After more than two weeks of chaotic protest, this week, the Canadian government pushed back. On Tuesday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the country’s Emergencies Act, enabling new financial restrictions on the protests and signaling harsh new penalties against anyone involved.

For many Canadians, it’s an overdue end to a chaotic protest that has stifled trade and brought alarming weaponry into otherwise quiet communities. But right-wing supporters have a wildly different view of events: figures like Tucker Carlson have portrayed the convoy as a working-class rebellion, and Trudeau’s response has been treated as enacting martial law, leading Elon Musk to tweet (and then delete) a meme comparing Trudeau to Adolf Hitler.

It’s a shocking split, arguably the single most important factor in the protests, and much of it originates in the fractured way information travels online. Convoy supporters are getting their news from a tangle of Facebook groups, Telegram channels, and random influencers, which is all then amplified and expanded by right-wing broadcasters like Carlson, The Daily Caller, or Canadian right-wing media network Rebel News. These channels promote a sanitized version of movements like the Freedom Convoy, amplifying its hashtags and turning its obscure extremist leaders into celebrities.

This pipeline — from physical protest to social media to establishment outlets — is what has helped the convoy evolve from a local standoff into a televised event that can raise millions from supporters thousands of miles away. Almost all of that infrastructure pre-dates the convoy itself, drawing from anti-vaxx groups, QAnon, and other fringe communities. And while the convoy itself may soon be broken up by the Canadian government, those online pathways are much stickier.

To understand how this echo chamber works, we have to start with the Ottawa protest itself. The “Freedom Convoy’’ started as a loosely affiliated group of Canadian truck drivers led by a group called Canada Unity, founded by far-right activist and QAnon conspiracy theorist James Bauder. But over the last 30 days, Bauder has managed to build a coalition of fed-up truck drivers, fringe Canadian political party members, neo-Nazis, anti-vaxxers, and an international coterie of scammers, grifters, and low-level online creators that has been able to generate major headlines around the world.

The convoy’s spread across Facebook didn’t gain any real momentum until a video about the protest was posted on Rumble, a right-wing video platform, on January 18th by a user named Ken Windsor and started to get a few thousand shares. In the caption of the video, Windsor shared links to a page called “Freedom Convoy 2022,” which had been started four days earlier, according to Facebook’s page transparency tools. Windsor had posted several videos on Rumble about truck drivers planning to protest Canadian COVID mandates before this. But the post on January 18th, according to social analytics tool Buzzsumo, was the most-shared piece of convoy content during this first week after it was posted to the Freedom Convoy 2022’s page.

Windsor’s Rumble video also linked out to a right-wing Canadian video creator named Pat King, who was active in Canada’s Yellow Vests protests, and also promoted the movement’s now-defunct GoFundMe page. Following Windsor’s video, between January 14th and January 23rd, several other Facebook pages and groups were created to support the truckers, including the first sizable Facebook group for convoy supporters, which was initially called Freedom Convoy 2022 but has since changed its name to “Convoy For Freedom 2022 ”. The group was also a major initial supporter of the GoFundMe page, with users sharing it on the very first day the Facebook page was launched.

According to AntiHate.ca, the GoFundMe was run by Tamara Lich, another former Canadian Yellow Vest who works for a Canadian separatist party, and B.J. Dichter, a right-wing commentator known for Islamophobic rhetoric.

Paris Marx, a PhD candidate based in Canada and host of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, told The Verge that the Freedom Convoy’s connections to the country’s far-right significantly outweigh its connections to actual Canadian truckers.

“It’s been pretty well-documented at this point that the Freedom Convoy has had connections to the Canadian far-right from the beginning, including having been behind the initial GoFundMe fundraiser,” he said. “It also never really represented a broad swath of truckers — 90% of whom are vacci