Salé has questioned, without evidence, the safety of vaccines, tweeted memes that seemed to support military tribunals and appeared to compare Justin Trudeau to Hitler. To be blunt, most Canadians would find Salé’s stance appalling. Most, but not all. The ideas she espouses are consistent with a growing movement, born of cherry-picked data, conspiracy theories and the opinions of scientists rejected by their peers that rose to new heights during three years of pandemic public health measures and isolation.
Writing like this is a clear red flag to me, an attempt to assure the audience of points not actually made.
As pandemic restrictions wore on, many people moved their social lives online. For many, those digital worlds were a refuge, a place to seek out like-minded friends and build community. But they also provided the opportunity to build worlds based on fear and misinformation, not based on evidence, says Tim Caulfield, the Canada Research Chair in health law and policy at the University of Alberta who studies misinformation.
Yes, there was misinformation. But the author is painting with a broad brush, and missing the fact that the media is selective about what information it shares, and that's it's been shown through the Twitter files that there was active collusion to misrepresent information, to filter, and to block those who were often telling the truth.
There is plenty of evidence. It's one thing not to look at it. It's another to tell us that it's misinformation when some of the worst of it has been proven true.
Shame on you.