In the good old days, the two main parties were close enough to the political centre that most of us felt comfortable voting either way. But then the conservatives decided to move to the right such that the CPC is now lingering close to the fringe.
In the days when people looked to mainstream media for their news and journalists sought the truth and checked their sources, the political fringes were small. However, since social media became the main source of news for many, the fringes have expanded; the more outlandish the story, the more likely it will get re-tweeted and people rarely check the source of the news or go into any depth to verify its truth. This new social media landscape suits politicians like PP, who use stories that have some semblance of the possibility of being true and use the information to move minds.
In a recent example, PP re-tweeted an article from The Telegraph in the UK and the National Post in Canada (both of whom often don’t feel the need to check their sources) that had the title “Mark Carney accused of plagiarism in Oxford Thesis”. This referred to his Phd thesis from 1995. One could wonder why this had suddenly been discovered 30 years after the fact just as Carney was entering an election. In any case, it lead to a response from Dr Margaret Meyer, Carney’s doctoral supervisor at Oxford:
“… over the course of this more than 300-page thesis, the Michael Porter book referenced in your question is cited dozens of times.
Within his thesis, Mark acknowledged, cited, scrutinized, and expanded on this piece. Mark’s thesis was evaluated and approved by a faculty committee that saw his work for what it is: an impressive and thoroughly researched analysis that set him apart from his peers.”
The problem is that the original article was tweeted and re-tweeted by people like PP many times but the response from Margaret Meyer was not. PP knows that – so for the two seconds that it took PP to propagate a lie, it costs him nothing and put his opponent’s reputation into question.
WR Foster 