MAGA media tried desperately to portray a fringe protest as a massive popular uprising

Good post on how most of the hype about the Ivermectin Insurrection came from outside of Canada:

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.

“Fox News has an interesting way of filtering very local events through the prism of its own culture wars, which creates the impression for their followers that they are part of some transnational grassroots uprising,” Amarnath Amarasingam, a professor at Queen’s University and senior fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, told The Verge.

As Broderick says, with the occupation over the main impact of this on Canadian politics will be to increase the grifting opportunities for the QAnon and/or western secessionist cranks who assumed an ad hoc leadership role, like Bauder and Lich.

…I can’t decide whether it’s funnier that these people are invoking the First Amendment in Canadian courts, or that they think even if they were in a jurisdiction where it was applicable that the First Amendment gives you the right to blare your horn at all hours in a residential neighborhood or to block major roads for days at a time:

The First Amendment as an all-purpose magic internet law finds itself in a Canadian court, where the judge is not amused https://t.co/Rltcp1qp4A pic.twitter.com/0C2ZPxv315— nilay patel (@reckless) February 20, 2022