How PressProgress used online spaces to cover B.C.’s most extreme election
Four years ago, B.C.’s NDP won a decisive majority under the leadership of former attorney general David Eby in a snap election in the early months of the pandemic. In 2024, more than a week after the Oct. 19 election, the NDP would remain in government after recounts in many very tight races with the newly formed B.C. Conservatives.
The B.C. Conservatives had emerged as the party to contend for government after B.C. United unceremoniously folded during a 2023 press conference, a party which had developed from the erstwhile centre-right B.C. Liberals. Then-leader Kevin Falcon refused to consolidate with the newly formed B.C. Conservatives, owing to the party’s radical elements. “There’s practical reasons why, but many of their candidates are frankly too extreme. I can’t merge with a party that has candidates that equate vaccinations with Nazism or apartheid,” he said, reported CityNews.
His comments portended what transpired as the B.C. Conservatives rose from dormant relics in the province to fledgling opposition. It seemed the party indeed kept its tent pretty open. Maybe too open.
In the waning weeks of the election, reports showed that candidates, including the B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad, were in lockstep with some of the province’s most extreme elements.
In an online interview with an anti-science conspiracy group documented by investigative online newsroom PressProgress, Rustad didn’t shy away from the possibility of installing “Nuremberg 2.0,” or Nazi era style-trials for public health workers and officials who had administered the province’s COVID-19 measures. He also threatened to call under review the province’s programming to protect 2SLGBTQ+ youth in schools and stood by some of his party’s most radical players.
Among them was Surrey South candidate Brent Chapman, who has said Palestinians are “inbred” and cast doubt on the veracity of both the Sandy Hook and Quebec City mosque shootings. He was elected in his riding.
Other candidates have peddled conspiracies about the 2020 U.S. presidential election and the Jan. 6 insurrection on the capitol.
And as the final seat tally was settled the week of Oct. 28, conspiracies emerged about the validity of B.C.’s own election.
At a time where the information space is dominated by social media fodder over local news, PressProgress led some of B.C.’s biggest stories this fall during an election that was replete with bizarre, anti-scientific and simply bigoted players.
The small news organization, which has been around since 2013, was well-positioned to do so. In a political moment where extreme voices are increasingly normalized and bigotry is argued as a matter of political disagreement, radicalization is happening where many newsrooms aren’t looking — online.
And given PressProgress’s success in unveiling much of the ugliness that characterized the B.C. election, it’s clear that that’s where we should be looking. A recent Media Ecosystem Observatory report showed that deciding which platforms to turn to is becoming a partisan matter, reported the Tyee. Local news offers have been taking huge hits since the beginning of the pandemic. And a year after Meta’s ban on news in Canada came into effect, residents are seeing much less local news than ever and don’t necessarily know about the company’s mandated news blackout.
With a team that has been covering the actions and rhetoric of far-right groups in Canada for years, the award-winning PressProgress knew to focus on monitoring online media to hold candidates and elected officials accountable during the B.C. provincial campaign.
J-Source spoke with PressProgress editor-in-chief Luke LeBrun about their editorial approach, the importance of recognizing the internet as a place rather than a medium and why this election was just so unsettling.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Steph: At what point did it become clear that this might be a bit of a weird one?
Luke: As soon as Kevin Falcon announced that B.C. United was effectively surrendering to the B.C. Conservatives, at which point, I guess Kevin Falcon realized that they would split the vote and that could potentially lead to the NDP basically taking virtually every seat in the province or something like that. In that press conference where Kevin Falcon and John Rustad came out and appeared together, something was said about how there were these donors that were holding back from donating and getting involved. And it sounded like there were some backroom conversations about how B.C. United shouldn’t be splitting the vote with the B.C. Conservatives and they need to basically run, ironically, under a united banner, which is not the B.C. United banner. As soon as that happened, it was obvious.
The B.C. conservatives have traditionally been a pretty kooky party. Last provincial election, they got something like one per cent of the vote, had no seats whatsoever until John Rustad got kicked out of the B.C. Liberals. Once he had been kicked out, rather than sitting as an independent, I guess he decided to join this party, which had previously been, fair enough to call it a fringe party. As soon as Kevin Falcon and John Rustad had had that press conference announcing that B.C United was going to fold, I think that was when it became pretty obvious that the candidates that would be running for the B.C. Conservatives would be, first of all, not well vetted, and then also just that there’ll be a lot of wacky stuff.
Steph: How would you describe PressProgress’s approach to covering the election and how you got so many of these bizarre but very important stories out?
Luke: We are always looking for stories that make an impact. We’re not just simply doing reporting on, so-and-so said whatever at the press conference. We’re not doing that kind of journalism. We’re not doing access journalism. We’re doing original investigative journalism, which focuses on topics that are of interest given our editorial focus, which is on issues of social and economic inequality. I do a lot of reporting on right-wing politics and far right extremism. We’re focused on reporting on a number of issue areas that are underreported by the bigger newspapers, broadcasters, corporate media.
