Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thanks to all of our panellists for being here.
Mr. Kalenský, I'm very concerned about how disinformation goes from the dark recesses of the Internet to the mainstream. It starts with a lie, presumably on the Internet. It gets amplified by fake accounts and junk media outlets. Then it becomes a hashtag. Then it becomes a bit more legitimate when ideological news outlets pick it up. Eventually, it lands in mainstream media or in a political party's platform or speeches.
In 2019, when a Syrian family in Halifax died in a very tragic fire, the Prime Minister retweeted my condolence post, and all of a sudden, my social media blew up with racist conspiracy theories and hate about this family and this tragic occurrence. Clearly, bad actors and bots descended on the story and spread hateful disinformation.
It makes me think about Alex Jones leading a campaign in America to dismiss the slaughter of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. He claimed that it was staged and that grieving parents were actors. Memorial pages for the young children who were killed were inundated with vitriol towards the parents and mourners.
He recently said that he knew what he was saying wasn't true; however, and this is shocking, in 2022 a poll in The Economist found that almost 20% of Americans believed that mass shootings like the Sandy Hook massacre had been staged to support gun control.
Mr. Kalenský, how does this happen? How does something like this, a despicable lie from a garbage conspiracy theorist, so fully entrench itself in the minds of mainstream citizens?