We're printing 65,000 Druthers papers for February for sure!! Way to go everyone!! 100,000 is the goal. Think we can reach that goal still this month? Keep spreading this link around with some words of engagement, if you will, pretty please 😋

www.donorbox.org/druthers

Message me if you have any questions, thoughts, ideas, etc., at admin@druthers.net

Thank youuuuuu ✌️

Shawn

Drone footage from this past Saturday in Toronto after the police took over Dundas Square... https://youtu.be/s1CGGOudxnQ

Insanity 😕 https://youtu.be/qRClpX5xKZ8

Wow! 😕 Spread this short video around everywhere, as this should be a real eye opener for many people. https://youtu.be/yu4bHBYzMEQ

Ohhh, whisper that in my ear again 😍 When enough of us stand up and say no, all this insanity ends.

Woodstock city hall, tomorrow (Jan. 21st) at 5pm. The city is threatening action against Phoenix of Project Phoenix. Be there if you can to show your support! https://www.facebook.com/phoenix.scott.1042

Wow, protestors were peaceful like every weekend before. But this weekend, the police were not!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=2GFcPgyvxFk

We're at 80,000 papers of the 100,000 goal for February! 🎉 If you are able, please help this fundraiser along, even if in the form of sharing this link. We're sending to print in less than a week! www.donorbox.org/druthers

When the police steal your protest sign and do the work for you 🤣🎉😎

100,000 copies of Druthers will be ready on Friday and it's full of info that will help people see bigger.

I'd love to give all of you bundles of these papers to distribute freely everywhere you go.

We made 25,000 of the first issue in December. 50,000 of the January issue and the February issue will see 100,000 copies!!

I could really use your help giving these papers to the sleepy heads ☺️ Message me if you'd like to help. admin@druthers.net

You can read both of the first two issues online at:

https://www.druthers.net/ontario-2020-december

https://www.druthers.net/ontario-2021-january

February Druthers is ready!!
Please share.
https://druthers.net/canada-2021-february/

Looking for contacts in the following cities to assist with picking up bundles of papers from the trucking terminal and getting them into the hands of volunteer distributors in these areas.

- Surrey, BC
- Red Deer, Alberta
- Winnipeg, Manitoba

Please connect me with anyone you know in those cities who might like to be a part of this.

admin@druthers.net

I'm at the printers now waiting for the trucks to arrive and pick up these pallets of papers. They will be arriving out west on Monday & Tuesday ☺️

Read the February issue of Druthers online here: www.druthers.net/canada-2021-february

Let's double the goal again with 200,000 copies of Druthers for March 🤗 www.donorbox.org/druthers

Monthly subscriptions are now available! Ensure you receive copies of Druthers every month, or even use this page to have copies mailed to anyone you feel really needs to see this information! https://druthers.net/shop/subscribe/

The Toronto Star published a piece about Druthers and me. I think it's great, overall! I'm actually impressed with the unbiased efforts of this author. What do you think?

How this man’s ‘newspaper’ is pushing anti-COVID-restrictions rhetoric across Canada.

ALEX MCKEEN FEBRUARY 07, 2021

In the video, Shawn Jason Laponte walks up to people on the streets of Toronto and asks about a half-dozen of them to share the message he’s printed on little black business cards.

“I love you,” the cards read. “Pass it on.”

It’s a cheesy but essentially heartwarming display in the 2018 video, the kind of thing you might expect from a group of high school volunteers looking to perform random acts of kindness.

Fast forward to 2021 and Laponte, a middle-aged Torontonian with long hair and wire-rimmed glasses, is still in the business of spreading messages, still apparently preferring the old-fashioned print medium to get the job done.

But the message has changed. This time he’s criticizing coronavirus restrictions and vaccination efforts. And the volunteers recruited for the task are greater than half a dozen people in Toronto.

They’re in Toronto. And Ottawa, Vancouver, Victoria, Red Deer and Edmonton. All across the country, getting ready to distribute thousands of anti-coronavirus-restriction newspapers by hand, in an effort to take their discredited ideas offline and away from the prying eyes of social media factcheckers.

