[Music] so i'm five years old sitting on our living room floor watching tv on a saturday morning blissfully unaware that a piece of misinformation was about to change my life see in 1987 i really didn't have much of a choice of what to watch on tv oh sure i had my limited selection of channels but they chose what was on and they would include ad breaks in everything they would even edit content to fit the ads in so if you were watching a movie in 1987 there'd probably be about 20 minutes of the movie that
had been cut out so that it can fit into a two-hour time slot with ads the movie that i was watching was called the incredible journey it's a story about three pets who get lost in the wilderness and they just need to find their way home and in the story there's a moment where a dog comes across a porcupine now the kind of edited for content scene played out like this dog sees porcupine from about 15 feet away dog barks at the porcupine porcupine turns its back to the dog then there's this kind of awkward
cut and all of a sudden now the dog has a face full of porcupine quills i mean i just sort of assumed that the porcupine had shot the dog with its quilts what else did i have to go on so i'm 18 years old gloriously frosted tips and a copy of big wrecks in loving memory of in my discman one day a friend of mine who considered me their smart friend mentions that they came across a porcupine when walking their dog i quickly said you need to watch out otherwise they'll shoot their quills at you
what um what followed was easily ten of the most awkward silent seconds i've ever experienced in my life my my status as their smart friend done and this is the power of misinformation misinformation is a powerful and dangerous aspect of our lives and much like the way that our experiences watching tv have changed since my significantly younger and much more hairline forward days as is the ways that we talk to each other see median technology they're powerful forces of change to which we are always having to adapt consider this in 1839 an article was written
by a man who had just ridden the train for the very first time he described the experience as the annihilation of space and time let that sink in the annihilation of space and time places that had previously been so far away that you would never visit them in your lifetime were suddenly within a day or two travel today social media has decimated our concept of space taking the entire world and bringing it right to our fingertips and if i may say between smashing through time zones and giving us readily available access to information if you'll
pardon my language it has done a solid maple syrup of a job on our notions of time gone gone are the days of having to sit around and wait for a news broadcast or hunt through encyclopedias to find information today there's a an abundance of information just a simple click away finding answers it's never been faster but as as my wife has told me numerous times um faster it's not always better you see misinformation it's also just a simple click away the cost of that misinformation be a lot more than losing your status as someone's
smart friend it can cost you your life see misinformation has been a major component of the covet 19 pandemic the world health organization has described it as an infodemic running parallel to the pandemic sadly many people have lost their lives due to following misleading information about treatments or cures for kovit 19. so what can you do what can any of us do about all this misinformation see social media and the non-stop flow of information it can get overwhelming but you have more power than you realize see social media it's not it's not some separate world
you know you'll often hear people say that oh that's online but this is the real world social media isn't some separate place it's just another way that we talk to each other and much like a beloved and fellow ginger character from my childhood wished it could be it's part of our world and you have power in that world you have the power to stop sharing misinformation but how first thing you always need to do is think ask yourself is the source of this information credible can it be verified somehow then ask does it even make
sense i mean does it really make sense that a porcupine shot its quills over a distance of 15 feet let's go back to those kovid 19 treatment options for a moment if there really was a simple cure-all surely healthcare workers would want you to know about it it makes no logical sense for the people who have been working day and night for well over a year to have not stopped and be like oh by the way there actually happens to be a simple and effective cure but the purveyors of misinformation will tell you this is
because it is all part of a massively orchestrated global conspiracy but does that make sense a global conspiracy involving every nurse doctor hospital healthcare worker health agency and government on earth all working in perfect harmony to facilitate this conspiracy clearly these people have never worked in public service because that is what i call a very gloriously optimistic view of project management you see misinformation thrives and i mean it thrives on being widely shared the more people who see and share the same thing the more legitimate it will seem in communications we call this the echo
chamber you see social media can be kind of like like a choose your own adventure except with your life with but a simple click you choose who you follow be it friends media outlets a humble public health twitter account from ottawa that happens to be the most followed local public health account in north america etc in much the same way as you'll gravitate towards the people at a party who are talking about something that interests you the online adventure that you click your way through will be one that interests you and we are all interested
in people who agree with us and that that is the most insidious aspect of misinformation you will want to believe it if you agree with it a bad driver does not like to be told that they're a bad driver and they will happily give a ride to their friend who says they're a good driver see we naturally tend to surround ourselves with people who agree with us which makes us believe that misinformation is a problem other people have but surely not us take it from someone who spent 13 years petrified of porcupines misinformation affects all
of us speaking of well-thought-out segways let's talk about gluten yes for the small percentage of the population who have celiac disease gluten is the enemy and i'm very happy that they have a wide variety of foods to choose from these days curiously though going gluten-free is one of the most popular weight loss trends of the last decade even though there's no evidence to support that whatsoever oh there's anecdotes and articles of plenty there's correlations and coincidences galore but evidence there is not plenty what often happens is someone will choose to go gluten-free but then they'll
also start eating a more well-balanced diet they'll start exercising and sure enough time will pass and they'll have lost weight and they'll be like oh thank goodness i went gluten-free not realizing that the source of their weight loss was the other peripheral activities and this particular trend is very very deeply rooted and yes i just made a pun about food but that root that strong root it comes from us it comes from our anecdotes of us telling each other and not from evidence we tell someone they post about it online someone shares someone shares it
around and around it goes but it doesn't need to be this way much like the physics defying porcupine quills of my youth the covid19 misinformation or the magic beans that are gluten misinformation will only spread if we allow it to spread and we cannot start to limit its spread until we admit that it's a problem that affects all of us now that's not an easy admission to make i know i've been there but now i'm here and i have not come here to chastise mame blame shame or any other verb i can think of that
happens to rhyme i've come here as a bringer of hope as a bringer of helpful truths i've come to help you adapt i've come to help make your clicks matter i've come to help you think you see you can make a difference i i can't change my past but you can change your future by thinking i mean granted if i could change my past oh i'd absolutely go back to that living room back to that young utterly adorable but somewhat impressionable five-year-old and i'd help to ease his mind help to show him the misinformation for
what it was help him see that there was no reason to be terrified of these porcupines i would also likely tell him that frosted tips are a genuinely awful idea and i would help him retain his status as a smart friend in the future instead i hope you'll all think about the information you see online i hope you'll ask yourself if it makes sense i hope you'll analyze it as if your own reputation as someone's smart friend was on the line think then click thank you [Applause]
