The whole world should be worried by the 'siege of Ottawa'. This is about much more...

[dalton99a]

5. Kick

“Donations from abroad are quite a common part of any large crowdfunding campaign,” Ciaran O’Connor, an expert on online extremism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told Politico. “But the scale of this one is unprecedented.”

Another reason why you should take the Ottawa protests seriously? Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, fringe groups can have an outsize influence. I’m sure you’ve heard of troll farms: organised groups that weaponise social media to spread misinformation, promote division and influence public opinion. Get this: in the long run-up to the 2020 US elections, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by eastern European troll farms. According to an internal Facebook report written in late 2019 and leaked to MIT Technology Review, troll farms were reaching 140 million users every month. Three-quarters of these users had never followed any of the pages: they’d had the content thrust upon them by Facebook’s engagement-hungry content-recommendation system.

“Our platform has given the largest voice in the African American community to a handful of bad actors, who, based on their media production practices, have never had an interaction with an African American,” wrote the report’s author, a former senior-level data scientist at Facebook. “Instead of users choosing to receive content from these actors, it is our platform that is choosing to give [these troll farms] an enormous reach.”

After that report was leaked in September, Facebook made a lot of noises about how it was aggressively cracking down on troll farms. Has it followed through on these promises? Meta Platforms, Facebook’s owner, said on Monday that it had removed dozens of scam pages associated with the convoy protest from Facebook; however, there are still a huge number of recently created pages supporting the hauliers, with suspiciously large numbers of followers. Meanwhile, on Telegram, a social network favoured by the right, people across the world are urging each other to replicate the tactics in Canada in their home towns. Canada may not be on the brink of civil war, but what is happening in Ottawa is one small front in a global information war. And the baddies, I’m afraid to say, are winning.