By Liam Radford [1]
BELLEVILLE – Students at Loyalist College are turning to social media as a way to learn about important issues leading up to the federal election.
Students QNet News spoke to said that they used Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat to gather news. By Liam Radford, QNet News
Students QNet News spoke to said that social media like Facebook and Twitter is the primary way they consume news on a variety of issues. Four students said that they don’t pay attention to politics, but have seen political ads and stories on social media. That’s raising concerns that some voters may be more vulnerable to disinformation surrounding the federal election on Oct. 21.
An IPSOS poll [2] done in June found that 90 per cent of Canadians said that they had fallen for a fake news story on social media, with two thirds of those polled saying they found disinformation on Facebook. People polled also reported seeing misleading posts on social media more generally about 65 per cent of the time.
Victoria Bonnell, a social service worker student, says that she follows politics around the election on social media. She says she thinks this will be a really rough campaign and that social media contains a lot of political bashing.
“So I haven’t even chose a side yet. I am not sure. (This election is) going to be a rough one I think,” Bonnell said.
Jessi Odaisky, who studies film and television production at Loyalist, said on Facebook that she gets a lot of her news from Google.
“When it comes to Google, I mostly try to as many different sources as possible and see what stays the same across platforms. So start with official news sites, mix in some opinion articles. I try to read comments on articles as well to get opposing views.” Odaisky wrote.
Mya Shilofs, a pre-health student, says that she gets most of her news from social media including Facebook and Twitter.
She says that she mainly pays attention to local news online and that she doesn’t really see too much about the election. Shilofs says if she comes across a story she will double check it.
“If I question it or think ‘I don’t really know if that’s true,’ I will try to look for for actual news sites that I know like CBC news,” she said.
You can lessen your chance of falling for fake news by practising media literacy skills like sourcing your news from multiple reliable places, checking if the story is timely and looking to see if there is bias in the story.
Another way to protect yourself from disinformation is to use online tools and methods that have been released to help people evaluate the accuracy of the news they consume on social media. News Media Canada, an association of national news media, has started a campaign to help Canadians critically look at online news called SPOT fake news [3]. The CBC has also developed a tool to help Canadians, a chat bot [4] that works through Facebook messenger and guides users through a course on how to spot fake news.