Canadian Politics Today

Well they didn't did they. They plugged the area with trucks, leaned on their horns all hours of the day, stunk up the neighbourhood with diesel fumes, forced businesses to close and cost people their jobs for three weeks. They had their fun now f**k off.

Stupid pricks are still  jamming 911 lines

How much does this matter now ?  Are the Conservatives going to try to make another Convoy ?  No.

Well apparently 46% of Canadians more or less disagree with the mandates, and the mandates are still policy as far as I know, so it seems relevant.

It’s a shocking split, arguably the single most important factor in the protests, and much of it originates in the fractured way information travels online. Convoy supporters are getting their news from a tangle of Facebook groups, Telegram channels, and random influencers, which is all then 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, amplifying its hashtags and turning its obscure extremist leaders into celebrities.
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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 truckers.

“It’s been pretty well-documented at this point that the Freedom Convoy has had connections to the Canadian far-right from the beginning, including having been behind the initial GoFundMe fundraiser,” he said. “It also never really represented a broad swath of truckers — 90% of whom are vaccinated and whose trade organizations distanced themselves from, if not outright opposed, the convoy.”
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But based on Facebook metrics, the core of the Freedom Convoy was never really anything more than a small collection of local conspiracy theorists who were then suddenly given a megaphone by America’s powerful right-wing disinformation machine. Their campaign was first supercharged by Facebook’s algorithm, which currently favors content shared within local groups, and was then blasted out into every feed and screen possible by ravenous conservative tabloids. American right-wing publisher The Daily Wire, founded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, latched on to the story at the end of January and published 66 articles featuring the keyword “convoy” between January 28th and January 31st. And the most popular story of theirs from this time period actually promotes a Facebook group that would eventually get shut down by the platform after barely four days for repeatedly violating Facebook’s policies around QAnon.

Amplifying small right-wing political movements like this has become a powerful piece of the conservative toolkit — particularly in the time of COVID. Case in point, 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.
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