It really wasn’t hard to be honest to find a lot of this stuff. I can think of a couple of stories that I did during this election where it was just as simple as, I hear about something, someone else has found something about a certain candidate that sets off my spidey sense that maybe there’s something off about this individual. So then I spend a little bit of time just digging into that person and, you know, surprise, surprise. There are a whole bunch of other kinds of extreme or conspiratorial ideas that that person happens to subscribe to.
That was the case in a couple of these stories that we broke during the election. And it wasn’t just social media posts. It isn’t random comments that people made on Facebook. In some cases, we’re dealing with videos or speeches that happened to be recorded and then ended up on YouTube or live streamed on Facebook or podcasts, things like that.
There’s so much of that stuff out there. It’s interesting, with a lot of people in these far-right political movements, they really have a tendency to broadcast a lot of their lives onto social media. There are some people that I have covered and tracked who were involved with the “freedom convoy,” for example, who are just live streaming every waking moment of their life and existence. And if you spend enough time to watch it, they are telling you everything about what they believe and what their plans are and so on and so forth. And so it’s kind of not surprising, in a way, if you just understand the culture of these far-right circles.
And these aren’t just random social media comments that people are making like four or five years ago. In many cases, these are people who are actually products of these extreme online communities. In some cases, a lot of these conservative candidates are people who hang out in these private Facebook groups or conspiratorial Facebook groups where they’re consuming a whole lot of stuff, whether it has to do with chemtrails or United Nations conspiracies or 15-minute cities and that kind of stuff. So to me, when you look at all these examples of some of the stuff that we’ve reported, I take that as a sign that we’re dealing with a group of people who are very steeped in far-right social media circles.
Steph: Something that we spend a lot of time thinking about is, on one hand, the lack of systematic reporting on far-right movements in mainstream organizations. And at the same time, the lack of seeing the internet as a locus of interaction or tangible spaces where material events happen.
Luke: That’s so true. If you go back to 2017, Facebook made a change to its algorithm where they want to promote “meaningful interactions” or “meaningful content.” So they downgraded these Facebook pages that were basically pushing clickbait. In some ways, some of the changes that they’ve made were I think maybe a good-faith effort to crack down on some of the low quality clickbait-type content. And then they were boosting Facebook groups. And so, for example, I do a lot of cycling. So, if I’m into that hobby, I’ll see more content from Facebook groups that are relating to bikes and cycling. If your hobby happens to be chemtrails or other conspiratorial stuff or anti-vaxxer type stuff, once you get into one of those groups, you will just be served increasingly more and more content like that.
I saw this at the beginning of the pandemic and I did some reporting on this for PressProgress where you saw different kinds of conspiratorial communities all converging and then they were rallying around anti-lockdown protests and rallies and things like that. And once they all started making those connections and interacting, there would be this cross-pollination where they’re joining each other’s groups and then they’re sharing different content from each other’s communities and in other spaces. You’d see everything converging. This is where a lot of those kinds of conspiracies come from.
I think you can draw a direct line between some of those Facebook groups and some of the online communities that were organizing and coalescing around that time three-to-five years ago, and then eventually manifesting in a freedom convoy or now in the B.C. election where you’re having several or maybe a couple of dozen candidates getting actually elected who are people who are from those online communities. It does seem like you can hear some commentary maybe from some older journalists who are just not very online and just not very familiar with online culture, but they do tend to downplay it and treat it like it’s just a bad take that someone posted on their Facebook wall and kind of missing the fact that these are signs of people who are really steeped in a certain information system.
Steph: Also just as places where culture is happening. It’s not just being referenced.
Luke: Yes, exactly.
Steph: On the flip side there, I also think about the role of the paywall and Facebook bans on Canadian news. I’m just thinking about that in terms of voter access to information and what looks like the radicalization of many residents.
PressProgress obviously is not paywalled, but we have a number of local news sites that are and we have this Facebook disaster that’s been unfolding for some time now. And how you might relate those things to what seems to be the voter behaviour this cycle.
Luke: I would love to see some polling or research done into, for example, in B.C. specifically, how much voters knew about these candidates. I would suspect that many of them have heard that some of the B.C. Conservative candidates were controversial, maybe, that they were kind of conspiratorial. But I don’t know how familiar the median voter would have been with some of these things. I mention this in an op-ed I did for the Toronto Star recently, but we’re dealing with multiple problems at the same time. I actually don’t want to criticize the media’s coverage of the election just because these newsrooms have been depleted. Resources are very low. I can imagine people are trying their best in those situations. Maybe there are some criticisms to be made about some specific cases here or there. But in general, it’s really hard to criticize or fault newsrooms that are just struggling to stay alive as is.
You’re dealing with a situation where newsrooms are going through rounds after rounds of layoffs. They don’t have the resources they once did. They don’t have the same reach that they once did. At the same time, news content is now blocked on Facebook. So that really limits your reach. At one point, we were getting half a million to one million page views per month. And a lot of that was coming from Facebook and our readership has significantly dropped as a result of the Online News Act. So that’s a problem. And so you now have a lack of professional, higher quality news content on these platforms.
