CANADALAND

(Short Cuts) Pudd’nhead POTUS

Over the past two weeks, the media has suddenly become experts in diagnosing neurodegenerative disorders following Biden’s stumbles at the debate. Canadian Youtuber J.J. McCullough joins Justin Ling to dissect this presidential testing of our patience.

Then, the Liberals are serious about stemming disinformation, and that’s why they’re paying social media influencers to spread government messages. Why this approach to disinformation won’t work and some ideas on what might.

Host: Justin Ling

Credits: James Nicholson (Producer), Caleb Thompson (Audio Editor), max collins (Production Manager), Karyn Pugliese (Editor-in-Chief)

Guest: J.J. McCullough

Further reading:

Sponsors:

Douglas:

Douglas is giving our listeners a FREE Sleep Bundle with each mattress purchase. Get the sheets, pillows, mattress and pillow protectors FREE with your Douglas purchase today. Visit do uglas.ca/canadaland to claim this offer!

Article:

Article is offering our listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim this offer, visit article.com/canadaland and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout

If you value this podcast, Support us! You’ll be a part of the solution to Canada’s journalism crisis, you’ll be keeping our work free and accessible to everybody.

You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music—included with Prime.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Duration:: 47m
Broadcast on:: 11 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Why don't more infant formula companies use organic grass-fed whole milk instead of skim? Why don't more infant formula companies use the latest breast milk science? Why don't more infant formula companies run their own clinical trials? Why don't more infant formula companies use more of the proteins found in breast milk? Why don't more infant formula companies have their own factories instead of outsourcing their manufacturing? We wondered the same thing, so we made buy-heart a better formula for formula. Learn more at buyheart.com. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. $45 up front for three months plus taxes and fees promoting for new customers for limited time. Unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month slows. Full turns at mintmobile.com. This episode is brought to you by Douglas. Shania Twain once asked, "Who's bed have your boots been under?" But I have a follow-up question. Was the bed a Douglas? Because if it was a Douglas, then maybe it was more of a mattress issue than it was a relationship issue. Don't cheat yourself out of comfort. Order a Douglas mattress today. Douglas is giving our listeners a free sleep bundle with each mattress purchase. Get the Sheets Pillow, Mattress, and Pillow Protectors free with your Douglas purchase today. Visit Douglas.ca/CanadaLand to claim this offer. That's Douglas.ca/CanadaLand. Canada Land, funded by you. [music] Welcome to hell. My name is Justin Ling and I am your guest host this week as Jesse Brown was carried off by a pack of wild beavers. My guest this week is the shockingly popular YouTuber, political columnist, and noted sayer of a boot, J.J. McCullough. Hi there, J.J. Hi, thanks for having me. Absolutely. On this week's show, the presidential testing of our patients. From cheap fakes to Biden's debate headache to the deep state plot to cover up the president's melting brain. We've sure fit a lot of media narratives into just a few crazy weeks. And then, countering influence with influencers, the liberal party's quest to fight disinformation is disclose to making me lose my mind. Welcome to Shortcuts, where we talk shit about the news. [music] This episode is brought to you by Michael Brown, or Lawrence Saville, Kim Fenton, Don Fallow, Linda Mackenzie Nichols, Victoria Daglish, Tanya James, and Maize. Hey, this is Maize and I work in the video game industry in Justjage, aka Montreal. As much as I'd love to hear Jesse get schooled by the expert guests on shortcuts, I support Canada Land because of the brilliant people who work on the network's investigative series. The level of depth that Archie, Jordan, and Nor pack into every unique season of Commons is so impressive. And shout out to Robert and Angel for bringing us the facts with nuance and humor in their Pretendian series. All of you are super talented, so please keep it up. [music] [music] If we finally beat Medicare. He says he's fine, physically and cognitively, but is he really? You know, you said you have an ongoing assessment. Have you had a full neurological and cognitive evaluation? I get a full neurological test every day. Well, I took two tests, cognitive tests, I used it. Medical doctors from the best in the world tried me everywhere I go. First questions are very easy. The last questions are much more difficult. I have an ongoing assessment of what I'm doing. Like you'll go person, woman, man, camera, TV. With the COVID, excuse me, dealing with everything we have to do with such person, woman, man, camera, TV. I've been touching everywhere I go. Give us that again. Can you do that again? And you go person, woman, man, camera, TV. If you get it in order, you get extra points. They said nobody gets it in order. It's actually not that easy, but for me it was easy. JJ, before we delve into the whole presidential fracas of the past few weeks, I know you've been talking about this. You made a video about it. I just have four questions for you. I think it's important we do a cognitive assessment test before we start any of this conversation. So just four easy questions. We'll just see what the results say. All right, number one, what is the day? It's Wednesday. Okay, well, what is the date? The date, July 10th. All right, spelled the word "world" backwards. D, L, O, no way. Fuck, I screwed this up already. Well, I can't be president, Justin. All right, the last question, the last question is what year is it? It is 2024. Not much I know. I'm bad at spelling. I'm a little dyslexic. You call me on that one. I'm unfair to be commander in chief. Yeah, I'm sorry. I found this test online, obviously, and I've calculated the results. And this is a technical diagnosis. It says you have putting brain. So I'm sorry. I'm sorry to break this news to you. Listen, JJ, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but a lot of American and even Canadian journalists have suddenly and very recently deputized themselves as cognitive specialists. So after the over the