like rumours of a serial killer in town to highlight the need for trusted local news. A case in point is the recent experience of Smiths Falls, Ontario, a community of roughly 9,500 people located along Eastern Ontario’s historic Rideau Canal. The town’s serial-killer rumour mill kicked into high gear when three local men went missing over a fourteen-month period.
Lawrence Bertrim, forty-two at the time, disappeared in late September 2022. About a year later, on October 19, 2023, Robbie Thomson, then thirty-four, was reported missing. Steven Tate, also thirty-four, vanished not long afterward.
His body was found along a highway outside town on November 8, 2023. Police have posted a $50,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the Tate case, which is being investigated as a hit-and-run collision. Bertrim and Thomson seem to have disappeared without a trace.
As the mysteries stacked up, so did the rumours, says Kelley Denham, who administers the Smiths Falls Together Facebook group with 14,000-odd members. Some residents “absolutely convinced themselves that there was a serial killer on the loose,” she says. Reliable information, meanwhile, was becoming much harder to come by.
In August 2023, in response to the federal government’s Online News Act, Meta blocked access to news on Facebook and Instagram for users in Canada. Denham posted screenshots of headlines and encouraged people to go to news websites to read the latest stories about the missing men. But .
