Well, it looks like another election season is behind us again, and I, for one, am grateful. It feels like it’s been a one-two punch of election hysteria between the U.S. election in November, and then our own just a few short days ago.

Now that it’s all behind us, though, I’ve seen some people on social media suggesting we might finally be able to go back to having conversations with people who don’t share our opinions or political associations, and maybe even work together with them towards making our country the best it can be.

I’d like to think that we can, I certainly hope we can, but I think there are some challenges ahead of us before we can accomplish that, and a lot of it has to do with misinformation and disinformation.

On election day, there wasw a surprising number of people on social media informing voters that they should bring a pen to the voting station with them because only pencils were being provided. The implication was that votes by pencil could be erased and changed, ignoring, mind you, that there was no reason to think any such thing was going to be done.

Personally, I don’t care what tool someone uses to mark their ballot. For all I care you could prick your finger and mark your X in blood.

My concern, though, is that this builds suspicion around the results of the election, an idea already stoked by similar baseless claims from the United States. And wouldn’t you know it, there already were people attempting to spread that idea today, less than one day after the election itself and the results.

No evidence of it, mind you. Just a vague possibility. And plenty of memes to back you up.

And that’s the biggest problem right now, I think. There are way too many sources of misinformation and disinformation to be found on social media, particularly platforms like X and Facebook. And thanks to the Online News Act (Bill C-18) it’s incredibly hard to push back against this, because actual, legitimate news, is blocked on Facebook.

I absolutely get the intention of the act. It’s frustrating to see companies like Meta and Google making advertising dollars off the work of Canadian journalists while our newspapers struggle to keep their doors open and the lights on, and yes, it would have been nice if those companies had decided to do the right thing and cough up some support for Canadian news. But I think we can all agree now that it’s not going to happen. And keeping this bill in place is going to do more harm than good in the first place.

Heck, even Pierre Poilievre went as far as to suggest that the news ban was an intentional attempt to censor the news.

While it’s an insane thing to suggest — after all, the news platforms themselves are still out there — that is essentially the result we’ve ended up with. Because most people simply want to get their news on Facebook.

We’re creatures of habit. For years we were getting our news updates alongside updates from our friends and our families, from organizations and companies, all of which we had carefully curated on the platform.

People are still getting updates there. Only it’s not accurate.

It’s time to fix that. Facts matter.