last couple of months, if you pick up a copy of the Washington Post, you may hear them interviewing cognitive specialists saying that Joe Biden's recent campaign missteps might show that he's at all the infirm or out of his depth. You've seen a ton of TV news bring on cognitive specialists, Parkinson's specialists, aging specialists to tell us how all of his memory issues are signs of something deeper. Before we even get into any of the specifics, what do you make of some of this covered over the last couple of weeks? Well, it's quite striking because not only has everybody become sort of an overnight expert in cognitive ability of people that they're just observing through the television. People have also seemingly discovered a new clause in the Constitution that says that in order to be fit to serve as president of the United States, you have to meet a certain standard of communication effectiveness. The thing that just really gets to me is I've always been a huge critic of debates in general, I think that they're very phony and performative and do not reflect anything about sort of the competence for office of a politician. And I think that this major crazy freak out over Biden's presidential sort of debate performance is just another illustration of that is that we have given way, way, way, way, way too much importance to these debates. And I think, frankly, we've given way, way, way, way, way too much importance to the politician's communication effectiveness as somehow a proxy for their fitness for the job overall. The whole case against Biden from a sort of cognitive perspective is all based on communication skills. And to me, I don't know, that says something about the degree that presidents are now functioning primarily as media figures more than anything else. Beth, I disagree to a wild degree on I think everything you just said. But let's rewind the clock a little bit before we build up to that. What's so striking to me is that, okay, yes, we have deputized ourselves, neurological experts with very little competency in that regard. But what's so interesting to me is that up until that debate, which now it feels like an eternity, but it's been two weeks now, up until that debate, the media narrative was that a lot of the allegations around Biden's decline were actually misinformation. We even coined a new term to describe all of the videos that had been published over, you know, mostly from the Trump campaign, sometimes from the New York Post, sometimes on Fox News, whatever. We started calling them cheap fakes. And, you know, these are videos that were deceptively edited. You know, this is that video. I'm sure everyone's seen it by now. That video of Biden at the D-Day Memorial kind of wandering off as every other world leader is watching this parrot trooper come down from the sky and the video shows Biden sort of meandering off into a field. And then, you know, if you zoom out, you actually realize that he's going to talk to a different parrot trooper, right? You know, there's a video out there of him supposedly trying to sit down on a chair that doesn't exist. It turned out there actually was a chair. Again, it was this weird camera angle. And so you had this whole media narrative that went on for a number of weeks that basically said, you know, Biden may be aging, but, you know, the idea that he's facing serious cognitive decline, it's all misinformation. Don't worry about it. It's just an RNC plot to dupe you into thinking that there's something amiss when things are mostly fine. And in fact, a lot of the coverage, I mean, over the last couple of years has also highlighted Trump's supposed to slide into dementia. Hence why he was pushed into doing this cognitive test, which he 100% aced during his presidency. And it's been interesting to watch that narrative completely pivot just within like an hour of the debate happening away from, don't worry, this is all a disinformation campaign too. Okay. Yeah. Maybe maybe the president does in fact have putting brain. I mean, my perspective is that two things in theory do not have to sort of contradict each other, right? Like it can be very much the case that the videos were selectively edited, as you sort of said, and were not in fact an accurate reflection of Biden's cognitive state. But again, to go back what I was saying before, that Biden's communication skills could still be much worse than people had previously realized. And so I think that if maybe there's a sort of sense of betrayal on the part of the press, it has to do with the communication side of things more than just sort of his cognitive fitness. Because I think that the other argument, an argument that the press has been making pretty consistently is that Biden doesn't do enough interviews. Biden doesn't do enough press conferences, you know, the communication side of the job. Biden has been sort of weirdly hesitant. You know, you know, this as much as anybody else, you know, a politician who has a lot of time for the press who spends a lot of time with reporters generally gets better publicity than one that doesn't. And so I think in that sense, if the press feels betrayed, the press feels like that they have been denied access, in part because the White House is covering up the deficiency of the politician. Then I think that it makes sense that they would be quite so, so red heart because it does seem like when we look at sort of this whole narrative about, you know, Biden should step down and they were increasing calls for Biden to step down and Biden's in battle presidency. It does seem like much, much more of a media driven narrative than anything that seems to be sort of sincerely driven by the grassroots. It's actually fascinating how much media narratives still become dominant and how much, because I think you're right, I think the media is helping drive this discussion in a major way. If you told me a decade ago that the media would still have this power and still have this inclination to set the narrative kind of writ large and create this huge sort of all encompassing meta narrative, I would have told you you're insane. There's no way we're still going to have enough sort of establishment media or still have enough kind of media dominance to do that. But that's where we're at, right? Like the media, if anything, more than before, more than even, you know, the early 2000s is capable and willing and interested in creating these kind of default established narratives. And it's funny because