The woman was in her nineties. She had lived in North Frontenac long enough to remember when the roads were still dirt and neighbours settled things at the kitchen table.
In the fall of 2025, somebody knocked on her door and told her she was in danger. A proposed battery energy storage facility on township land. They told her about fire, toxic chemicals, what would happen to the lakes. No one brought a document. No one brought a bylaw number or an engineering assessment. They brought fear, left it with her, and moved on to the next house.
That is not a story about a battery. It is a story about what happens when the pipeline that connects Canadians to truth is severed at every joint.
The cord was cut in August 2023
When Meta blocked all Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram, it detonated the primary channel through which most Canadians encountered journalism.
The blockade was Meta’s response to the Online News Act. Google negotiated. Meta refused. It removed every Canadian news link from two platforms used daily by tens of millions of Canadians. The ban remains in effect.
The McGill Media Ecosystem Observatory measured the damage: an 85 percent collapse in local news outlets’ Facebook engagement. Eleven million fewer news views per day. 212 local outlets went dark on social media. What filled the void was not silence. NewsGuard documented the shift: engagement with unreliable sources on Facebook tripled. Professional journalists were locked out. Everyone else could post anything.
The River Valley Sun in New Brunswick lost 90 percent of its audience reach. IndigiNews, an Indigenous journalism outlet, now pays Meta $16,000 to $20,000 a year to boost posts around Meta’s own blockade. It is paying the company that silenced it for the privilege of being partially heard.
In August 2023, the same month the ban took effect, wildfires forced the mass evacuation of Yellowknife and surrounding communities. Tens of thousands of people needed real-time safety information. Meta refused to lift the ban. Prime Minister Trudeau said Facebook was “putting corporate profits ahead of people’s safety.” Meta did not respond.
During one week of the 2025 federal campaign, Canada Proud ran 31 of the top 50 most-viewed posts about Prime Minister Mark Carney on Facebook, according to The Logic. Seven deepfake videos of Carney circulated, including fabricated CBC and CTV interviews directing viewers to scam investment sites, according to the Canadian Digital Media Research Network. The outlets that could have debunked them were barred from the platform.
In 2025, Reporters Without Borders dropped Canada from 14th to 21st on the World Press Freedom Index. The CRTC has confirmed it has no plans to act.
The same poll, four numbers, four headlines
Between March 19 and 24, 2026, Abacus Data polled 1,515 adults on Alto, the proposed high-speed rail line between Toronto and Quebec City. The survey was commissioned by Alt-NO, a citizens’ group opposed to the project. One dataset. Here is what Canadians were told it said.
Alt-NO led with 25 percent, the share who strongly supported the project. Cult MTL published “Large majority of Canadians support the Alto high-speed rail project,” citing 62 percent combined support. The article did not disclose who commissioned the poll. It did not explain that the question primed respondents with selective economic projections before asking their opinion. It did not mention that two-thirds of respondents said they would not ride the train even once a year. Alto’s own quarterly tracking poll, conducted among approximately 1,000 Ontario and Quebec residents per quarter, showed 73 percent support as of November 2025, presented under the heading ‘public opinion’ without provincial qualification.
Three figures from overlapping data. All real. All weaponized. The survey question itself was primed with selective economic projections, a design choice that research shows shifts results by five to fifteen points.
Jesse Hirsh, writing in Metaviews, described the dynamic: “High-speed rail in Canada isn’t being killed by policy. It’s getting pummeled by Facebook posts.” The opposition does not need to convince everyone. It needs to saturate enough of the space that opposition feels ambient, obvious, already decided.
The Rural Ontario Municipal Association recognized the pattern. Their 2025 conference included a session titled “Getting Accurate Information to Residents,” identifying the decline in local journalism and social media misinformation as drivers of toxic public discourse. Not a North Frontenac problem. Province-wide. National.
North Frontenac. Population 1,800. Same disease.
In North Frontenac, the Frontenac News had spent months investigating the battery proposal, interviewing the company’s principals, identifying red flags in fire suppression revisions. It could not post a single link to Facebook. The groups where the debate raged were controlled by a handful of admins with political motivations. The journalism was locked out. The fear was not.
I was physically assaulted by a member of the township’s Economic Development Task Force, who was subsequently removed. Not over an argument. Over questions. The assault was the response to a journalist asking questions about a public body. That it came from someone appointed to serve the township says something about the information environment that township had become.
The echo chamber did what echo chambers do. The opposition petition was promoted across every major local Facebook page and community hall. NFNM’s coverage, built on council documents, engineering reports, and interviews with the company, was systematically blocked by the same admins selling the fear. The fear campaign got the headlines. The paperwork did the work.
What happened in North Frontenac was not just local Facebook admins picking sides. It was the same playbook that automated systems now run at scale.
The machines are already here
In 2024, automated traffic surpassed human traffic on the internet for the first time in a decade. According to Imperva, 51 percent of all web traffic is now machine-generated. One estimate, from analytics firm Graphite, put more than half of written online content as AI-generated, a figure the company itself describes as approximate.
Nota News, documented by Poynter, was caught scraping content from 29 legitimate outlets and republishing it under fabricated bylines. The Investigative Journalism Foundation, in a report published by The Tyee, investigated “Surrey Speak,” an AI-generated local news site in British Columbia, a site no human journalist had ever worked at, publishing dozens of articles a day to a community that could not tell it from the real paper. Pink slime journalism, partisan operations disguised as independent local news, now outnumbers legitimate local news sites in the United States, according to NewsGuard. A Yale study found people often trust the fakes more.
Canada’s Rapid Response Mechanism confirmed that a Chinese-linked network called Spamouflage targeted dozens of Canadian MPs with thousands of bot-generated comments and deepfake videos. During the 2025 election, bot-like accounts flooded party leaders’ social media pages. Five accounts alone pushed more than 28,000 posts during the Liberal leadership race, according to a Reset Tech analysis shared with The Logic.
Most Canadians have no idea what they are looking at. A 2025 KPMG study ranked Canada 44th out of 47 countries in AI literacy. Only 24 percent of Canadians have received any AI training, compared to 39 percent globally. The gap is not that people have not tried a chatbot. The gap is that they think a chatbot is what artificial intelligence is. Agentic AI systems now manage correspondence, run businesses, pull records from multiple databases, and produce sourced briefs in minutes. They decide what to do and do it. No human checks each step. Most Canadians do not understand what these systems already do. The public conversation treats AI as a novelty. The technology has moved past that. The bots are writing the content and shaping the discourse. Meanwhile, people are asking ChatGPT for recipe ideas and believing they understand the technology.
The institutions that connected Canadians to truth were built by people who started weekly newspapers in towns that could barely support a general store, by editors who covered township councils because they believed the public had a right to know. Those people are mostly gone. A technology company decided Canadian journalism was not worth negotiating with. A media industry discovered rage pays better than reporting. An automated internet is filling the silence with content no human wrote and no editor checked. What they built is being dismantled from every direction at once.
The battery project is dead. The council’s paperwork killed it. The woman in her nineties is still in her home. Nobody went back to tell her that the project was stopped not by the people who frightened her, but by the elected officials who did their jobs.
Nobody went back because the pipeline is broken. She is still afraid. And she has no way to know she doesn’t need to be.
Donald Morton is the lead investigative journalist at North Frontenac News Media.
Editor’s note: Right of reply was sought from all parties characterized in this article before publication. The NFNM journalist referenced in the North Frontenac section is the author. Cult MTL was contacted regarding the specific factual claims about the Alto poll coverage. No response was received by publication deadline.
