A Bangladeshi firm appears to have played a key role in promoting the Ottawa protest online, and Grid has found increasing evidence of fringe conspiracies and violent extremism throughout the movement.
Online groups on platforms like Facebook and Telegram, together with fundraising campaigns on the GiveSendGo site, have formed digital lifelines for the ongoing Canadian action. They funnel moral support, supplies, manpower and money to the effort, even as they help spread baseless conspiracy theories and toxic rhetoric...
“This is something you frequently find,” said Ethan Porter, who leads the Misinformation/Disinformation Lab at George Washington University’s Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics. “People who are convinced that covid vaccines are part of the government conspiracy also believe that child abduction, as in child trafficking, is coordinated by global elites.”
“The thing to remember,” Porter said, “is that most people don’t believe this stuff.”