I think the, especially the US press and the Korean press is always sort of just nipping at their heels in this respect. The American press seems to think it's become more enlightened, right? Like it went through this whole thing with Hillary Clinton. Looking back, we now know that it was a mix of the Internet Research Agency in Russia, but also a bunch of Trump supporters, but also just a bunch of random people online. We're pushing the idea that Hillary Clinton had Parkinson's when it's actually had like, you know, a mild case of pneumonia, but people were diagnosing her by videos of her kind of leaving campaign events and looking kind of woozy on stage. And the media fed into it, like actively, rapidly, enthusiastically fed into the idea that Hillary Clinton was sick and ailing. And I think you can make the case that it actually helped cost her the presidency, that and like a 10 other things, but like, it really did hurt her. One sort of perspective that I've heard on all of this, which I think is quite interesting is the degree to which the establishment press, the elite press, the prestige press, whatever we could call it does seem like it is mostly just kind of having an internal conversation with its increasingly sort of progressive liberal readership at the expense of sort of the rest of America, a sort of common refrain that I've heard from some sort of more progressive defenders of Biden has been like, where are the editorials calling for Trump to drop out where, you know, the editorials declaring Trump on fit for office and expressing this sort of high dungeon sort of outrage at sort of Trump, the way that there has been, you know, so much ink spilled about Biden's unfitness. And the only way that that really makes sense is that sort of publications like the New York Times or Vox or the Atlantic or the New Yorker, whatever, just care much more about their progressive audience, their progressive readership and view their role as journalists much more. They just kind of take it for granted that obviously no conservatives read them. And also, you know, going back to your point about, you know, this feeling of betrayal, like you actually do hear it from some journalists and from some pundits like they genuinely are angry that they've been lied to effectively by the White House and the Democratic campaign. And they are kind of lashing out and like, you know, we're going to come back in a second to whether or not Biden is competent to run because, you know, clearly you disagree but I think he's not. I'm fascinated by this one story that ran at the times, just a couple of days ago, the headline is Parkinson's expert visited the White House eight times in eight months. And when you first see the story, it's like, you know, golf's backing like, oh my God, like this is the smoking gun, right? Like, like, and it feeds into this idea that the White House is keeping something from us, right? Like that Biden has had Parkinson's for the better part of a year. Or telling anybody, God, they're a danger to the country. This is horrifying. It's not until you actually dig into the story that you find out that this Parkinson's expert has been visiting the White House since 2012. And it has actually been part of the medical unit, not just providing expertise on the president's health, but on general matters of policy. And it's also been treating, I think, veterans through, like, the White House Veteran Health Care Unit. And the times knows all of this and puts it in the story and just rams it through anyway. And I find that absolutely gobsmacking and probably pretty good evidence for the idea that there is a sort of, to some degree, a wounded sort of emotional response coming from the White House press corps on this. Well, and I think there's also just a kind of cheap sensationalism, right, like a cheap desire for clicks. Like, it's a compelling narrative. Like, it's the most dramatic story of this election cycle, the idea that the president might drop out or might even resign as you've sort of seen. Agreed. But also, I look at all this reporting now. All of these sources saying around the White House, around the president, saying, "Oh yeah, we've known this for ages." Like, he's been declining, obviously, for some time. Like, he's sharp as hell one day. You know, he's lecturing Benjamin Netanyahu from the situation room one day. But the next day, you know, he's clearly kind of forgetting people's names and, you know, kind of wander around aimlessly. It doesn't seem as sharp as he used to in all this. I actually, journalists might feel duped by the White House. I feel duped by our journalists in the press corps, right? Like, far from feeling like this is just a totally, you know, media-driven narrative. Like, I think you to just some degree. I think it's the opposite. I think us downplaying his age concerns was the media-driven narrative. And now the floodgates are open. Any reasonable person watching that debate would come away with the feeling that Joe Biden is no longer fit to be president, not just because he's not capable of communicating, but because he's not capable of formulating thoughts from his brain in a critical moment. Like, that is a skill that goes far beyond just campaigning or political communication. That is a skill that affects his ability to negotiate with Congress, to negotiate with world leaders, and ultimately to win the campaign. There's a poll out today, a couple of internal polls reported by Politico that suggests that New York state is suddenly, you know, maybe not a toss-up, but it's been downgraded from, you know, solid Democrat to maybe leading Democratic. That is terrifying. Like, holy shit, we are on track to watch Joe Biden lose this campaign in a spectacular fashion. And given that Joe Biden's entire appeal is he's the guy who can win the campaign, how is he still the nominee? But tell me about the Canadian context, because, you know, I think people have drawn the comparison as I think you have on your YouTube channel between the effort to take down Biden from inside, and, you know, save the Republic, and the sort of failed campaign to oust the Prime Minister that has seemingly fizzled with kind of like equal limpness. Are there similarities between the effort to remove the president and the effort to remove the Prime Minister? I mean, I think there are obvious similarities in the sense that in both cases it seems like it's a strategic decision more than anything else. I mean, despite that, you