It's a curious thing indeed that while virtually the entire Canadian political establishment craved US approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, few of the country's politicians could be bothered to offer kind words for the Republican Party promising to make it happen.  Now that President Trump has finally OK'd the thing, ending eight years of delay, and ultimately rejection by the comparatively beloved Obama administration, the gratitude the White House receives, from the Prime Minister on down, is mostly stiff and abstract.

Canadians are fed a steady diet of fables from their government, media, and education system encouraging the belief that their country is not a run-of-the-mill nation-state possessing ordinary interests of safety and prosperity, but a bundle of progressive policies, social programs, and moral virtues that just happen to have a GDP and army.  Such ideological blinders make forming logical strategies of Canadian foreign policy extraordinarily difficult, since the boringly normal business of crafting commonsense global relationships is hard to initiate from a premise that your country transcends all norms.

When Prime Minister Trudeau brags about presiding over the world's "first postnational state" he sets expectations that the behavior of his government will be animated entirely by universalist concerns — the great global "isms" of the modern left: feminism, multiculturalism, environmentalism.  In a domestic context, these expectations are appeased easily enough, a photo-op with refugees here, a pink t-shirt Youtube video there, but collapse quickly once the rest of the messy world intrudes.

Canada has a vested interest in seeing the present government of Saudi Arabia survive.  The country is an important source of oil for our eastern provinces, and at a time when the established regimes of the Middle East are battling terrorist armies of apocalyptic cultists eager to make war on the west, it is rational for Canada to side with the regimes.

Yet Saudi Arabia is also a repulsive dictatorship whose Koranic constitution promotes grotesque and retrograde attitudes towards its female subjects.  The Trudeau administration's decision to sell weapons to the kingdom — despite being a continuation of decades of Canadian policy — thus subjected our ostentatiously "woke" government to accusations of hypocrisy and cowardice it was rhetorically unequipped to rebut.

Similar pressures emanate from continental pipelines.  Canada is a deeply trade dependent nation, with about $231 billion of that trade â€” or about 40% of our total export value â€” coming from the sale of oil, gas, and other natural resources to foreign countries, mainly the US.  There is simply no universe in which Canada's economic stability can be secured without a healthy resource sector and a happy relationship with America.  Trudeau's trouble is that his base would prefer their PM bloviate about how he can't muster "anything but condemnation" for America's bigoted president or how his green heart pines for Alberta's oil sands to be "phased out" than self-censor in the pursuit of Canadian survival.

Placing domestic ideology above national interest is a multi-partisan problem, to be fair.  The NDP would be a cataclysmic party to run Ottawa at this point, given Thomas Mulcair's loud and repeated insistence that he believes the President of the United States is a "fascist," surely the most extreme insult one would-be head of state has leveled against another on this side of Hugo Chavez.  The Conservatives, meanwhile, face a dilemma of their own regarding whether it makes sense to continue their high dudgeon denunciations of Putin's Russia — a Cold War continuity ubiquitous during the Harper years — at a time when Trump's State Department is more inclined towards detente, and even cooperation, in the service of larger geopolitical goals to which Canada has common cause, including the destruction of ISIS.

Shortly after Trump's election, Henry Kissinger deemed one possible virtue of the outcome the establishment of "coherence between our foreign policy and our domestic situation" — in other words, making American actions abroad clearly linked to popular demands at home.  The vision of "America First" articulated in President Trump's inaugural was certainly as coherent as could be, outlining, as it did, a simple equation of American greatness inversely tied to the success of foreigners.  Whether the formula works, it at least offers a clear conception of the national interest, something Canada's comparatively incoherent cast of statesmen can still barely describe, let alone defend.

Written by J.J. McCullough

The man isn't shy about holding forth with his opinions, and for Canadians who are sick of overly coached candidates spouting talking points, that's refreshing.  But the problem is not that O'Leary likes to flip the script.  It's that he's speaking to hear the sound of his own voice and not to Canadians.  Too often, O'Leary uses his celebrity status platform to indulge himself.

