MacDougall: As the Conservative leader showed this week, what sells online is salacious fiction delivered with a side of snark.
Welcome to the new, digital laws of politics, which says that boring questions about substantive issues don’t travel or draw engagement online. What sells online is salacious rumour delivered with a side of snark, or full-frontal attack delivered full-force. In the online world, traffic trumps truth.
For the uninitiated, Poilievre’s semester comment was a call-back to the 2019 election, when a website called the Buffalo Chronicle published a “report” citing unnamed “sources” claiming Trudeau had left his school in British Columbia because of some supposed sex scandal. The website claimed the Globe and Mail had spiked a story about it, and later claimed that Facebook had been pressured into censoring the Chronicle.
Exhibit A on that front: Here I am, a columnist in a mainstream title, writing about the mechanics of Poilievre’s semester jibe and re-hashing a disproven salacious claim. I am obeying the old laws and fuelling the new. That I’m doing it with a purpose doesn’t matter. The internet won’t draw that distinction.
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