From Tweets to Trucks: Disinformation and Threat in the Canadian Freedom Convoy

• In Event: Social Media and Canadian Politics

Abstract

The use of social media disinformation campaigns to disrupt political discourse in liberal democracies has become prominent in global politics. However, the subversive and divisive strategies of adversarial state, non-state, and state-affiliated actors remain undertheorized, especially at the microlevel. In this chapter, we take a bottom-up approach to analyzing how the diffusion of disinformation produces potential security consequences for Canadian politics specifically. Drawing from social network theory, we demonstrate how bad-faith actors achieve and maintain access to Canadian social media networks via a process of cultural keying. While this activity is usually limited in scale and scope, actors may cynically seize on critical domestic and international events salient to target networks to achieve political goals. To illustrate these arguments, we examine the Twitter behavior surrounding the Canada convoy protest (#freedomconvoy2022). While others have investigated the most prominent far-right Canadian personalities’ behavior during the unrest (Elmer and Burton, 2022), our investigation takes a more comprehensive look at the right-wing (dis)information environment. We use structural topic modeling to identify the most prominent themes and narrative frames appearing on social media during the unrest. The use of “truckers” was especially effective because they were a stand-in for “the real people” and therefore a framed as trusted source of information. More importantly, we find topical overlap between those discussing the convoy and right-wing antigovernment networks abroad, such as the “stop the steal” coalition in the U.S. Covid-19 disinformation, which serves as a beachhead for the importation of more extreme anti- democratic content.

This paper documents and analyzes the operation of disinformation systems through the lens of the Canadian “Freedom Convoy,” a protest movement originally centered around commercial truck drivers and their opposition to government mandates about vaccination and other restrictions meant to curb the spread of Covid-19. While the convoy started as a local phenomenon in early 2022, it quickly spread on social media and, by February 2022, had captured the attention of a global audience (Carvin 2022; Broderick 2022). Subsequent research has shown that Kremlin affiliated actors, particularly RT, played a significant role in amplifying contentious coverage of the event (Orr Bueno 2023). Two questions motivate this discussion. First, we ask the extent to which a coalition of transnational actors, predominantly associated with far right and anti-establishment ideology, helped to sustain online discussion around the convoy and framed it in terms of a larger (global) struggle against corrupt and allegedly “authoritarian” government elites. We seek to uncover the role of disinformation about Covid-19 in these discussions. Secondly, we are interested in recovering the right-wing, populist, and anti-establishment discourses about the convoy and in analyzing what role they played in shaping the critical and explicitly confrontational period in January and February of 2022. We also seek to highlight the extent to which these discourses were seeded by non-Canadian, state-affiliated, and non-state actors.

We trace part of the convoy-related online discourse using longitudinal data from Twitter, focusing on the hashtags #FreedomConvoy2022 and #ConvoyToOttawa used by participants, sympathizers, and detractors of the protest. As part of our analysis, we examine tweets containing the above hashtags in the 10-day period leading to the removal of the protesters from downtown Ottawa, as well as all of the tweets over a full year span prior from a random sample of 249 accounts (nearly 3 million tweets in total). These accounts were sampled from a population that tweeted about the events using one of the hashtags two or more times during that 10-day period. Using structural topic modeling (STM), we identify significant thematic overlap between those interested in sharing information about right-wing Canadian and American politics, more generally, and those interested in sharing information about the Freedom Convoy protest, more specifically. We note the potency of right-wing populist, antigovernment, and anti-Covid-19 prevention measures messages as central keying themes, with disinformation as catalyst for relatively more extreme rhetoric and confrontation with the state.

Our findings lead us to conclude that the convoy, at least as an online phenomenon, was driven largely by transnational forces that deploy disinformation tactics to further their political goals. Overall, our analysis attempts to clarify the strategic logic of transnational disinformation operations and to better understand the threat the weaponization of media, particularly social media, poses to open, liberal and democratic forms of government.

Author

• Michael W. Habegger, Louisiana Tech University