The Canadian media seems intent on fitting him into the "Canada's Trump" box.  But Trump, for all his flaws, said things that connected with ordinary Americans.  Talking points or no, the problem with modern politics is that the politicians aren't saying the things people want to hear.  For example, who was O'Leary speaking to when he said that there was "nothing proud about being a warrior"?  When the other leadership candidates dogpiled onto him, he could credibly claim that he was being ganged up on.  Trouble was, there weren't many Canadians who raised their voices in support of what he said.  Condemning the military isn't where voters- especially Conservative ones- are at, it seems.

Then you have O'Leary's comments to the effect that he would throw union members "in jail."  Again: Who is the intended audience here?  Obviously it wasn't Canada's labour unions, who have launched a pre-emptive blitz against him on Twitter.  But what about CPC members who belong to a union?  Or how about Ontario Tories who are still licking their wounds from the pounding they took in 2014 when PCPO leader Tim Hudak promised to cut 10,000 public sector jobs?   What is the upside of a broadside against big labour this early in the game?  Is there data showing that this is what people want?  If so, I haven't seen it.

But it's O'Leary's comments about Canada being safe from terror attacks because we've been "neutral" in the fight against ISIS that are really confusing.  "The last person ISIS wants to put a bullet through is a Canadian"?  Well, someone should remind Mr. Wonderful that ISIS has already put a bullet through a Canadian- Corporal Nathan Cirillo.

Now, Mr. O'Leary is a newcomer to politics.  He's an outsider.  He's a maverick.  All this is clear.  But we already have a Prime Minister who is infamous for blurting out things he shouldn't.  And O'Leary has had to walk back several of his comments already, most notably what he had to say about Canada's Armed Forces.

How can O'Leary claim to be Justin Trudeau's "worst nightmare" while giving voters more of what they've had from him already?  And can he keep his outsider credibility intact if he has to keep apologizing for his controversial comments?

His fellow Dragon, Arlene Dickinson, suggests that O'Leary shifts positions "when it is convenient", so further corrections may be forthcoming- especially when O'Leary has to submit to the judgement of CPC voters at EDA meetings.

It's true that Trump did have to apologize for the outrageous things he said in the wake of the Trump Tapes incident.   But before he did, he had built up a reputation as a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut who rolled over his critics and haters.  It's one of the things that gave him the ability to make it across the finish line when his campaign faltered two weeks before Election Day.

O'Leary simply hasn't put in the time or the work that Trump did.

The question remains though: Does he need to?

Written by Josh Lieblein

Late last year before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau slinked off to the Aga Khan's $100 million extravagant island retreat, Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson announced she would be questioning the PM for his participation in cash-for-access fundraisers, where guests paid the Liberal Party of Canada $1,500-a-ticket for access to Trudeau.

Despite this unprecedented bombshell, Trudeau didn't have second thoughts about taking his friends and family to a billionaire's Bahamian island, flying in his private helicopter, and enjoying an all-expenses-paid trip, even though the man offering the largesse is the head of a foundation registered as a federal lobbyist that Trudeau's government granted $55 million to last year.  Trudeau — who claims he has read and understands the Conflict of Interest Act — supposedly saw no need to inform the Ethics Commissioner on his unprincipled plans to go ahead with the lavish trip.  The only logical conclusion one can gather from this is that Trudeau and team realized the horrendous optics of the trip, but figured they'd keep it clandestine, trying to get away scot free  with the unseemly getaway.

The PMO's tight-lipped and curt responses to reporters with the impertinence to ask the location of where the sitting PM was located suggests this was indeed the strategy.  A game of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? ensued.  At first nosey reporters were simply given the vague hint that he had left the country.  Then reporters got warmer when it was disclosed he was in the Bahamas.  Finally, reporter David Akin X marked the spot on the Aga Khan's paradise island.  This silly game of treasure hunt was made possible by Trudeau's decision to try and secretly circumvent the ethical guidelines so he could indulge in the lap of luxury.