Instead of “I love you, pass it on,” Laponte is telling anyone who will listen: “You are being lied to.”

And, still: “Pass it on.”

Shawn Jason Laponte, who founded an anti-coronavirus-restriction newspaper Druthers, distributed the first issue of the paper at Adamson Barbeque, the Toronto restaurant that refused to close during coronavirus restrictions.
The product of Laponte’s dramatic shift in messaging, called Druthers, first came out in late November as a 12-page newspaper filled with warnings about the alleged tyranny of coronavirus restrictions and vaccine hesitancy-promoting content.

Then, among a certain crowd in Toronto and around the country, the idea caught fire. Laponte increased his print order by four times, from 25,000 copies printed in November to 100,000 in late January.

The latest issue has been sent to volunteers across the country for distribution. Money poured in from supporters on an online fundraising platform, while dozens raised their hands to get involved in distributing the papers, and writing.

On Monday, according to a message shared to the Druthers Telegram channel, the newspaper was set to arrive out west, making it a national effort.

The newest edition contains a full-page “fact check” on coronavirus measures, making numerous discredited or overstated claims about the coronavirus tests, vaccines and the efficacy of lockdowns at limiting virus spread. It includes the claim that “the coronavirus is statistically shown to be far less deadly than portrayed by mainstream media and health officials,” and a headline that reads “Here’s why I wouldn’t take the vaccine, Dr. Tam.”

In fact, the coronavirus has killed 2.27 million people worldwide, and the multiple vaccines to protect against the virus have been through rigorous testing. Vaccines do not cause autism or any brain disorders as claimed by some anti-vaccination activists. Tests to detect the coronavirus, the effectiveness of which are questioned in Druthers, are more likely to produce false negatives than false positives.

The expansion of Druthers tells us about two things that are happening with the spread of disinformation in Canada right now. The first is that, although the vast majority of Canadians do not hold antivaccination beliefs, or other discredited theories related to the coronavirus, the pandemic is providing fertile ground for those who do believe these things to find a common cause, and new ways of connecting.

The second is that, as Facebook, Twitter and other tech giants crack down on disinformation, some of the people who truly believe in these theories are already thinking of ways to circumvent social media and build a bigger following offline, free from the gaze of factcheckers.

Shawn Jason Laponte.
It began in early November. At the time, Laponte made a long post to his Facebook page, apologizing to the people in his life whom he may have offended, but promising to keep speaking up about the “larger workings of the world” he claims to have uncovered over 16 years of research.

“I wish so badly I could instantly give you all the insight I have received over the thousands of hours I have poured into looking at this. But I cannot. I know I cannot change anyone's mind about the reality of the situation we are in,” he wrote. “All I can do is plant seeds.”

In an email response to questions from the Star, Laponte described that 16-year process of discovery further, detailing hours and years spent “soaking up perspectives” online. It’s led him to a number of “projects,” he said, which he spearheads in between carpentry and renovation jobs, including the love campaign and starting an association called the “lightworkers” of Ontario, which, in its broad definition, says it wants to spread joy and light through various spiritual practices.

“The more I discovered, the more I grew concerned about the way humanity was being intentionally divided and misled,” Laponte wrote. “My desire to help bring humanity together grew, and that has been the driving force behind everything I have done since then.”

Over the weeks following the initial publication of Druthers, Laponte opened a Facebook page and adapted his website — previously used for the “I love you pass it on” campaign — to recruit Torontonians to the cause of starting a 12-page newspaper. On a Facebook group, he recruited people to write articles and distribute the papers once they arrived, and used an online fundraising platform to raise about $3,500 for the first 10,000 newspapers to get printed.

The first paper contained articles promoting a campaign by an antivaccination group to challenge the government’s pandemic response, and unfounded claims of miracle drugs that are being held back from the public. It made further, unfounded claims that the pandemic is being used as an “untruthful narrative” by the government to wrest civil freedoms from the public.

After the first issue came out, it was distributed at antimask rallies in Toronto and at Adamson Barbecue, the restaurant which refused to follow COVID-19 orders and attracted a large crowd of anti-restrictions protesters when Toronto Public Health took possession of the restaurant in late November.