know, there is at least a case to be made that Biden is not able to do the job in a sort of functional way. Obviously, the much bigger argument is that, you know, yeah, like you just sort of said that Biden could lose the election, and that's obviously the main case against Trudeau. Nobody's making an argument that Trudeau is sort of cognitively impaired necessarily, although some people wouldn't make that argument from the from the get go. But the argument is primarily that this is a matter of political strategy, and that is if Trudeau cannot lead his party to success in a Toronto writing that had voted liberals for three decades, you know, then clearly the game is over. I think in both America and Canada, there is often sort of a point of no return. You've been in office for too long. The party has been in power for too long. It's the same thing that happened in Great Britain, you know, they keep swapping out leaders and hoping that that'll help them sort of change the channel and it doesn't because people are just sick of you. There's times in which there's like fundamentally, you know, this is an old media cliche, right? Some elections are just change elections and there's a limited ability to sort of resist that. And, you know, I think we've seen that many times, actually, in Canadian history, in contrast to the US, where they don't tend to swap leaders mid-election, we've seen that many times in Canada that they have, you know, whether that's John Turner or Kim Campbell or, you know, countless times at the provincial level. And by large, it seems to always fail, you know, maybe with the exception of Paul Martin. I would also say, you know, I'm not the biggest fan of Trudeau, but I do think that there is a case to be made that Trudeau is a man who is sort of chronically underestimated. I remember in our, in our sudden newsdays, Justin, I would often be taking some pretty condescending pod shots at Justin's abilities and he sort of proved me wrong. You mean faith goldie? I think good old days. Yes, of course. No, but, you know, he proved us all wrong, right? Like, Justin Trudeau has proven an ability to be a much better campaigner and to bounce back to snatch victory from the jaws of failure. I mean, it still boggles my mind that he bounced back from the blackface thing, which dropped in the middle of a campaign. So, you know, I think that obviously he still has a huge, huge uphill battle to fight, but it doesn't seem irrational to me to assume that this man who has routinely sort of exceeded expectations might be able to pull off, you know, another miracle. This episode is brought to you by article, getting the right piece of furniture can make such a difference in how you feel about your space. There I say it could even be transformative. My favorite piece of furniture is a new desk we built on our solarium that is now my at-home desk and I'm really fond of it. So if you're looking to transform your space with a new favorite piece of furniture, I recommend checking out article. Article offers sleek, stylish furniture that looks like its designer, but without the designer prices. That's because it's all online with fast, affordable shipping across Canada and the US. If you want to upgrade your patio furniture this summer, head over to article.com. They've got some modern patio sets that frankly won't look out of place in a living room. It's stylish, high quality, affordable furniture without the big box store. Article is offering our listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim this offer, visit article.com/CanadaLand and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com/CanadaLand for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. This episode is brought to you by Douglas. JJ, what happens to you when you don't get enough sleep? What are the consequences? I'm in a terrible mood all day. No one wants to be a roommate. It's awful. Yeah, well, when I don't get enough sleep, I go slightly loopy. If you're struggling to get a good night's sleep, one thing that can help is upgrading your mattress. So far, over 200,000 Canadians have discovered the medium firm support of a Douglas mattress. Douglas is proudly made in Canada, and 90% of the energy used to make the Douglas mattress comes from renewable sources like wind and hydro. These mattresses are also extremely comfortable. The last-text phone gives the sleep surface a bit of spring, and the eco-like cooling gel keeps things cool for those hot summer nights. With Douglas, there's no middleman, no showrooms, just a high quality, affordable mattress shipped directly to your door. Douglas is giving our listeners a free sleep bundle with each mattress purchase. Get the sheets, pillows, mattress, and pillow protectors free with your Douglas purchase today. Visit douglas.ca/candedland to claim this offer. That's douglas.ca/candedland. JJ, I understand you have brought a duly noted in, and it's about the Online Arms Act. So the Online Arms Act is obviously a manifestation of the Liberal government's quite ambitious desires to regulate the Internet. It's similar to Bill C11 in that way, which is another bill, the Online Streaming Act, which I've been squawking a lot over the years. But what I thought was interesting about the Online Arms Act was that the Conservatives had recently requested that the parliamentary budget officer do a cost assessment of it. They got back with their report, and not only is this the implementation of the Online Arms Act expected to cost about $200 million over the course of five years to implement, it's also going to entail hiring over 300 bureaucrats and will take at least two years to fully implement because these 300 bureaucrats are going to be staffed in sort of three different government departments. And yeah, it's going to take two years to sort of fully implement is the parliamentary budget officer's estimation. And this is relevant because obviously we're having an election in less than two years, and the Conservative Party, which is on track to win that election, has said that they're going to tear up the Online Arms Act. And this reminds me of Bill C11 because the CRTC recently put out a timeline that estimated that the full implementation of Bill C11 is not scheduled to take place until after next year's election as well. It says something to me of the degree to which the Liberal government is in many ways sort of smothering their own legislative initiatives under the crippling weight of a bureaucracy