Now returned home tanned and caught again demonstrating unethical behaviour, Trudeau must face the full wrath of Dawson, the independent parliamentary watchdog whose job security just so happens to depend upon Trudeau.  The fearsome commissioner, slighted by the PM after her previous admonishment, has bared her fangs, opening an investigation into Trudeau's ill-advised trip.  If her employer is found guilty, Dawson can use the full might of her authority and slap Trudeau a whopping $500 fine per violation (one for accepting the gift of the trip and another for flying on the Aga Khan's private aircraft).

But it's odd it took this brazen flouting of the rules before Dawson fully flexed her muscles in launching an investigation.  The Globe's investigation into cash-for-access events unearthed that a Chinese billionaire donated $200,000 to the Trudeau Foundation and $50,000 to erect a statue of Justin's father shortly after attending a cash-for-access dinner with Trudeau, but somehow this apparent conflict didn't warrant Dawson's inspection.

Trudeau appears to be oblivious to the severity of his actions.  He "looks forward" to meeting with the commissioner, unperturbed she is launching an investigation into his misconduct.  Perhaps it's because he knows he's untouchable.

The media have given Trudeau an easy ride, which has led him to become increasingly audacious in his actions.  When Trudeau was an MP in opposition, he had one of the worst attendance records in parliament.  Instead of doing his job as the education critic, Trudeau was busy lining his pockets giving speeches to charities and school boards for as much as $20,000 a pop.  It wasn't clear, as MP's details of expense claims aren't disclosed, but Trudeau likely billed taxpayers' for his transportation to and from these lucrative side gigs.  However, except for the defunct Sun News Network and Toronto Sun, Trudeau was barely chided by the mainstream press.  Whenever Trudeau is caught in an ethical quandary, journalists and pundits come to his rescue; they don't hold him to account.

In this most recent case of the secret getaway, the media unquestioningly reiterated the PM's excuse — the Aga Khan has long been a family friend of the Trudeaus.  The media also added how the billionaire spiritual leader and philanthropist is a swell guy.  Neither of these points have anything to do with whether or not Trudeau broke his own set of ethical guidelines he introduced shortly after taking office, as well as his claims his government was going to be transparent and open.  On top of this, Trudeau keeps dodging questions â€” thanks to a few reporters actually doing their jobs — about whether or not the PM has been to the Aga Khan's island before, or if he was only had the immense pleasure since his Liberal government gave the Muslim leader's charity $55 million.

Of course no significant consequences will befall Trudeau over his most recent blunder, but a trend is emerging.  As Trudeau spends taxpayers' money traveling the country to see ordinary Canadians — essentially going on the charm offensive campaign to distract from his latest predicament — Trudeau seems to think he is above reproach.  However, only a little over a year in office, Trudeau's arrogance and ethical blindness demonstrate likely fatal flaws foreshadowing the tragic fall from grace to come.

Written by Graeme C. Gordon

The election of Donald Trump has preoccupied American commentators and journalists with deep and important questions about the intersections of culture, economics, politics, and indeed life itself.  You can open any American magazine, newspaper, or website at the moment and read fascinating essays about the economic malaise of the rust belt, the breakdown of white working class families, the appalling arrogance of celebrity condescension, the dangerous groupthink of Ivy League schools and more, authored by both liberal and conservative alike.  These are substantial pieces of writing, literary and well-researched, that reflect a desire to truly understand American society in all its vast complexities and challenges.

People don't write these kinds of things in this country.  In place of substantial sociology we have lazy polemicists like Stephen Marche, Jon Kay, and John Ibbitson who blithely assert ideologically pleasing generalizations about Canada with scant evidence.  This difference is a reflection of the widely different stories our elite tells about our respective nations.

The American commentator says "we are a flawed people defined by our flaws and our constant struggle to overcome them and live up to the unfulfilled ideals of our founding."

The Canadian commentator says, "we are a fundamentally wonderful people defined by our contrast with the awfulness of America.  We must celebrate our superiority and dismiss our failings as laughably minor."

The Canadian narrative is like cotton candy; it's sweet and fluffy and gives you a satisfying rush.  But it's unhealthy in the long term, since it's not made of substantial stuff and won't make you stronger.

