MEMO #1: Twitter’s “Manipulated Media”

Résumé analytique

This memo from the Canadian Election Misinformation Project examines the first major misinformation incident of the 2021 Canadian federal election: Liberal candidate Chrystia Freeland's tweet of a deceptively edited video appearing to show Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole favouring privatized health care. Drawing on a Media Ecosystem Observatory survey of 806 Canadians collected August 23 to 26, the memo lays out five findings. Most people who heard of the story were exposed through traditional news media (62 percent) rather than Twitter itself, where only 10 percent actually saw it; once Twitter labelled the video "manipulated media," news coverage of that labelling spread the underlying misinformation well beyond its original audience.

Nearly a third of Canadians reported seeing the story, making it the most-reported piece of misinformation of the campaign, and it prompted questions to all three major party leaders on privatized health care. Beliefs about the video's truthfulness split sharply along partisan lines: 52 percent of all respondents believed the misinformation was truthful versus 35 percent who thought it false, while three-quarters of Liberal supporters called the claim truthful compared to just 34 percent of Conservative supporters (56 percent of whom called it false). The story provoked strong negative emotions, most commonly anger (35 percent), disgust (24 percent), fear (16 percent), and stress (16 percent), in contrast to a comparison story about federal vaccine mandates, which evoked mostly neutral, calm, or happy reactions.

Finally, the incident spawned further conspiratorial narratives, with some users suggesting the "manipulated media" label was applied to benefit the Conservative Party because a Canadian Twitter executive had once worked for that party. The memo concludes that misinformation can spread not only directly on social media but through traditional media's coverage of it, and that once in circulation it takes on a life shaped by partisan commitment rather than by its truth.