Sam Goldstein, a longtime Toronto criminal lawyer who was consulted by Adamson Barbeque’s owner during the ordeal, said the voices of dissent — including a newspaper such as Druthers — are legal expressions of opinion and untruths that are part of living in a free society. That’s even if the opinions and falsehoods expressed in Druthers and online sites promoting COVID-19 conspiracy theories are generally scorned by the public, and ignored by the government.

“You may not like ... conspiracy theories, but in order to protect your right to the truth, you also protect someone else’s right to be wrong,” Goldstein said. “History ought not to be written by governments.”

The spread of misinformation related to COVID-19 does have the potential for negative impact, even if it’s legal.

Research by EKOS, a Canadian polling company, found about one quarter of Canadians were hesitant about taking a vaccine, and that, compared to April, those questioning vaccines in July were more likely to doubt other things related to the pandemic too, such as believing the virus was created in a lab, or that the mainstream media is getting coronavirus news wrong.

In other words, there’s been a convergence of people who may have been inclined to mistrust mainstream narratives, around the issues presented by the coronavirus.

“My evidence is that there’s really a potent force shaping these views,” said Frank Graves, president of EKOS research, in a previous interview with the Star. “The people who have these extreme views, they’re lower information consumers, they’re not typically well educated, they tend to be middle aged or older. Though they don’t consume government websites and mainstream media, they tend to overconsume Facebook, Reddit and YouTube.”

In Druthers’ short life so far, the paper doubled in print output for the January issue. Then doubled again in February. Laponte started posting on Facebook and Telegram that he was surprised but pleased about the paper’s growth, and that he was getting contacted by Canadians from coast to coast who wanted to help distribute it. Laponte told the Star they’re aiming for 200,000 papers in March.

But while much of the conversation surrounding Druthers is happening in online communities, where conspiracy theorists have traditionally made their homes, this project has been sure to put the heart of its content into print, where big technology companies cannot stop it from spreading.

“Druthers was born from the need to get around the blatant censorship by the big tech companies,” Laponte wrote to the Star. “With tens of thousands of doctors and other health professionals voices being silenced online, and with mainstream media not giving these experts any airtime despite the potentially life saving info they were bringing to the table, it quickly became clear that printed information was the way to go.”

The health professionals Laponte refers to are, for example, the World Doctors Alliance, which has made videos shared thousands of times over social media and has been identified by the AFP Fact Check site as a group of medical practitioners making numerous false claims about COVID-19.

Ahmed Al-Rawi, who runs the Disinformation Project at Simon Fraser University, studying false information online, said it’s only to be expected that some conspiracy theorists will turn to alternative, or in this case old-school, methods of disseminating information when the big social media sites — Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, especially — start factchecking and taking down more false content.

Al-Rawi has noticed that some of the far-right Facebook groups he monitors have started recruiting followers to other platforms less likely to be censored.

In some cases, he’s seen the conversations become even more extreme and hateful when moved off the mainstream platforms.

“I’ve never seen this kind of hatred before,” Al-Rawi said, referring to one channel he followed on the mobile messaging app Telegram. “Yeah I do worry about it, especially if the customized mobile platforms are encrypted and harder for others to reach. Harder for us to monitor.”

Reached by the Star, both the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service said they do not monitor or investigate misinformation and conspiracy theories.

What they do investigate, meanwhile — threats to security and online communication that veers into threatening territory — is becoming harder to trace.

RCMP declined to comment on the investigative tools used. In an email statement, CSIS spokesperson John Townsend wrote that media and social media have enabled a surge in propaganda disseminated by threat groups.

“Most notably, the increased use of encryption technologies allows terrorists to conceal the content of their communications and operate with anonymity while online,” Townsend wrote. “They can evade detection by police and intelligence officials, which often presents a significant challenge when governments investigate and seek to prosecute threat actors.”

Druthers is not a source of those kinds of threats, nor does it appear to be an example of misinformation becoming more extreme when it moves offline — most of the articles, at least, are presented as opinion and do not deny the existence of COVID-19 outright.

But it may elucidate one way misinformation sources might endure beyond the threats of shutdown by mainstream social media sites.