This Remembrance Day, CBC has published an important piece by Alexandra Kazia exploring how the way we experience war is being transformed through social media and the endless feeds delivered straight to our phones.
I shared thoughts alongside former Canadian Armed Forces Brig-Gen Jay Janzen and several leading psychologists about how this constant exposure to conflict and information manipulation affects our ability to build a shared understanding of events.
The foundation of a normally functioning society is a basic set of facts about what’s happening around us. Today, those basic building blocks are fracturing, overwhelmed by stress, emotional fatigue, personalized feeds, and deliberate disinformation. When everyone is exposed to a different selection of “truths,” we risk losing not only trust in institutions, but in one another. And when that trust erodes, remembrance itself is at stake.
As Jay notes, adversaries are exploiting this moment — weaponizing free expression to target morale, cohesion, and democratic resilience. The result, as psychologists warn, is empathy overload, shallow memory, and growing cynicism.
To honour those who served, we must protect not only our historical memory, but the information environment that shapes it. That means platform transparency, civic education, and building resilience against foreign and domestic manipulation.
When facts fracture, memory fractures. And without shared memory, there can be no shared Remembrance.
Indeed: lest we forget.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/remembrance-when-war-is-livestreamed-9.6974088