https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/10/17/analysis/explainer-rise-canadas-right-wing-meme-pages
[links and images in online article]
Explainer: The rise of Canada’s right-wing meme pages
By Emma McIntosh in Analysis, Politics | October 17th 2019
If you’ve scrolled through Facebook in the past year, you may have
encountered the right-wing meme machine.
The social media pages — whose names usually include the words “proud”
or “strong” — started springing up in 2016, the year after Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau and former Alberta premier Rachel Notley
defeated conservatives and swept into power. They aren’t affiliated with
any party, but spread anti-Liberal and anti-NDP messaging mainly through
funny memes that seem designed to go viral.
You’ve heard of them for a reason. Fast-forward to the run-up to the
Oct. 21 federal election, and these pages — some related, some not —
have amassed significant influence on social media. Alberta Proud, for
example, has more than 180,000 followers on Facebook, which is just over
half the size of the following of the Liberal party but far more than
the Edmonton Journal's 101,000. Another page called Ontario Proud — a
loud voice in that province’s 2018 election — regularly clocks more
social media engagement than many of Canada’s largest news outlets.
“We wanted to shake people," Ontario Proud founder Jeff Ballingall told
National Observer in November 2018, five months after Progressive
Conservative Premier Doug Ford won the Ontario election. “I think we
helped bring that change in Ontario.”
Though these pages’ folksy humour suggests they might have grassroots
origins, interim financial filings to Elections Canada show they are
often funded by corporations — which aren’t allowed to donate to
political parties — and wealthy donors, who are limited in how much they
can donate to parties and candidates.
Though Canada’s election law also imposes spending limits on third-party
groups, such entities often serve as a way around the rules that apply
to candidates and political parties, said Melanee Thomas, a political
scientist at the University of Calgary and Ekin Fellow at the McGill
Institute for the Study of Canada.
“Our election law is really, really ill-equipped to deal with this,” she
said. “There are flags that pop up all over the place with it.”
Third parties also allow political parties to stay out of the fray.
In general, political parties in the current federal election have
focused on positive ads about their own candidates, while third-party
groups have taken on the bulk of the negative campaigning, a report by
the Digital Democracy Project found.
‘Do we have a democratic right to lie to each other?’
Most regions in Canada have their own local “Proud” page, but there are
national versions as well. They tend to fall into two camps.
Ballingall’s group includes Ontario Proud, BC Proud and a national one
called Canada Proud. These have been the focus of months of news coverage.
Ballingall has said his pages were actually inspired by a friend’s
success with Alberta Proud, a page that’s part of a different family of
groups called Canada Strong and Proud. Headed by Chris Russell, a
Newfoundlander who has a day job at an insurance company, the network
includes a national flagship called Proud to be Canadian and regional
affiliates like New Brunswick Proud and Ontario Strong, in addition to
Alberta Proud.
Ballingall’s group of pages are technically not related to Canada Strong
and Proud, despite their confusingly similar names. But their
relationship isn’t entirely separate: Ballingall’s content-production
company, Mobilize Media, has also done work for pages in the Canada
Strong and Proud Network, the Globe and Mail reported (Mobilize Media is
also the main vendor used by Canada Proud).
It’s not particularly surprising that these right-wing pages and their
left-wing counterparts like North99 have been so popular, said Elizabeth
Dubois, an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa who studies
political uses of online media.
“We’ve seen late-night television and satire take a huge role,
particularly among young people, in information gathering,” she said,
adding that social media pages could fulfil the same purpose.
But the pages also tap into more intense feelings of political anger,
frustration and anxiety. Content that taps into that frustration “fires
people up,” Dubois said.
Those powerful reactions are heightened by the often-misleading content
they share, Thomas said — to make information easily shareable and
simple to digest, the format inherently lacks the ability to convey
nuance and uncertainty. The result is a “slanted presentation” that has
“very little information,” and is geared toward achieving a political goal.
“You can’t get full information with a meme,” Thomas said. “What they
want is for people to be disinformed.”
One Alberta Proud post from July, for example, falsely says court
judgments halted the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion because “one
small oil tanker per day” from a new proposed marine terminal “might
harm the local orcas.” In reality, though judges found issues with the
government’s assessment of the risks to orcas, their primary issue was
that the federal government had failed to fulfil its legal duty to
consult First Nations.
=====================================
To subscribe, unsubscribe, turn vacation mode on or off,
or carry out other user-actions for this list, visit
https://www.freelists.org/list/keiths-list
Note: new climate change website is now in pre-launch
Visit https://www.10n10.ca/e/index.shtml
