Canadian police: 25 arrests and more than 1,550 tickets issued in Ottawa demonstrations

Canadian protests against vaccine mandates, Covid-19 restrictions and the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have captured attention in the US and abroad — and prompted a flurry of misinformation, including a false claim that was promoted by podcaster Joe Rogan and on Fox.

These are the facts:

False claims about the number of trucks

Organizers claimed in late January that the convoy had grown to tens of thousands of trucks — even that the number was around 50,000. Others repeated this “50,000” figure.

Theo Fleury, a retired hockey star who’s a frequent critic of Trudeau, said on Fox in late January that there were “50,000 truckers” heading to Ottawa. Rogan, who has been criticized for his show’s role in promoting Covid-19 misinformation, said on the show in late January that the convoy involved “apparently some insane amount of people, like 50,000 trucks.” Even larger figures, like “80,000” or “over 130,000” trucks, swirled on social media.

Facts First: The number of trucks involved in the protest was never anywhere close to 50,000; such a number of trucks would have taken up hundreds of miles more road space than this protest occupied. Canadian journalists put the number of trucks in the hundreds in late January. Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly told reporters on January 31 that it was impossible to provide exact crowd-size figures but that he had “heard” numbers as high as 18,000 total demonstrators — not just truckers — present in the city at the peak of the protest on Jan. 29. No credible source has reported that the number of participating trucks in particular ever approached tens of thousands, let alone “50,000.”

Falsely captioned photos and videos

Numerous social media posts put inaccurate captions on photos and videos of events that had occurred prior to 2022 — such as truck demonstrations, other protests, even a parade in support of the Special Olympics — to falsely claim these images were connected to the Canadian convoy protest.

Facts First: One video that has been shared on various social media platforms was captioned to claim that it showed South Carolina truckers heading to Ottawa to join the convoy — but it actually showed an August 2021 truck parade in support of the Special Olympics, USA Today reported. A video of honking Brazilian truckers that circulated on Facebook was from a May 2021 demonstration in support of President Jair Bolsonaro, not a demonstration in solidarity with the Canadian truckers as some captions claimed, USA Today also reported. A photo of a massive protest crowd, shared in Twitter posts in both English and Spanish as if it were from Ottawa this year, actually depicted a 1991 demonstration in Moscow against the Communist government of the Soviet Union, Reuters reported. And another photo, which has been described in Facebook posts as a group of Amish people driving to support the convoy, is a shot of Old Order Mennonites simply going to church, PolitiFact reported.

Read more fact-checks for the protests here.