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In the week since the short clip has been online — posted to a purportedly Vancouver-based page that traffics mostly in social media clips of Canadian leaders — it has been liked almost 12,000 times. Many of the comments were swift to point out that voting in Canada had long involved tiny golf pencils, but others vowed to show up to polls ready, ballpoint in hand. 

That’s the latest false claim to bubble up on social media before Canadians head to the polls on Monday. On the plus side, experts say that fears of major foreign-led disinformation campaigns have not materialized — at least not yet. But that doesn’t mean misinformation hasn’t been a problem. It’s just that the call might be coming from inside the house.

It’s never been harder to tell what’s true online, as formerly trusted sources of information shrink or get blocked, to be increasingly replaced by partisan influencers, bots and rumour. Sometimes regular people end up reposting it. While some of this no doubt is fuelled by bad actors outside the country, they’re able to exploit an information landscape that is partitioned and polluted.   

It has had the effect of “raising the cost of trying to get reliable information,” says Heidi Tworek, director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia. 

But research also suggests that if you think the information ecosystem around you is less reliable, you think your fellow citizens — particularly those voting for other parties — are less informed: “So it has a corrosive effect on trust in demographic institutions,” she says. In other words, Canada’s misinformation problem is as much a Canada problem as it is anything else. 

Take the worry about pencils. It’s the sort of conspiracy that begins to seem legitimate when you spend “a huge amount of time” online, talking to people who think just like you do, says Aengus Bridgman, director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory and the Canadian Digital Media Research Network. 

“Your lived experience comes to mean less and less over time as you spend more and more time online,” he says. “I think that’s ultimately what can generate these moments, where your online reality hits actual lived experience.” 

In other words, when everyone around you is in agreement, polls — or an election result — that disagree can begin to look like conspiracy. 

When Canada’s public inquiry into foreign interference  earlier this year, Justice Marie-Josée Hogue called misinformation an “existential threat” to democracy. An internal briefing document prepared for the elections commissioner also warned that the use of AI was a “high” risk for the campaign.

Fears tended to focus on major players like Russia and China, but when the election writ dropped many also worried about the impact of a newly antagonistic United States. Fears crystallized around tech titan Elon Musk, who had used his X platform to boost the far-right Alternative for Germany party ahead of that country’s elections, and was now working closely with President Donald Trump — with some even called for  into possible foreign interference.

While it does not totally fit the definition of interference, Trump has, however, helped ratchet up electoral tension by musing about a Canadian future as the 51st American state — though not necessarily by convincing Canadians of the idea’s merits. (Trump mostly stayed out of the campaign conversation, before popping back up in a Time interview in the campaign’s final days to say he was ”.”)Ìý

“It’s certainly clear that factually incorrect information by the leader of the country to the south played a big role in the election, but not necessarily because people believe it, but because they were actually reacting against it,” Tworek says. 

More covert activity may be revealed later, but Canada has so far been fortunate that there has not yet been a major push by a foreign actor, or a deceptive ploy on the scale of using Biden’s AI-generated voice for robocalls, Bridgman says. (The Canadian government’s Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections, or SITE, task force has highlighted a couple of online campaigns seemly directed by China, but neither are thought to have significantly impacted the election.)

Still, it’s arguably never been harder for a reasonable person to know which information is credible online. Trust in traditional media continues to crater — according to the Reuters Institute, the number of people who trust the media has fallen 15 percentage points in the last five years, to just 40 per cent. 

When it comes to rumours like pencils at the polls, Elections Canada made it the subject of one of their online ”,” stressing that while pencils have long been used in voting around the world — they don’t dry up or risk blotted ink and a spoiled ballot — you can use a pen if you want, and election workers never handle a ballot without witnesses anyway. But their posts and media stories are both competing with a huge amount of social media noise. (While the video of the man asking about pens at a polling station was eventually marked with a note that it was “missing context,” Elections Canada’s own  currently has a mere 650 likes.) 

That drop in trust, combined with the closure of many smaller media outlets has helped push people online, where one in four Canadians get news from social media despite algorithms that prioritize polarizing content that provokes emotional reactions. This is also the first election playing out amidst Meta’s ban on news content, where the void has been filled by ads that look like news stories but sell crypto and newslike content shared by accounts like Canada Proud with clear partisan allegiances.

While foreign meddling for political ends is usually the biggest concern during an election, Tworek argues we need to be just as concerned about those who are using the election for grift. 

“We really need to worry about the fraud or scam aspect to this,” she says of the AI-generated ads. “I’d argue it often has a bigger effect on individual people’s lives. Like, if you fall for this cryptocurrency scam that, say, Mark Carney seems to be hawking.” 

It’s also increasingly apparent that your feed is not your own, as it gets more difficult to tell who is controlling your Facebook groups or running political ads.

“I’m embarrassed for them that they somehow think this is OK,” Bridgman says of Meta’s inability to get a handle on fake ads in particular, but says the unchecked fake political content on social media in general was “utterly irresponsible.” (In a recent statement to CBC, a Meta spokesperson said that they “continue to invest in new technologies and methods to protect people on our platforms from scams.”)Ìý

The sense of a communal digital town square has crumbled further as people have begun to decamp to their own ideological camps online. According to numbers from the Media Ecosystem Observatory, X remains the primary home of Canadian politics, having seen 73 per cent of all social media posts from federal candidates. It’s most popular among the PPC and Conservatives, the latter of which tend to dominate engagement in general.

But other factions are starting to splinter — almost half of the federal candidates on upstart Twitter competitor Bluesky are Liberal; YouTube engagement is dominated by Conservatives and TikTok by the NDP. While the old Twitter was never perfect, people with opposing views used to, in theory, be able to have a conversation.

“Now as platform segregation speeds up a little bit, even that possibility is gone,” Bridgman says. “I think that’s probably part of it. Like, how do you follow a campaign and follow the debate, if people are talking past each other?” 

When Canadians head to the polls on Monday, with either pencils or pens, many people’s online expectations will butt up against real world results.