Prior to 2004 virtually everything a politician said that reached the public passed through the filter of “journalism”. It was printed or broadcast, or infrequently, posted online but *someone other than the individual or the individual’s spokespeople had to publish it.*

Everything was, in theory, subject to some form of editorial review.

Through a variety of official means, including legislation and professional standards, such as those protected by CBSC, those who published things were ultimately responsible for the veracity of those things.

We had what is commonly referred to as a system of “checks and balances”.

In 2004 Facebook was created. Today the number of daily uploads (of all things) is nearly five billion. Per day. Every day. The number of actual shares is in the hundreds of billions per day.

Some great percentage of those uploaded and shared items have not been put through any filter or subjected to any journalistic review. No one edited them or verified them. There are no standards or laws in place to ensure the veracity of things published online via social media.

Someone, maybe a politician or an out of work plumber, just decides to say something and publish it. One can say pretty much anything on social media. It doesn’t need to be true. There are no internet regulations, no legislation that requires honesty or due diligence.

In 2006 Twitter started and now registers over 500 million original tweets per day and billions and billions of shares via retweets and quote tweets.

Every day we are potentially exposed to nearly six billion pieces of unverified information.

They’re not all misinformation, of course, we don’t see them all, they aren’t all in a language we speak or about anything Canadian. But even if only one tenth of 1% of them were relevant, that’s still six million pieces of potentially dangerous or incorrect information.

Based on average Canadian social media use (67% of us use social media) I believe it’s safe to make the statement that the chances of any social media using Canadian NOT seeing at least one piece of false information every single day is exceedingly small.

CBC published a poll in 2019 that said that 90% of Canadians admitted to having fallen for fake news. No one can know for sure, but well-educated guesses range from 40% to 75% as to the lack of reliability or factuality of social media content as a whole.

Misinformation is widely considered, by political scientists, social scientists, analysts, general intellectuals and even the pundit class to be the single largest problem we face in our world.

Oxford, suggests we are entering a period of post-truth politics.

This is all for the person in my DMs asking why I am so obsessed with this topic.

Because I'd like my children to have a freer, fairer, healthier world in which to raise my yet-to-be-born grandchildren is the short answer.

And we can't get to any of that if people are making decisions on bad or false information.

TL;DR?

We have lost the checks that kept us balanced and we need to create new checks.