that they seem to be incapable of stopping the expansion of. It's a very sort of interesting, very validating, I suppose, state of affairs for people on the right end of the political spectrum. The idea that bureaucracy is killing their own sort of half-baked ideas. I still can't get over this. Like, I am violently in favor of regulating at least to some degree social media. Like, I would rather see us remove their liability protections, but whatever, you know, some stuff in this bill is good enough, I guess. But it also goes so far into my like, you know, opening this up to the human rights tribunal just strikes me as one of the stupidest imaginable things you could do in this bill. And it's going to make it such a target, such an easy target to repeal if or when the conservatives get in. And frankly, good riddance. I hope they do get rid of it because it's just a bad idea. And I can tell you by talking to some people who helped draft the bill, they're not happy with what it ended up being. Anyway, duly noted. So, JJ, my duly noted for this week is something that's become a bit of a running topic between me and Jesse on this show. To give you the really, really, really quick background, in June, Google announced that the Canadian journalism collective, this group dominated by this company called Indigraph would be responsible for doling out $100 million in fees associated with the online news act. Now, I raised a bunch of concerns. I think there's some conflicts of interest here. I'm concerned about the capacity of this organization to actually get the money out the door. I'm concerned that one group seems to be overrepresented on it. I'm concerned that they didn't go with the big companies that actually do the majority of the local journalism in this country. But anyway, Jesse was not super impressed. He issued a clarification about my segment. He suggested I was over my skis and that I am somebody who knows almost nothing about the news publishing business. Justin Ling is a super news reporter. And like most news reporters, he knows almost nothing about the news publishing business. Jesse went on to say that this Canadian journalism collective has no real power over anything. They don't decide who qualifies. They don't decide who gets the money or how it's divvied up or doled out. They are mere flesh vessels for this cold, hard search engine, hush money. Okay. Well, fine. This is a disagreement between me and Jesse. That's totally fine. Although I will point out that other organizations have basically backed me up since that show. News Media Canada alongside a bunch of local journalism organizations have echoed those concerns about the possible conflicts. They've issued 10 recommendations on how the collective could overcome those, including adding more diversity to their board. With the concerns from columnists in the national post, there was a mini scandal driven by, I should say, bad faith organization on us reporting Canada, which is just exists to harass people in the media. But regardless, they dredged up a bunch of tweets from one board member of the collective and she was forced to apologize further sort of distracting from the issue at hand. Okay. All of that kind of put behind us. I want to add a little bit more fuel to the fire because over the last little while we started getting some of the documentation. I say some of the documentation because the collective has written to the CRTC to say it does not yet have ready policies regarding eligibility for the program, how they're going to verify full-time employee that definition, how they're going to select membership, how they're going to disperse the funding, how they're going to resolve disputes. They have no documentation for those things yet are asking for extensions until later this week to get it all done. Okay. But we have some of the documentation about the actual agreement between the collective and Google. And there's this little section in there that I think is really interesting because it says that both the collective and all of the members, those who are getting the money, are agreeing to forego any bargaining process, complaint before the CRTC or lawsuit regarding the quote, infringement of copyright in relation to making available news content of members. Did the Canadian journalism collective just sign away their members ability to sue Google for copyright infringement, particularly at a time when Google is hoovering up news content to feed its LLMs? I think it's a good question. I would love an answer to it. Do we have any sort of sense of the timeline on this? Because I'm wondering if this is another thing that is just a lot of time wasting that will ultimately be undone by the conservative administration. I said this last time I have a strong suspicion that no one is ever going to see a dollar of this money. Do we know that? Someone has posted something online and you know it's not true. What do you do? A new survey found that a majority of Canadians have been exposed to Russian disinformation about Ukraine. MediaSmartz has a wealth of other resources to help you learn how to determine what is real and what is fake. Visit BreakTheFake.ca to find out more. And it found that supporters of the Conservative Party are more likely to believe Kremlin narratives compared to liberal and NDP counterparts. Polarization of toxicity, of misinformation, of disinformation, of anger directed at individuals and institutions. If it raises your eyebrow, it should raise questions. Check the facts before you share online. Learn more at canada.ca/disinformation. A message from the Government of Canada. All right, JJ, I saw an item just from a couple of weeks ago that I thought was really interesting that I want to get your take on. The headline is Ottawa keeps spending on influencers. Liberals say it's about stemming disinformation. It's a piece from the Canadian press and it reveals that we've spent about $1.7 million on influencers, influencer marketing campaigns and strategies. All since 2021, we've seen it used by Health Canada, the public health agency of Canada, agriculture and agri-food Canada, the immigration department. So these influencers have been hired to talk about everything from the COVID-19 vaccine to food safety. They've been hired to put out government approved messages on safe cannabis use, dementia prevention, sexual health and mental health resources. JJ, have you been tapped by the government to do to fight disinformation? No, I have