The Canadian government pushed back this week after two weeks of protest. Trudeau invoked the country's Emergencies Act to allow new financial restrictions on the protests and harsher punishments for anyone involved.
For many Canadians, it is an end to a chaotic protest that has stifled trade and brought alarming weaponry into otherwise quiet communities. Tucker Carlson has portrayed the convoy as a working-class rebellion, and Trudeau's response has been treated as martial law by the right-wingers.
It's a shocking split, the most important factor in the protests, and much of it comes from the fractured way information travels online. Thevoy supporters are getting their news from a tangle of Facebook groups, Telegram channels, and random influencers, which is all amplified and expanded by right-wing broadcasters like Carlson, The Daily Caller, or Canadian right-wing media network Rebel News. These channels promote a sanitized version of movements like the Freedom Convoy, which can be found on these channels.
From physical protest to social media to establishment outlets
The convoy evolved from a local standoff into a televised event that can raise millions of dollars from supporters thousands of miles away. The infrastructure was drawn from anti-vaxx groups and other fringe communities. The convoy may be broken up by the Canadian government, but those online pathways are much stickier.
To understand how this echo chamber works, we have to start with the protest. The group of Canadian truck drivers that started the Freedom Convoy was founded by James Bauder, a far-right activist. Bauder has built a coalition of fed-up truck drivers, fringe Canadian political party members, neo-Nazis, anti-vaxxers, and low-level online creators.
The convoy didn't gain much traction until a video about the protest was posted on a right-wing video platform and started to get a few thousand shares. According to Facebook's page transparency tools, Windsor shared links to a page called Freedom Convoy which was started four days earlier. Truck drivers are planning to protest Canadian COVID mandates before this. The most-shared piece of convoy content during the first week was the post on January 18th.
“The Freedom Convoy has had connections to the Canadian far-right from the beginning”
Windsor's video was linked to a right-wing Canadian video creator named Pat King who was active in Canada's Yellow Vests protests. The first sizeable Facebook group for convoy supporters, which was initially called Freedom Convoy 2022, changed its name after Windsor's video. On the very first day of the Facebook page being launched, the group was a major initial supporter of the page.
According to AntiHate.ca, the GoFundMe was run by a former Canadian Yellow Vest who works for a Canadian party and a right-wing commentator.
Paris Marx, a PhD candidate based in Canada and host of the podcast Tech Won't Save Us, told The Verge that the Freedom Convoy's connections to the country's far-right significantly outweigh its connections to actual Canadian trucking companies.
He said that the Freedom Convoy had connections to the Canadian far-right from the beginning, including having been behind the initial GoFundMe campaign.
James Bauder, the founder of the Trucking for Freedom group, was connected with the organizers of the trucker's protest on January 25th. During these early weeks, Trucking for Freedom would become an official documentarian. The Trucking for Freedom group distributed King's high-res photography from the road. They were shared through a number of small Canadian Facebook pages and groups.
Five convoy groups were created by a single hacked account
The reach on this content was small. Pat King's videos have been watched less than 100,000 times. In January there were a number of local posts, like an emotional post from the page for the Continental Cattle Carriers, or a photo album of children cheering.
Between Tuesday, January 25th, and Saturday, January 29th, the total mentions for voyeuristic went up 195 percent, which coincides with other large groups. This was the last time the convoy would be entirely Canadian. It would travel south to the United States but also beyond North America, gaining support from right-wing pages across Europe.
Convoy groups began to attract counterfeits and scam artists as a result of international attention. An investigation from Grid News found that five convoy groups were created by a single hacked account, and a Facebook spokesman told NBC News that content farms as far as Bangladesh and Vietnam were promoting convoy meme. On January 28th, a page currently called Freedom People, run out of Bulgaria, created a convoy Facebook group called, "Freedom Convoy Worldwide", which currently has 9000 members. The Freedom People page uses a group called Freedom Convoy Worldwide to advertise a donation page.
“Users in Telegram chats are being bombarded with conflicting maps, routes, dates, and times that seem to evolve by the hour”
The movement's international spread introduced it to Facebook's larger universe of anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. The first video about the convoy was posted on January 24th by a Facebook page run by four people based in the United States. The page has become so popular that it may be the center of the entire convoy movement online right now. It was originally called 2012: What and is now called 2020: What's the Real Truth. In January 2021, it changed its name to advocate for a global revolution against COVID protocols.
Canadians were no longer leading the convoy at the end of January. It was around this time that the largest convoy group was created, and it doesn't seem to be run by any Canadians at all. It has 87,000 members and is called The People's Convoy. The administrators of the group have ties to the US on their Facebook profiles.
Sara Aniano is a misinformation researcher who has contributed to the Global Network on Extremism and Technology.
Users in Telegram chats are being bombarded with conflicting maps, routes, dates, and times that seem to evolve by the hour, and many have expressed confusion. They are not on the same page.
“Fox News has an interesting way of filtering very local events through the prism of its own culture wars”
The core of the Freedom Convoy was a small group of local conspiracy theorists who were suddenly given a megaphone by America's powerful right-wing disinformation machine. Their campaign was boosted by Facebook's algorithm, which favors content shared within local groups, and was then blasted out into every feed and screen possible by conservative tabloids. Between January 28th and January 31st, The Daily Wire published 66 articles featuring the phrase "convoy", which they latched on to at the end of January. The most popular story of theirs from this time period is about a Facebook group that was shut down by the platform after just four days for repeatedly violating Facebook's policies.
Amplifying small right-wing political movements like this has become a powerful piece of the conservative toolkit. Over the last month, Fox News aired over eight hours of programming about the Freedom Convoy, warning that an American version was on its way.
A professor at Queen says that Fox News filters local events through its own culture wars and creates the impression that they are part of a grassroots uprising.
The convoy may have been put on Fox News' radar by The Daily Wire. The majority of the activity on Facebook around Daily Wire stories has come from a network of larger pages associated with The Daily Wire. Crowdtangle data shows that the January 31st story about the convoy Facebook group got a lot of interactions on the platform because it was shared to both the personal page of Daily Wire commentator Michael Knowles and to the personal page of Shapiro. The movement was turned into a meaningless Facebook meme because of the American media attention.
The convoy's donation page was shut down by GoFundMe on February 5th, causing a massive spike in activity. Engagement hasn't come back. The GoFundMe shutdown was the most important event of the convoy. The movement has been part of it since the very beginning. According to a statement from GoFundMe, the convoy's fundraiser was shut down after the company was given evidence that protesters were planning to occupy the capital city.
Fox News coverage has given a huge boost to fringe anti-government figures like Bauder and King, who would not have been influential enough to spark global interest on their own. He is worried that those figures will use their new profile to draw followers to the fringes, using the same network of Facebook groups and willing right-wing amplifiers.
The movement is here to stay despite the fact that the activism on the ground has probably peaked.
Garbage Day is a newsletter written by Ryan Broderick.
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