Canada

Too bad the people who need this most aren't the type who believe in fact checking

I worry that'll strongly disadvantage one party and ruin most of their advertising ideas. And that could mean an abrupt regime upgrade for our prairie provinces.

If you know what the problem is, why not deal with the source or the platform that enables the problem rather than telling people what the problem is.

What I'm saying is that government should do more to regulate and control social media companies and treat them no differently than newspapers, cable TV companies or news organizations. Social Media companies are by default the news platforms that everyone relies on now .... whether anyone would like to admit that doesn't matter because that is what everyone now uses social media for.

It doesn't mean regulate and control the internet ... it just means control the social media companies that basically have all the keys to democratic information sharing in our society. They have and use the power to control, manipulate, promote, withhold, highlight or hide just about all the information that society needs to understand our world. Social Media now have the power to direct our world .... if we don't do anything about it, we are giving up our democratic systems to private corporations with their own selfish motivations that have nothing to do with the betterment of society.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The ElectoFacts website, launched this week, provides factual information to debunk the most common misconceptions observed by Elections Canada officials in recent years.

"Building resilience against inaccurate information helps strengthen the overall health of democracy," Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault said in a statement.

The ElectoFacts website says that it does not intend to establish Elections Canada as "the arbiter of truth" that will actively monitor the accuracy of statements and information distributed by parties and candidates.

Perhaps most significantly, Perrault's report called for legislative changes to make it illegal to spread information that disrupts an election or undermines its legitimacy.

The report said that action must be taken because the continued spread of disinformation could "jeopardize trust in the entire electoral system on which democracies rest."

Perrault said there are laws on the books to deal with disinformation that were used when misleading robocalls were made to voters in Guelph, Ont., during the 2011 federal election.

The original article contains 843 words, the summary contains 155 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!