VIDEO - FUREY: Be wary of Liberal plan to police ‘fake news’ during the election | Toronto Sun

Try to come up with a working definition of “fake news” in a few seconds, something that would fit into a sentence or two.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, despite the endless chatter about the phrase. And you’ll be even harder pressed to come up with a definition that’ll be acceptable to a large number of people.

Ask 10 people for a definition and you’re bound to get 10 different answers.

Yet somehow the federal government thinks it has a firm handle on the issue. Enough so that on Wednesday morning several Liberal cabinet ministers convened a press conference to announce what they’re doing to do combat “fake news,” disinformation and foreign interference in the upcoming federal election.

The plan includes $7 million to fund workshops that aim to teach Canadians how to sort through potential disinformation as well as “critically assess online news reporting and editorials.”

This is a dangerous path to head down, to put it mildly. The very notion of the party in power coming up with the framework for how to police information during a campaign in which they’ll be seeking re-election is already a massive conflict of interest.

That’s not the end of it, though. The feds also unveiled something called the “critical election incident public protocol.” If the government becomes aware of an “interference attempt” during the election, a panel of senior bureaucrats will be convened to figure out whether it’s serious or not — “a substantial threat to a free and fair election” — and, if so, a press conference is held to inform the public.

What shape is this going to take? What if hundreds of nameless social media accounts originating from Russia or China start sharing a story that makes Prime Minister Justin Trudeau look bad? Is that interference? Likely. If the story is completely bogus, certainly yes.

Then the question becomes, should the feds call on social media outlets to shut down these accounts? And should they then hold a press conference to inform the public to be wary of it all?

Maybe, but the optics of it are difficult — government resources being used in the middle of a campaign for what basically amounts to shooting down a negative story about the PM. Shouldn’t it just be up to the public and other media to swat away the fake news?

Here’s a harder example. What if the story shared by the bots is an accurate story published by, say, the Canadian Press? The bots are sharing it to make the PM look bad, but it’s not fake news. Maybe because of the foreign bots sharing the story so widely a handful of Canadians who were otherwise going to vote Liberal changed their mind. Foreign actors swayed votes. Is that disinformation? Should it be shut down? Should there be a press conference to warn people that an otherwise aboveboard story has fans in the Kremlin?

These questions matter. There have been a whole lot of think-tank reports and academic papers written about fake news and they all tend to talk in generalities. But there are no generalities to “fake news.” The only way to tell what’s fake and what’s not is to dig deep into the details.

This is what federal officials and this newfangled incident response panel will be tasked with getting right. Good luck with that.

You can bet that when a press conference is held, it will only make matters worse. It’ll create a cascading reaction where everyone debates whether what’s brought up is actually true disinformation. People will question the government’s motives. This will create confusion and subsequent news stories more fake than the first one.

The feds have also released a condescending graphic they’re planning to send around that tells people “think critically about what you see online.” “Why am I seeing this information?” it reads. “Is this message trying to influence me?”

Canadians should also think critically about this whole government plan.

afurey@postmedia.com

https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/furey-be-wary-of-liberal-plan-to-police-fake-news-during-the-election