Wanderings – Fact, fiction, and what’s posted online

A fire in the middle of the night consumed a stone house near where I live recently. The house was empty and there were no injuries. That is where I thought the story ended, but it wasn’t so.

There was a quarry nearby, dating back to county road construction projects back during the depression. Having been filled with water for decades since, it has become a local not-so-legal swimming hole. But then, bones were found.

The two incidents were connected. Not by police investigators, or by facts, but by the magic of a Facebook group and the power of rumours.

One story, fabricated by keyboard warriors and armchair investigators from ones and zeroes in social media connected the two incidents together as a larger mystery. The house caught fire, firefighters accessed a local pond for a water resource to put out the fire, the water was pumped down and that’s when the human bones were found. Cue the police investigation. Nefarious things were happening in our community.

This raged on for nearly a day. Speculation in the form of comments and messages. The narrative built into this big story, for which only two things were true: a house did burn down; and bones were found in the quarry/pond. Everything else was nonsense perpetuated by social media.

The bones found were in-fact animal bones, as confirmed by a simple email to the local police media officer. The fire, took place nearly eight hours after the bones had been found – they were not discovered while draining water from the quarry to fight the fire. Sorry Marty McFly, no time travel needed here.

What the internet/social media speculators got wrong was the time line, the connection between the two incidents, and the order of which those incidents occurred. This was a simple case of two unrelated events being wrapped into a pseudo-conspiracy and crime by rumour.

This was allowed to continue on for a few days online, gradually burning out. But I could not post the article I had written with the facts of the two unrelated events because social media companies do not want to compensate media companies for their news.

It has been just over two years since Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, stopped allowing Canadian News content to be shared on their platform. The Online News Act required Meta and Google to pay news outlets for the stories that were shared through their platforms. Google struck a deal, Meta did not. And we are left with what this is.

For two years, internet rumour, gossip, and speculation has run rampant on social media, primarily Facebook groups – meanwhile newspapers, TV, and Radio are unable to post articles about the news.

Where Meta has positioned itself to be a channel for people to connect, when there were forest fires, Amber Alerts, or the like, no news was allowed. I am sure people looking for information on when they should evacuate their home appreciated receiving posts about erectile disfunction medicine, one-pan meal prep ideas, and what celebrity looks like what animal instead.

Two years into the Meta news ban, its channels have devolved to cesspools of rumour groups, peppered with the odd for sale post, entertainment nonsense, and places for hate and misinformation to propagate. To see the worst effect of this, look south – but things are not rosy here either.

While allowing Canadian News back on Meta outlets would help the situation, the real solution is with the consumers: ie the readers. Think before you post, look up facts, find a news article from a credible source, and just ask questions before forming an opinion or typing words. In the words of Dana Scully, “the truth is out there.” It’s just likely not to be on Facebook.