By Tim Shoults
October isn’t just National Newspaper Week – it’s also municipal election season in two provinces (Alberta and Quebec, with Newfoundland and Labrador just finishing their elections last month).
Those are the first municipals election being contested while Meta is blocking news from its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, in Canada.
Perhaps just as importantly, they’re the first municipal elections to be conducted since AI has come into our lives.
Those two facts may come together in some very concerning ways for those looking for information to help them make their choices for municipal councils and school boards this fall.
Here’s a recent local example: One of the local Facebook groups in my hometown of St. Albert, Alta. recently had someone ask a question about which city councillors voted for and against on a controversial issue before council earlier this year. A fellow citizen very helpfully replied with the list.
The problem was that one of the councillors listed was a name I’d never heard before.
A quick Google search revealed that the mystery man was, in fact, a city councillor — but for the City of Lethbridge.
I replied to the Facebook poster, who told they tried to post the article from our website which listed the councillors in favour and against, but of course, Facebook wouldn’t let that happen due to their spat with the federal government over the Online News Act. Instead, the poster got their list from an AI-assisted search in Google, which missed one of the councillors in favour and erroneously substituted the councillor from Lethbridge.
It’s the first AI-hallucinated error I’ve seen on social media this election campaign, but it might not be the last.
This isn’t a question of some bad actor trying to spread misinformation online. This isn’t even someone lazily throwing the first thing they ask Google for up onto Facebook. This is someone who made a good faith effort to source local news, then turned to what they thought would be a trusted alternative in AI and ended up inadvertently posting misinformation.
It’s a clear demonstration of the need for professional, fact-checked reporting at a critical time, and a warning that that reporting isn’t nearly as accessible as it needs to be. We get only one chance every four years to choose the women and men who will lead our city and make countless decisions that impact it for decades to come.
To make those choices with erroneous information is frightening, and while citizens on Facebook chat groups are well-meaning, the possibility for error is clearly there. And without the ability to post links to verifiable, fact-checked information done by people who are paid to do that and nothing else on Facebook — one of the principal channels people will be using to get their information — that possibility for error to go uncorrected is high.
We might have caught one error thanks to me being on Facebook at the right time, but we’re too busy covering local news to be policing Facebook for local misinformation.
We’re also not going to be able to solve Facebook’s issue with the Canadian media industry before voters go to the polls, so we’re going to need some kind of workaround. And it’s going to need to involve you, the reader.
We have a saying in the business: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” For this election campaign, I’d like to offer a different version of that: if you come across a piece of information that is critical to your next vote, check it out on the website of your local news source.
Yes, it’s more work, but having verified facts is worth it.
Tim Shoults is publisher of the St. Albert Gazette in Alberta
