First, the bad news: the big social media companies are not going to be able to keep stupid stuff and fake facts out of the fall election.

The good news, however, is that voters already have a mechanism to sort between real and ridiculous reports in the heat of the campaign. It’s called the brain, and citizens are advised to treat theirs well this summer — they’ll likely be needing to use them a lot this fall.

Many media outlets, including this one, have election-integrity projects underway for this fall’s campaign, anticipating the very real possibility of mischief and intrusion — foreign and otherwise — into the Canadian democratic process.

There’s been lots of talk about how to crack down on potential meddling, and who’s best placed to do the cracking down: governments, or the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter.

What’s been less discussed is the individual responsibility of citizens for the spread of fake and mischievous news. Are there checks we can enforce on our own consumption and use? The short answer is yes.

Craig Silverman is a media editor with BuzzFeed News, which is working in collaboration with the Star on election-integrity initiatives now and into the election campaign.

“There’s obviously a supply problem. It’s being created, it’s being spread,” Silverman told me on Tuesday. “But there’s also a demand problem: people in some cases are seeking it out, or when they’re seeing it and consuming it, they’re not taking their own responsibility to question it.”

Silverman has been studying the phenomenon of “fake news” for five years — well before Donald Trump was elected U.S. president in 2016 — and has even been given credit for inventing the term (although he acknowledges that Trump now owns it). Silverman was also one of the featured experts in a documentary that aired on CBC TV’s The National this week, which was highly instructive about the ways citizens can inoculate themselves against poisonous political discourse.

The advice is remarkably similar to what we already know in the workplace or our private lives: check your emotions before acting on them. “It’s on us to be sharp,” as the CBC’s Adrienne Arsenault said. In short, if you’re having an emotional reaction to some piece of political news, slow down and think it through before you accept it as a known fact — or worse, start spreading it around.

For fake news to work as a tool of disruption or mischief, it requires an emotional audience, with hair-trigger instincts toward the “send” and “share” buttons. Angry or hyper-emotional voters are the best friends of fake news. Unsurprisingly, politicians such as Trump find them useful, too.

Emotions work well in politics for the same reason they work well in conventional advertising — it’s much easier to manipulate how people feel than how they think.

This isn’t to say that politics has to be totally void of emotions — robots are in no danger of displacing political jobs (well, maybe for votes in the Commons and some appearances on TV political panels.)

“There is a role for people to be upset, to be unhappy, to want change. … We don’t want to invalidate emotions,” Silverman said. “But I think it’s the manipulative aspect of this that we have to worry about.” He’s not talking here about manipulating to achieve some political goal either, such as winning an election. He’s talking about the bad actors who are inserting sticks into the wheels of democracy simply to make a buck or disrupt the system.

Pam Damoff, a Liberal MP from Oakville, recently posted some abusive comments she’d received on her Facebook page in reply to some statistics she quoted on poverty and job creation. When I ran into her a couple of days later, Damoff said she hadn’t encountered garbage like this when she ran in 2015. She was predicting, by that measure, that this election is going to be ugly.

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She’s probably right, says Silverman. “Yeah,” he said, sighing, “we’re going to see a far more intense, a far more divisive and far more manipulated election than we did in 2015.”

That may well be inevitable on the supply side — governments and social-media companies have limited ability to halt the flow of fake or misleading news. It’s not as inevitable on the demand side — especially if voters keep checking to see whether they’re forming their opinions from the gut or the brain.

Susan Delacourt is the Star's Ottawa bureau chief and a columnist covering national politics. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt

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