not. I'd like to use shock to learn. I guess I'm not a friendly in the eyes of the Trudeau government. We're going to talk a bunch about misinformation and disinformation and I think the quixotic campaign to fight it in a second. But let's just start here. What do you make of this? Is it a good idea for the government to be giving money to YouTube stars and TikTokers to ask them to sort of toe the party line as it were? I do get the impression upon reading this article in some of the coverage of it. Is that fighting disinformation is becoming a bit of a sort of government buzzword that doesn't really mean anything? It seems like now what we used to just call just generic sort of government information initiatives or even propaganda might be too sensational. But the kind of public information campaign that tell you what country is not to visit or eat a nutritious breakfast and this kind of stuff that government always does. And it seems like it's much easier to justify enormous amounts of spending on generic government public outreach initiatives if you sort of drape that. Drape that in the high-minded sort of rhetoric of like what we're fighting misinformation. And I just don't know if some of the stuff that these influencers have been doing really rises to the level of fighting misinformation as opposed to just doing generic government PR work in a way that maybe seems a little bit more credible to young people. They assume then just your generic TV ads where it's like a message from the government of Canada. I think that's that's pretty much exactly right but it also starts to make me concerned because right like I as a journalist like I have reported on misinformation pretty extensively over the last number of years like not to, you know, to my own horn but like I often get calls from like whether it's a CBC or whoever to come on and do the disinformation beat. This has been kind of my shtick for a couple of years now. And I'm starting to get a little crazy about it. I think the public safety threat of misinformation of conspiracy theories of disinformation driven extremism of foreign disinformation campaigns. I think all of these are actually still pressing and maybe even more pressing than they were a few years ago. I'm also increasingly losing my mind at our very, I think, ineffective maybe even declining effective campaigns to try and disrupt it because I think you're right. Like I think we've increasingly used misinformation and disinformation as an excuse to talk about everything and to sort of like metaphorically roll up a newspaper and like whack people's noses for falling for the wrong things. It is fundamentally driving an even bigger problem than misinformation or disinformation or conspiracy theories or whatever, which is declining trust. And this is why I'm interested to know what you think the long tail of this is for these influencers. It seems to me like, I don't know if you followed Drew Gooden. I trust Drew Gooden. I love watching Drew Gooden videos. Yeah, he's great. Do I think he's the world's smartest person? No. But do I think that he's engaging in good faith and doing, you know, a credible amount of research when he goes into a video? Yes. Like, do I think he's more credible than the Golden Mail? No, but I can kind of understand why people who have grown to hate the mainstream media would feel that way. And the prospect of somebody hiring Drew Gooden to just regurgitate government-ridden talking points on vaccines makes me slightly nervous. That's an interesting insight because it kind of suggests that there could be a sort of a meta message that the government is enforcing sort of unknowingly, which is basically like trust influencers broadly. Like influencers are credible people. So we're going to sort of take advantage of their credibility in order to promote the message that we want to promote. But then it's also sort of encouraging that just like in general, you should listen to what influencers say. And that can be a pretty dangerous message, right? If the government is sort of enabling a kind of frame of reference in which enablers are more credible than the mainstream media, more credible than the government itself, you know, what is the long-term consequence of that becoming the new conventional wisdom? Because I do think it's very important as well that we understand that when people are sort of subject to misinformation, it is not always because they're being sort of hoodwinked. Sometimes it's because they actively prefer the misinformation. Sometimes it's because they go out of their way to seek out misinformation. Like, I think that was part of the opposition to the TikTok ban. I mean, I don't know what you think about that, but it does seem to me that like some of the young people that were opposed to it were opposed to it because they have grown used to being fed certain consistent narratives that they have become convinced are the truth and they don't want to lose that. But let me ask you because it does seem like, listen, you're on the right side of the political spectrum if we accept the political spectrum exists. It does seem like conservatives have proven particularly susceptible or maybe even... Maybe even settled in the right word, like an enthusiastically participating in misinformation, sliding all the way down into beliefs in conspiracy theories. There's this fantastic paper that got published in Nature a couple of months ago. It's called "Miss Understanding in the Arms of Online Misinformation." And it's by these five researchers who are kind of preeminent in their field that are making the case in a large respect that we're fighting misinformation in the wrong way. And we're thinking about it all wrong. And they find this really interesting data point that I think is really compelling. They write, "The 20% of US citizens with the most conservative information diets were responsible for 62% of the visits to the 490 untrustworthy websites described that kind of influenced the 2016 campaign." And they find this for basically everywhere you look. The 6.3% of the most conservative YouTube users were responsible for nearly 80% of exposure to extremist channels. 