But at the same time, you have these Facebook groups where they’re sharing these wacky conspiracies about the United Nations and 15-minute cities and Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum. (Schwab leads the WEF.) And those are filling the vacuum because there isn’t anything else there. And then once those people are posting content relating to those conspiracies, there’s no way for a fact check to intervene and maybe challenge some of those ideas. I would just say look at the whole online ecosystem and how information is circulating and flowing. And it just seems really broken to me.
I think a lot of people, probably, first of all don’t know who Klaus Schwab is or understand why people are upset about the World Economic Forum or why people think that children are going to be forced to eat bugs. A lot of people will realize that is self-evidently absurd. But maybe there’s five, 10 per cent of the population — there are people out there who are more vulnerable to this information and these narratives taking over their sense of reality. All of these things are, in combination, definitely contributing to a really dysfunctional situation.
Having something like CBC or CTV or the Globe Mail or these news brands that are bigger and just have a longer history and are generally regarded as being trustworthy, well-established news brands — having those outlets cover these stories would give it more legitimacy in some of these people’s minds, I think. And so the lack of coverage about it, I think it also is maybe enabling some people to dismiss some of the smaller digital outlets are sourcing this information, but the bigger outlets are just for the most part ignoring it, then I could imagine that some people will find it easier to dismiss it or choose to ignore it.
I think it’s really important to understand that these online communities are generating a lot of the political discourse, certainly amongst the far right. But just in general, the internet is becoming the space where these ideas are being incubated and generated. And it is jumping off the Internet into the real world. So I think we do need to take it seriously.
Steph: To what do you owe these major gains by the Conservative party here given where things stood four years ago?
Luke: I went to Germany and the Netherlands in June as part of a journalism program in advance of the EU elections to understand the rise of the far right over there. The stuff I saw there happening in Europe is very similar to what I’m seeing in Canada and what played out in the B.C. election. I think across Europe, in North America and elsewhere in the world, you have post pandemic inflation, your cost of living is kind of out of control. So there’s real, material economic issues that are impacting people in real ways. And I think that the outcome of the vote, in some ways reflects that.
But I think, too, the familiarity of the Conservative brand name, especially considering the B.C. Liberals change their name to B.C. United. No one knew what B.C. United was. It sounds like a soccer team. And so when pollsters are asking them who are you supporting there, they think that the Conservatives are the established party.
They’re actually the fringe party in that situation. So I think some of it just goes to the familiarity of the Conservative brand. And then the other part of it, too, is the media. I just think that there is something seriously broken with how information circulates, especially when it comes to elections in our democracy right now. And clearly, the fact that so many problematic candidates were able to get elected in spite of a long list of controversial or in some cases bigoted or conspiratorial statements, I think reflects the fact that a lot of voters were likely not aware or just lacked depth of information about those candidates.
Especially with someone like Brent Chapman, who’s kind of the poster boy of controversial B.C. Conservative candidates. There’s just so many disqualifying things that Brent Chapman said and yet he was able to get elected. And I’m sure if you did an exit poll of people who voted for Brent Chapman and ask them what they think about some of his positions, for example the idea that Muslims all engage in inbreeding or his comments about Sandy Hook in questioning whether or not that was real. I’m sure that many people who voted for him were either not aware of that or don’t agree with the things that he has said.
Steph: Do you have anything in mind that you might consider some of PressProgress’s more impactful stories, ones that got a lot of reach or had some impact on the news cycle in the election?
Luke: I broke the story about John Rustad’s Nuremberg 2.0 comments. I think that ended up dominating some of the news headlines for a couple of days. I was surprised, though, that the story about the candidate who shared a video claiming that you could cure COVID-19 by blowing the hairdryer up your nose didn’t get as much traction. I thought that this story has the ingredients of a viral campaign story.
This was an example or two, I think, of just where the B.C. media wasn’t really picking up on these candidates’ stories, at least not early on. I think that the Brent Chapman and the Nuremberg 2.0 stuff was kind of when there was a bit of a shift in the media coverage. And people at that point started taking these stories maybe a little more seriously.
My colleague Rumneek Johal, who is our B.C. reporter, has been doing a lot of reporting on drug policy and the drug crisis. She’s done a number of stories during the election about some of the comments that the B.C. Conservatives made, who were fearmongering on that issue and using some very dehumanizing rhetoric. It was interesting from my perspective, as her editor, when there were a lot of drug policy advocates who just feel ignored by the mainstream media in British Columbia and they just seemed very grateful for someone to be asking them their opinions and quoting them in stories.
She’s also done a lot of reporting on the foreign interference stuff with India targeting the Sikh community and the South Asian community in Canada. A lot of these communities feel so gaslit by the corporate media in Canada. So, when someone comes to them and asks them what they think and just seeing their views kind of reflected back to them in our stories, they just seem very grateful for that. So I think that’s also been impactful.
Steph Wechsler is J-Source's managing editor.