I don't want to hear another word about "online misinformation" from these people

The ones who complain about that, and the ones who so easily fall for made-up partisan ragebait, are one and the same.

When the federal election was called a few weeks ago, I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life:

I checked Facebook.

There is no drug so potent as negative partisanship, and it only took a few minutes of browsing that most Boomer-adjacent of social media sites for my opinion about the election to evolve as follows:

After I’ve calmed down, with or without pharmaceutical intervention, I realize that Liberals undoubtedly feel the same way when accosted by hyper-partisan Tories accusing Mark Carney of being a Maoist or whatever. And we’re likely all being played for fools by whomever is making ragebait memes, whether or not they’re actually based in Canada.

“As a proud Canadian and a lifelong Conservative party member, here’s why I’m supporting Mark Carney and the Liberals this time…”

But then I’m confronted with something like this, shared by some of my IRL friends on Facebook, and the smoke is once again billowing from my ears a la the police captain from Last Action Hero:

This kind of meme is the absolute worst, for several reasons:

1. It’s easily checkable, to a degree that should have stopped its spread as soon as its totally 100% non-partisan Canadian creator posted it. I have the Perplexity AI app on my phone, and this is what came up for me when I asked it to give me ten misleading statements by Mark Carney:

   

2. It’s absurd on its face, unless you sincerely believe Carney was born in a manger 2,025 years ago and has never, ever told a lie, and also Pierre Poilievre is so devious that Perplexity overrides its own programming to give you twenty lies he told on the campaign trail when you only wanted ten. (Which probably means it passed the Turing Test or something.)