1% of Twitter users were responsible for 80% of exposures to dubious websites. We talk about misinformation as being this really kind of all-encompassing problem as though anybody could stumble upon a misinformation vortex and be sucked into it and suddenly be part of this zombie army of misinformation believers. But by and large, what we're finding is that the average person when they come across misinformation doesn't fall for it. If they do fall for it in the moment, they forget about it within a week. We tend to see that even people who are susceptible tend to fall into misinformation circles that are not super harmful, right? Like, it's stuff like the Titanic didn't sink, like, just dumb bullshit like that. It really seems to be this hardened group of motivated partisans who keep believing all of this stuff because, as you point out, they want to. Like, what is it behind the conservative movement right now as it exists that seems so enthusiastic about believing all these conspiratorial narratives? Well, I mean, I think there's a couple of ways to answer that. I mean, I think that one part of it is just that conservative voters, sort of conservatives as a demographic have been trending less and less educated as time goes on. I mean, we see this in the US election and I think we see this in, you know, maybe less so in Canada just because the conservative base is much broader, it seems. But certainly in the US, you see that sort of Republican voters have been trending less and less educated. You know, the sort of the base, the most hardcore sort of Republican voter is now a guy with a college degree, and that didn't always used to be the case. You know, this is sort of part of the increasing sort of class division in American politics when previously there would be sort of stronger divisions based on things like race. Now we're sort of seeing like there's a broad kind of multiracial coalition of people who are united, in part by gender, but also by a sort of a lack of attending post-secondary education. And that's a problem, definitely that's a problem. And I think you see this even when you just watch like your average Fox News broadcast versus your average MSNBC broadcast. You know, they're both biased in different ways, but you know, the quality of the reporting in the Fox broadcast or the quality of the argument that the pundit is making is just much obviously lower and is targeting a sort of dopier audience. But hang on, I don't buy that that's an education problem. And like, you know, there's this great kind of line that comes out of a lot of misinformation research and it's kind of borne out by a ton of studies we've done, which is that the biggest predictor for belief in misinformation is not a lack of education. In fact, there seems to be kind of no correlation whatsoever with post-secondary education and belief in misinformation. And actually, there's a little bit of data that suggests it's the opposite, that the biggest predictor for belief in misinformation is overconfidence, not under education, right? Like, the more you think you're capable of understanding something without needing to listen to experts, the more likely or to fall for something. Is this like low trust in experts? Is this just arrogance? This was the second point I was going to make is that I think what you've seen is that you have seen the rise of Donald Trump is kind of the leading figurehead of the of the conservative movement on this continent. And if you have somebody like that, who actively does traffic in conspiracy theories and who is arrogant and cocky and says all sorts of things that are just demonstrably not true, not because he's necessarily a sinister sociopathic liar, although that might be part of it. But also because he just has a grossly inflated sense of his own ability to understand the truth of a situation. You know, when you have somebody like that being the figurehead and when you have partisanship being as sort of strong as it is, you know, that causes a lot of people to sort of line up in lockstep with a leader who is trafficking in falsehood as a matter of course, and who is trafficking in conspiracy theory as a matter of course, and who has chosen to make some of the big causes of his political movement, you know, conspiratorial causes such as the idea that the elections are rigged against him. So that's very problematic as well. And that's the sort of something unique that we haven't seen previously because, you know, previous generations of conservative leaders, be it, you know, Reagan or George W. Bush or Mitt Romney or whoever have not had the goal to sort of traffic in that kind of stuff. So I think that that's a very negative development in terms of the political right. But the third thing I would bring up as well, and this is a sort of more defensive conservative thing that I would say from my perspective as someone on more on that side, which would be that a lot of the times are definition of what you do. And the definition of what is misinformation or what is a false fact to believe. And when we have little studies that sort of rank your ability to believe false facts, yes or no, a lot of times I think that those studies are kind of biased in the sense that they over select for misinformation that conservatives are likely to believe. And they under select for misinformation that left wingers are likely to believe because we know that there are a lot of sort of left wing myths that people on the left do not sort of think critically about and that I think even sort of left wing thought leaders do not encourage their followers to think critically about, you know, stuff about crime and the economy and racism. And like the degree to which people on the left often like grossly over assume the bad sort of sides of these kinds of social problems or the extent to which these social problems are huge and have been as bad now as they've ever been and sort of things like that. Like if I'd be curious to see a more sort of balanced effort to document misinformation or better yet just stop classifying that stuff and misinformation, right? Like differences of interpretation and differences in analysis of like data that comes to different conclusions is not misinformation. Like, you know, like, Hey, I think, you know, class revolt is the most effective way of bringing about like effective economic policy is not like misinformation, right? Like it is it's Marxism. Like, you know, like, yeah, well, I mean, I was I was thinking more like if you sort of say like, well, what is the unemployment rate and if somebody says like the unemployment rate is like 50% when it's actually like 3%. Like, that's a falsehood. I mean, is that misinformation? Like, maybe, no, it's just being wrong. Well, but again, like if you're talking like if we're for