From vaccine hesitancy to the rise of far-right extremism, COVID-19 has mainstreamed conspiracy theories at an astonishing rate, with devastating impacts — but the handful of reporters and researchers addressing them in Canada say they don’t have the resources to respond to the country’s dis- and misinformation crisis alone
BY EMMA BUCHANAN, J Source, Sept. 24, 2021
For the first wave of the pandemic, journalist Jeff Yates and his colleagues at Radio-Canada’s disinformation debunking team were so overrun with emails that they had to put a triage system in place.
Before the pandemic, Yates says Décrypteurs, Canada’s only dedicated disinformation reporting team from a French-language media outlet, might receive anywhere from one to seven emails per day. But when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in mid-March 2020, that number climbed to about 100 emails daily, and left three team members scrambling to address thousands of messages and false health claims circulating at a pace Yates says didn’t dissipate until the summer of 2020. (Décrypteurs received 5,230 emails from 4,077 people between March 1 and Aug. 31 of 2020. Yates says the waves of emails “came back with a vengeance” in September 2020 when Québec announced another lockdown.)
“We kind of lost control of our inboxes,” Yates says, adding that the sheer volume of emails and disinformation online meant they had to put in place a “worst first” system: his colleagues got up early in the morning to sort through the many emails they’d received overnight. Like they always had, the team decided what to address based on the information’s virality and risk. Now, though, it was no longer just a matter of what they should cover, but what they could.
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