The outcome of the Tory leadership race will decide whether this country will get an advocate for a Canadian counter-narrative.  Though only an infinitesimally small section of the public — perhaps less than half of one percent — will wind up electing the next Tory boss, the result will play an outsized role in either reenforcing or threatening the story our powerful tell themselves, and by extension, us.

If a man like Michael Chong wins, the dominant narrative will be reenforced.  Chong believes that in the last election the Tory party failed Canada by being too dark and divisive.  His candidacy is based on the premise that Canadians crave leaders who celebrate conventional progressive totems like immigration, environmentalism, and the CBC, and rally around calm, progressive politicians like himself.

If a man like Andrew Scheer wins — an apple who has not fallen far from the Stephen Harper tree — the narrative will be reinforced to some extent as well.  Prime Minister Harper was a radical man for his time, but his near-decade in government proved his flavour of conservatism, which, though principled, was vastly more cautious than it ever got credit for, could be compatible with the larger system.  The elite never came up with a good theory of what Harper represented, beyond the fact that it was possible to elect an alternative to the Liberal Party from time to time.  Because he so closely resembles Harper in tone, temperament, and agenda — indeed, as an understudy he is in some ways more Harperite than Harper himself, Scheer's leadership would be more a vindication of the past than an effort to define the future.

If Max Bernier, Kellie Leitch, or Kevin O'Leary wins, by contrast, the official narrative will be dealt a dramatic blow.  These three candidacies are based on the premise that Canada's ruling elite and institutions are flawed and failing in ways conventional wisdom never dares acknowledge.

Leitch says our immigration system is reckless, and failing to protect Canadian values.  Bernier says the Canadian state has grossly exceeded its mandate at the cost of personal freedom.  O'Leary says our government is run by incompetent fools who know nothing about economics.

If these world views prove popular it will come as a sharp rebuke to commentators who insist Canada is a fantastically well-run, contently left-of-centre place where political disputes occur only at the mildest margins of a settled consensus.

Though I am furiously opposed to O'Leary, significantly suspicious of Bernier, and still skeptical of Leitch, any conservative who feels their lived experience as a Canadian does not match the idyllic picture spouted by the elite media and establishment politicians should support one of them.

Only their victories will ring the alarm that Canada is a more unsettled country than many would prefer to believe.  Their leadership will force a critical dialogue that will hopefully come to resemble the useful fad of honest self-examination sweeping the United States.

Photo Credit: CBC News

Written by J.J. McCullough

One of the conclusions of Kenneth Arrow, who won the 1972 Nobel Prize in economics for his research on voting systems, was that healthy democracies should produce electoral outcomes uncorrupted by "irrelevant variables."  In other words, an obviously pointless act should not exert undue influence over who winds up winning.

In Canada, voting NDP has been a pointless act since the party's inception.  The New Democrats have never come remotely close to winning a federal election, and in our majority-rules parliamentary regime, they've impacted virtually no decision of consequence over the last five decades.  Yet due to quirks in our electoral system, the NDP nevertheless remains the most powerful "irrelevant variable" of Canadian politics.  Their success or failure in wasting votes on the margin exerts enormous consequence in deciding who runs the country.

When the NDP does unusually well, in elections such as 2011, 2006, 1988, and 1984, Conservatives tend to win.  When the NDP does unusually bad, as in 2000 or 1993, the result is a Liberal landslide.  In many ways, the outcome of the 2015 election was determined far more by the failures of the Thomas Mulcair campaign than anything Stephen Harper or Justin Trudeau did.

Though popular legend holds that the Conservatives lost because they "alienated" too many immigrant-heavy ridings with racism or whatever, a look at the data indicates the Tories only won such ridings in 2011 thanks to a divided left.  The Conservative share of the popular vote in these places didn't really decline much between 2011 and 2015 — the NDP vote, however, collapsed amid a Liberal surge.

Jack Layton was a vastly more compelling leader than the woman who came before him and the man who came after.  Though he never did much for the 70%-plus of the country who consistently voted against him, his personality struck some as compelling and his passion as genuine — particularly in contrast to the terrible trio of Liberal leaders he overlapped with.  A substantial slice of anti-Conservative voters struggled with who to support: their hearts said NDP, but their brains said Liberal.  Conservative prospered from this indecision and won three terms in office.