drawings, if we're making sort of like a sort of ideological analogy, right? Like if you think of like some super far left podcaster who's always on and he's rallying about how like we're in the late stages of capitalism and everything sucks and the world is collapsing and the economy's never been worse and blah, blah, blah. Like if somebody's giving a drumbeat of like that kind of narrative and that results in the audience believing or making a sort of a lot of assumptions about sort of the negative state of the world and the economy and stuff like that. That's not born out by objective reality. Then I think it's easy to argue that a sort of a far left podcaster or influencer is engaging in a kind of misinformation and is misinforming his audience in the same way that a right winger who is, you know, going on about how, you know, widespread sort of the trans pandemic is or whatever is engaging in a sort of misinformation. Let's try to add a slightly positive note, right? The liberals, like I said, have engaged in this effort sort of quell misinformation. They've done the education campaigns over the years. There is a proposal for the government to actually try and force platforms to ban misinformation or do automatic takedowns. It seems the government has dropped that idea from their policy book. But like, if we kind of accept the misinformation and conspiracy theories are genuine problem going forward, but the liberals are approaching it the wrong way. Like, what is the right way of trying to do battle with the scourge of misinformation that is kind of sucking at least a small number of people into this conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Well, I mean, my sort of bias perspective is that it falls on people like you and me, frankly, I think that people like you and me have to kind of like rise to the occasion people that do have big audiences, people who are sort of thought leaders, people who are folks in the media. Like, obviously, we have our own problems in the sense of, you know, people might not find us credible and for various reasons, but we do have a sizable audience, right? Like, we do, we have a direct ability to communicate with large chunks of the population. And I think we have to take that responsibility very seriously. We have to think about what we're discussing, you know, what topics we choose to talk about, which topics we don't choose to talk about, you know, the degree to which we are comfortable sort of subjecting our audience to facts that might make them a little disconcerted, but are true. And avoiding things like audience capture, right? Avoiding just becoming completely biased ideologically because we know that that will get clicks and that will get the views and that will keep us having a sort of competitive advantage over our laymer opponents, right? You know, it's very easy to assume that the responsibility is all on someone else, right? It's easy to assume that the responsibility is on the government or is on the mainstream press. But, you know, I think we all have our role to play, just as individual citizens have their role to play as well. When I sort of said earlier that I think we all have to remember that we have agency. We're not all passive victims. We all have the ability to kind of be mature and think sort of seriously about this kind of stuff and think seriously about our own sort of responsibility. So that's kind of how I come to it. Well, I try to use my YouTube channel in a way that is sort of fighting misinformation in his own small way. And I would hope that you view your role as a journalist in similar terms. Yeah, that's about right. I think the grand weakness of how governments go about fighting this, and this is true for like big news outlets as well, especially all those that partnered with Facebook to do these little fact checks under misinformation. I think we need to stop being co-opted, right? Like, starting point, like Facebook is the world's largest vector of misinformation. Stop legitimizing their platform by putting your news on it, frankly, like that's where we're at, ditto for Twitter. But, you know, I think more than that, what everyone gets wrong is that we think the facts themselves are the things that need fixing. When reality, we just totally ignore the values that bring you there, right? Like there's a ton of interesting research into this that's happened over the years that basically suggests that the most effective way of getting somebody off a misinformation point is to find a way to identify with their values and to kind of partner with them to find a new path forward, right? Like finding ways to get onto the same page on something and then moving off sort of in a constructive way, instead of just rolling the newspaper up and swatting them on the nose and saying, "No bad, stop TikTok." I think collaboration is a lot more effective than condescension in this regard. And that's the only way we're going to effectively convince people that the Titanic did sink. Yeah, well said. That is shortcuts for this week. Thank you, JJ, for joining me. I hope you had some degree of fun. It was a load of fun. Thanks for having me. You can email me all about it at justinling@proton.me. I swear, I'll read it, I just won't reply. You can also subscribe to my newsletter at bug-eyed@shameless.com or, I don't know, just Google bug-eyed and shameless. JJ, where can people find you? They can find me on YouTube. If you just type in JJ Canada, I'll pop up. I know McCulloch is hard to spell. This episode was produced by James Nicholson, and additional production was done by Caleb Thompson. Our production manager is Max Collins. Our editor-in-chief is Karen Puglazy. The music is by so-called syndication is by CFUV 101.9 FM in Victoria. You can visit them online at CFUV.ca. If you value this podcast, please support us. We rely on listeners like you paying for journalism. As a supporter, you'll get premium access to all of our shows ad-free, including early releases and bonus content. You'll also get our exclusive newsletter discounts on Canada Land merch, invites and tickets to our live and virtual events. And more than anything, you'll be part of the solution to Canada's journalism crisis, and you'll be keeping our work free and accessible to everybody. Come join us now. Click the link in your show notes or go to CanadaLand.com/join. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music included with Prime. Thank you for supporting Canada Land. [MUSIC]