One of the tactics of propagandists, you know… people and organizations bent on twisting your mind and opinion to their will, is to dehumanize the alternate opinion to diminish contrary viewpoints.

This happens on all sides, but I will tell you about one specific example that is dividing our province even today.

A few years ago the ruling conservative party here in Alberta set out on a political junket and struck upon the idea of dividing the people in half by claiming that there were “real” Albertans and… well, you decide the other half of that equation.

It was not a claim based on evidence or any valid merit. It was a claim based on a gut inclination, telling one group, largely rural, that they were more valuable than the other group, largely urban. It was meant to divide. It was meant to enrage. It was meant to control.

Control?

Control the so-called “real” people for the sake of spreading misinformation through the cracks of the flattery, maybe. Control the so called “real” people by sweetening the toxic ideas with a bit of sugarcoating, probably.

Years later I am still encountering that exact divisive rhetoric online. Folks who were enamoured with being “picked” to be on the “real” team not just leaning into their favourite child syndrome but using it as a lever to dismiss contrary opinions. Failing to challenge their own role in a misinformation machine. Ignoring the pleas of family, friends and neighbours reaching out to them to rethink their radicalization.

“You’re not real so you don’t count.”  They say, and dig themselves a little deeper into the control of their flatterers.

This is just my example, how my government is dividing my home with misinformation but it happens all across time and geography. It has been a tool of countless regimes and every dark movement in history.

But… if the crux of your argument is that the other side is not worthy of an opinion, then you’ve already lost something greater than the argument. 

The internet is one giant game of broken telephone.

I remember growing up in the 1980s. Every night the news was on the television in our house. There wasn’t a set channel or a preferred broadcaster, at least not that I can recall, but rather at dinner time each night and later at ten in the evening, the anchor from the local TV station was on the air, sitting with a serious expression, telling us reports of what was going on in the big wide world. 

Reports. From reporters, who had gone to school to learn how to write and think and ask good questions and vet sources and relay balanced facts.

Maybe that still exists to some extent, but I would wager that most people now get most of their news from the internet in some form: social feeds, news posts, shared links, podcasts.

Who am I to judge, right? I’m posting stuff online and you are reading it? And I get news from all kinds of places, often through second hand links and feeds and offhand comments from influencers, too.

But I would also wager that the collapse of traditional media has left multiple generations of people with a real big mental gap, and a lot of us are afflicted: we assume that just like there were standards and rules and ethics for airing the news each night, that if someone managed to post anything on the internet it must have gone through some kind of filter, right?

Right?

Nope. None of that is true. 

Websites cost literal pennies to build. Social media accounts are frequently, if not in the majority, created by AI algorithms that create content out of thin air based on the casual prompts of… well, that’s the question isn’t?

Who’s at the other end of that broken telephone? Who is really giving you your news? And who is giving those people their information? You clicked on a link posted by a friend, but who gave it to them… think about that, because it actually matters, now more than ever.

We spent years never asking because it rarely needed to be asked.

If it came over the airwaves and into our homes on the television it had been vetted.  It could be trusted.

But if anything the exact opposite is true for the internet, glued as we are to our feeds and plugged in as we are to our podcasts. 

No one is vetting these people—if they even are people—so you need to crank up your own awareness and pay attention to what the garbled message really is.

Do you answer the phone?

Do your remember the last time you answered the phone without checking the caller ID?

Used to be, and I might just be old enough to remember those days, you picked up the phone without a second thought simply because it rang. Maybe it was a friend or family member. Maybe it was a stranger. Maybe it was a wrong number. Maybe it was a telemarketer. Whoever it was, you almost always answered.

I have multiple layers of screening that I do with my phone these days. Call display, pre-answering services, and voicemail screening are just the three big tools I use these days to prevent getting unwanted calls.

And why do I screen all my calls lately? Why don’t I just pick up the phone whenever the damn thing rings?

I screen because enough of those calls are people calling to try to scam me. I am filtering what gets through to reduce the amount of thought and effort I would need to do “on the fly” if—and ultimately when—I answer one of those calls.

I don’t want to be scammed, and I doubt anyone actually does. So, moreso lately I have honed techniques and used tools to avoid being tricked by a stranger.

Now… and be honest here: Do you remember the last time you clicked on a link and read the article behind it with the same vigilance with which you probably screen your phone calls? Do you really think those scammers are restricting themselves to the phone system?