If we accept the premise that Justin Trudeau's electoral coalition contains a lot of former Layton voters (a justified conclusion, given Trudeau's caucus features many MPs from ridings that went NDP in 2011), then any Conservative path back to power will require the emergence of a Layton-esque leader to again temp progressive voters and divide their loyalties.

I nominate Jagmeet Singh for the role.  He's the 37-year-old bearded, turban-clad deputy leader of the Ontario NDP, representing the greater Toronto riding of Bramalea-Gore-Malton in the provincial legislature.

Singh's leftist bona fides are strong.  His Castro eulogy was even more glowing than the prime minister's, and as I write this, the featured video on his website is one offering support for the anti-Israel BDS movement (or at least one opposing opposition to it).

But more than that, as Canada's first nonwhite, non-Christian prime ministerial candidate, he would be brimming with the most potent weapon of progressive division at the moment — identity politics.

A large number of left-wing voters, especially young ones in urban centres, have come to view casting a ballot as an exercise in demonstrating their own virtues, rather than an objective analysis of who can most competently run the country.  In the eyes of such types, Singh's presence in the race for PM will instantly transform the next federal election into a referendum on whether Canada is "ready" to be led by an Indo-Canadian, or whether we live in an irredeemably racist hellhole.  Affecting exaggerated, Obama-style veneration for Singh could offer an unprecedented opportunity for racially anxious leftists to preen their progressiveness.

It would be a direct challenge to Prime Minister Trudeau's standing as the wokest, privilege-checkingest social justice warrior in the room.  Liberal partisans would suddenly find themselves having to make (horrors!) the pragmatic argument for why an incumbent white prime minister was better equipped to address social inequality than some brown back bencher from Queen's Park — a track New Democrats would invariably describe as condescending, if not colonialist, if not outright white supremacy with hints of fascism.

Such internecine squabbling over allyship and intersectionality is not the sort of thing most Canadians care about.  But in a country whose political future rests heavily on irrelevant variables, it could prove a tremendous asset to the right.

Photo Credit: Global News

Written by J.J. McCullough

News reports on the popularity of fake news in the past two months have spiked.  Ever since Donald Trump won the election, mainstream media has seized on the narrative that fake news had a large influence on American voters during the last election.

Canadian BuzzFeed News media editor Craig Silverman, who has covered fake news for years, wrote an article entitled "This Analysis Shows How Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News On Facebook" a week after the election.  It was this piece, and others by Silverman, that the mainstream press made hay and ran wild with, conflating his findings as proof fake news was rampant online, misinforming the public.

"[I]t's definitely just one slice of the picture and it was therefore unsettling for me to see people take this one data set and declare that it means fake news won Trump the election.  No, it doesn't.  But in the more than two years I've been looking at this kind of content I've never seen it hit this big in such a sustained way," explained Silverman by email.

The New York Times published a frontpage article, "As Fake News Spreads Lies, More Readers Shrug at the Truth", and the rest of the mainstream followed suit, devoting ad nauseum coverage to the supposed rise in fake news.  Then the conspiracy theory of Pizzagate culminated in an armed gunman holding up a pizzeria so he could investigate a non-existant paedophile sextrafficking ring being run in the restaurant's non-existent basement.  The mainstream media's confirmation bias was falsely confirmed by this one story, and another wave of news stories of moral panic over fake news were published.

However, the mainstream media overestimated and ginned up the power fake news sites have on the overall electorate, and some of them conflated Silverman's methodology and findings as their evidence.  A closer look at Silverman's research suggests that the apparent rise and power of fake news has been greatly exaggerated by the mainstream media.

In Silverman's article claiming top fake news outperformed real news on Facebook,  he looked at the amount of Facebook engagement fake election news received compared to real election news.  For his analysis he took the top 20 real and top 20 fake articles from the three time periods of February to April, May to July, and August until election day (Nov. 8).  His analysis concluded that in the last three months of the election, the Facebook engagement of top fake news stories spiked to surpass that of top real news stories.

Reviewing Silverman's raw data, it is mostly accurate, but there are some caveats.

