Canadians face misinformation, uncertainty in bid to protect against coronavirus: experts

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From coronavirus modelling to grim new unemployment numbers, there’s been a lot of information for Canadians to digest over the last week.

But in interviews with The West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson, Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith and Dr. Jason Kindrachuk say Canadians aren’t alone in trying to wrap their heads around it all to sort fact from fiction — and, in some cases, outright lies.

“In some cases, these are coordinated efforts, not always by state actors but coordinated efforts to de-legitimize state efforts, de-legitimize media, de-legitimize Western countries,” said Erskine-Smith.

He’s part of a group of Commonwealth politicians and access-to-information advocates behind a new coronavirus fact-checking website called Infotagion.

Many of the politicians involved were part of the International Grand Committee on Big Data, Privacy and Democracy that studied the role of social media in spreading disinformation and violating people’s privacy in 2019.

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