For two weeks Now, truckers have brought downtown Ottawa to a standstill. What started as a local dispute against vaccine mandates has now turned to snow – co-opted as a cause for US extreme right to engage in a protest far beyond Parliament Hill. On the ground, hundreds of trucks and cars blocked roads in the city and set up tents to protest the imposition of vaccination requirements on truck drivers. On social networks, videos of the protest are attracting millions of views and crowdfunding campaigns, shared by the likes of Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino, has raised large amounts of money. Confederate flag, QAnon symbol and swastika with all reported to have been seen at the protest site.
From a distance, what is happening in Ottawa seems like an uprising of disgruntled truckers. But the right took the opportunity to turn a local protest into another chapter in the never-ending culture war. Offline, 90 percent Canadian truckers are vaccinated and the Canadian Freight Alliance, which represents the domestic industry and does not support the convoy, said most of the people in and around the protests “There is no connection to the trucking industry.” Online, the incident became a global shock, with hundreds of thousands of supporters gathering on Facebook and Telegram — with many of them living outside the Canadian border.
“Online chat is very transnational,” says Amarnath Amarasingam, a researcher on extremism at Queen’s University in Ottawa. “There are people from Brazil, Australia and the US.” This global attention seems to have galvanized those on the ground. While few protesters remained, the control of the demonstration was estimated cost of C$800,000 ($630,000) a day. And, thanks to the backing of some of the biggest names in the US philanthropic social media scene, the protest, dubbed the Freedom Convoy by supporters, has continued to gain momentum. online, even as the numbers on the ground dwindle.
The result was a strange disconnect between the offline and online versions of the protest — with more of the most successful social media posts coming from familiar figures from the American right than protesters. . Ten video support the Truck driver shared via Donald trumpet Jr. from January 25 to February 7 was viewed by 4.2 million people. The right-wing media apparatus has stepped up support for the protest, with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau call it “An insult to memory and truth.”
“The story and the outcry has been partisan with content creators,” said Ciaran O’Connor, an analyst from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an organization that tracks online extremism. right-wing and the American media in particular. O’Connor saw a similar phenomenon around “Great reset” conspiracy theories. The theory that the pandemic is a global conspiracy to allow world leaders to reset the planet, remained a niche until it was picked up by Rebel News, the Canadian equivalent of Breitbart News. selected. From Rebel News, the conspiracy theory made its way into the orbit of right-wing US commentators like Ben Shapiro and Laura Ingraham, who then further amplified the message, sending it to their millions of followers. . A similar process is underway with the trucking protests in Ottawa. Glenn Beck, Ben Shapiro and Dan Bognino — with Trump Jr. — shared their thoughts on the protests with millions of people worldwide.
The explosion of interest has been fueled by all the names you might expect: Current and former GOP officials such as Mike Huckabee and Marjorie Taylor Greene shared their support for the convoy on social media. More than 88,000 posts were shared by pages, Facebook groups, or verified profiles between January 22, when the Freedom Convoy began, and February 8, according to disaggregated CrowdTangle data. collected by WIRED. Those posts were interacted with 16.6 million times.