The first exception is Silverman's categorization of some articles.  A Breitbart article and Twitchy article were deemed fake news in his top Facebook-engaged fictional stories published in the last three months of the election.  Although these two articles were hyper-partisan, I wouldn't categorize them as fake because they don't make up their facts from thin air.  And to single out a right-wing publication like Breitbart for one of its more torqued pieces, categorizing it as fake news, meanwhile treating the left-wing hyper-partisan publications like Vox, Huffington, etc. as completely legitimate and real news is unfair.  If real news sites, which Breitbart most certainly is one, were all nitpicked for fake news stories then there would most certainly be false stories from all real news outlets.  Just take a look at CNN's many whoppers, like when it told viewers it's illegal for the public to read emails from Wikileaks.

The second exception to Silverman's analysis was the decision to only look at 19 real news sites while not putting a limit on the amount of sites looked at for top fake news stories.  This severe limiting of the real news pool meant some top performing real stories in Facebook engagement were left out from Silverman's analysis.  Even from his list of 19 publications, several top articles in Facebook engagement were left out of Silverman's analysis in the time period of August to election day.  For instance, a Business Insider election article and Huffington Post election article had 747,000 and 537,000 Facebook engagements respectively, and both were not included in the real news category, despite these two publications being included in Silverman's list of 19 real news sites.  The sharp decline of real news in Silverman's chart is exaggerated from the reality.

Although limiting of real news sites to 19 and the omission of several of the top performing articles within Silverman's list skewed Facebook engagement of real news stories to drastically decline, the top 20 fake news articles (in which a few top stories were also overlooked by Silverman as well) would still have likely surpassed and "outperformed" real news stories for Facebook engagement in the last three months of the election.  However, the notion that Facebook engagement numbers of top fake news stories is proof of mass consumption and deception of the American people at large is foolhardy.

The actual popularity of fake news sites pales in comparison to real news sites.  When looking at search engine optimization (SEO), the ranking of fake news sites is underwhelming. Ending the Fed, the most popular fake news site by far, with about 40 per cent of all the Facebook engagement from the top 20 fake election articles from August to election day, merely ranks as the 7,519th most popular site in the world.  Other fake news sites, other than hyper-partisan publication Yes I'm RIght at 2,566th, are way back with rankings like 10,119th, 41,546th, 203,620th, 589,896th, and 5,555,984th.

Real news publications on the other hand, as one would expect, have way more real engagement with actual traffic to their sites.  CNN is 89th, The New York Times is 103rd, Washinton Post is 173rd, and Huffington Post is 182nd.  The only two real news publications on Silverman's list outside the top one-thousand are Vox at 1,311th and New York Daily News at 1,032nd.

Silverman was dismayed that some in the media have conflated his analysis as proof fake news outperforms real news for actual consumption.

"No they definitely don't outperform on a daily basis, and in terms of overall traffic the mainstream sites dwarf them.  I mean, it would be insane if it was any way other than that!  These fake sites are often one-man bands.  They are sometimes run as a hobby or side hustle.  The biggest ones may have a roster of low paid freelancers.  So they cannot compete on a daily or overall traffic basis with big mainstream news sites.  It's really about the hits and the engagement they can get on social for them," said Silverman.

"The way I'd put it is this: It seems crazy that I'd have to keep adding more than 19 of the biggest English-language news websites in the world in order for their content to get more total engagement than the fakes.  These mainstream sites, with big resources, huge FB pages and dedicated social teams, should not be in the same realm as fake news when it comes to engagement on Facebook," explained Silverman.

So why did the top fake news sites get similar or better Facebook engagement than real news sites in the last three months of the election, despite being way less popular than real news in actuality?

