{"id":269729,"date":"2021-09-13T10:30:53","date_gmt":"2021-09-13T14:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/issues\/stopping-the-hostile-online-attacks-hurled-at-candidates\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T23:40:23","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T03:40:23","slug":"stopping-the-hostile-online-attacks-hurled-at-candidates","status":"publish","type":"issues","link":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/fr\/2021\/09\/stopping-the-hostile-online-attacks-hurled-at-candidates\/","title":{"rendered":"Stopping the hostile online attacks hurled at candidates"},"content":{"rendered":"

Right from the start of the 2021 election campaign, the political parties\u2019 social media strategies have been in full swing. Justin Trudeau was masked and bumping elbows<\/a> with children on Instagram (where he has four million followers); Annamie Paul retweeted Margaret Atwood\u2019s tweet <\/a>to demand a leaders\u2019 debate on climate change; Erin O\u2019Toole was on Facebook posting video rebuttals<\/a> to perceived gaffes by Trudeau, and Jagmeet Singh has continued to build his popularity with younger demographic groups as the dominant Canadian politician on TikTok<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As candidates across the country push their carefully orchestrated videos and chatty posts, they often receive hostile responses. To better understand this problem, we researched online abuse in the 2019 federal election campaign. We interviewed more than 30 candidates and staff; we used a novel machine-learning model to analyze more than a million tweets directed at candidates; and we made recommendations on how to mitigate the problem. We found that 40 per cent of the tweets were negative; only 7 per cent were positive (figure 1). The more prominent the politician, the greater the volume of negative messages they received (figure 2). (For more details, including reflections on online harassment by five women in politics, see our report Trolled on the Campaign Trail: Online Incivility and Abuse in Canadian Politics<\/em><\/a>, published by the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia).<\/p>\n