In this space and others, we’ve talked a lot about the effect of misinformation and conspiracy theories on our political culture, but there’s a growing and pronounced impact on our legal system as well. From local missing person’s cases to crimes so heinous that they capture the consciousness of a country, can our online culture be trusted with their role in law and order matters?

Last week in Guelph, a photo of a father and his daughter at a local coffee shop was shared on social media as part of a human trafficking inquiry, and a few months ago, CTV News Kitchener reported that the search for a missing Kitchener man was being hampered by online sleuths who had some very peculiar ideas of what happened to the man. Both of these cases are local, and so are their impacts, but what happens when online detectives focus their fire on a national tragedy?

This happened last month in the case of the mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C. In the immediate aftermath, people scoured the internet and social media to find information about the shooter, and as fate would have it, an Ontario woman with the same last name as the shooter’s mother was misidentified as Jesse Van Rootselaar. How does something like this happen? Are we overlooking how conspiracy theories and online detectives with an agenda are affecting crime coverage?

If anyone might have some insight into this issue it’s Dr. Ahmed al-Rawi, who is an associate professor of News, Social Media, and Public Communication and the director of the Disinformation Project at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He will talk to us about the current state of the information ecosystem when it comes to crime reporting, why context matters in any reporting, and whether our obsessions with true crime primed the pump for all these amateur detectives online.

So let’s talk about the dangers of crime and conspiracies on this week’s Guelph Politicast!

You can learn more about The Disinformation Project at the Simon Fraser University website. You can also visit Dr. al-Rawi’s personal website. You can check out the straightforward, community reporting at their website.

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