First, Facebook engagements include likes, emoticons, comments, shares, and link clicks, all of which can be questioned for the authenticity of whether or not they actually captured a user's interest.  Likes and emoticons mean very little in whether or not a user is actually affected by the content.  Similarly, comments are often left by users who haven't read the article, and sometimes comments are racked up by a few users having conversations or arguments.  There is also the likelihood that these fake news sites have paid bots to increase engagement on their Facebook posts.  Silverman noted that fake news was also spread by users seeding it in Facebook groups, which members would then tactically spread across the internet.  Finally, if Facebook engagement is cheap to come by, and fake news sites can entice interaction by having the most creative and visceral headlines out there (truth is no impediment), then it's unsurprising that fake news stories with well-executed promotion and attention-grabbing headlines could begin trending on Facebook's trending news module (more on how that was able to happen below), which would then further skyrocket the fake stories' engagement.

Second, in late August Facebook fired its trending news team after it was reported by Gizmodo that the human curators suppressed legitimate conservative news from the trending module.  With the removal of human editors, Facebook relied on an algorithm to choose its trending news stories.  From that point up until the election, fake news stories began breaking into Facebook's trending news list.  Most of the top 20 fake news articles from August to election day on Silverman's list were published after the trending news team were fired, suggesting that fake news engagement may have proliferated because there were no gatekeepers removing fake news from Facebook's influential trending news module (44 per cent of Americans get their news from Facebook) during this time period.

Silverman disagrees there is a correlation between the rise in fake news's Facebook engagement after the removal of human curators of the trending news module (created in 2014).

"I don't think the two are connected.  Those editors worked only on Trending and that product is still fairly new and not a huge driver of traffic.  It's really all about the News Feed when it comes to getting traffic and exposure for your content on Facebook, and that is a totally different product.  (Though my understanding is that the Trending algorithm takes signals from the News Feed algorithm.)"

Whether or not the removal of the curators was a main reason fake news stories engagement spiked in the last two months is impossible to verify since Facebook is secretive on its internal numbers and overall performance of its site.

Nevertheless, the amount of people tricked by fake news stories is verifiable.  In another BuzzFeed piece, Silverman analyzed an Ipsos poll, which asked 3,015 American adults about real and fake news stories.  Silverman found that an average of 75 per cent of respondents who were familiar with fake news stories believed in the lies.  However, only about 17 per cent of respondents on average had heard of the fake news stories, so only an average of 12.5 per cent Americans polled were actually duped by a fake news story.  A significant portion to be sure, but not nearly enough to justify the mainstream media's overblown moral panic over the issue.  One can find at least 12.5 per cent of the American population believe much more ludicrous things than fake news.

Now that Facebook is designating ABC News, Politifact, FactCheck, and Snopes as fact-checkers, fake news engagement should wane from the inevitable crackdown on fake news.  What Facebook users should now watch for is if these left-wing organizations begin once again suppressing conservative news stories, as well as other digital start-up competitors.

The real fake news dilemma comes not from a sudden rise in Facebook engagement of these low-budget hoax sites, but rather where fake news has always been the most powerful and deadly, from within the mainstream media itself.

The Washington Post alone has published a slew of egregiously false news stories within the last two months. In one story, the paper had to publish this embarrassing retraction: "An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electric grid.  Authorities say there is no indication of that so far.  The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid."

Another Washington Post article entitled "Russian Propaganda Effort Helped Spread 'fake news' during election, experts say" irresponsibly relied heavily on a hyper-partisan PropOrNot's phony blacklist of fake news sites (including Breitbart and other real news sites PropOrNot deemed political enemies), despite the group's amateur website and the members hiding behind anonymity.  In a delicious bit of irony, the Post's story on fake news sites turned out to be fake news itself.  The paper was forced to include an editor's note in which the paper distanced itself from the dubious PropOrNot and its phony blacklist.

Less amusing fake news stories are ones that have been used to manufacture public consent.  Who could forget the false cries of "weapons of mass destruction" used as an excuse to invade Iraq?  How about Ben Rhodes, Obama's former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, bragging about how he duped the press into reporting the false narratives the administration fed them?  Or more recently, the extremely blown out of proportion stories about Russia "hacking the election", stories with no real evidence other than intelligence agencies' and anonymous sources' blusterous claims.

If anything should be learned from the mainstream press's hyperventilation over these fake news stories it is that no news outlet is omniscient and the reader should remain ever vigilant and skeptical of all news sources.

Written by Graeme C. Gordon