they kept past pledges. Have they earned another term?
Attend your local all-candidates meetings, and if you can, actually speak with the candidates themselves. Ask them tough questions and see how they respond.
And on election day, cut through the noise and make an informed choice of your own.
