School board candidates who opposed gender ideology received highest rates of offensive tweets in 2022 Ottawa election: report

School board candidates received the highest rates of abusive tweets of any candidate in Ottawa’s final borough election held in October 2022, according to a new report from the charity Samara Center for Democracy.

“Most of the abusive tweets went to candidates Shannon Boschy and Chanel Pfahl. 33 percent respectively [743 of 2,221 tweets] and 32 percent [5,073 of 15,938 tweets] of the tweets they received were offensive,” said the Ottawa section of a larger report issued June 20, entitled “Online Abuse in Local Elections: The SAMbot Municipal Report.”

The report said both candidates “vocally objected to policies on justice, inclusion and sex education”. In particular, “they have been outspoken about their opposition to access to gender-affirming youth care,” and neither was elected in 2022.

In addition, five of the six candidates who received the most offensive tweets were in the running to become receivers with the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, the report found.

The SAMbot project tracked online abusive sentiment in eight municipal elections across Canada between August and November 2022, in Vancouver, Surrey, Ottawa, Brampton, Toronto, Winnipeg, Yellowknife and Charlottetown.

Nili Kaplan-Myrth, an Ottawa school candidate, general practitioner who advocated for COVID vaccination and other pandemic measures, received the highest number of abusive tweets of any Ottawa candidate, with 29 percent (21,460) of the 74,823 tweets sent to were sent to her categorized as abusive. About 1 in 10 (7,530) were considered a threat by the SAMbot software. She was elected in 2022.

SAMbot is a software application that uses a type of machine learning called natural language processing.

The artificial intelligence software tracked all English and French tweets sent to candidates. Every tracked message, be it a reply, a quote, a tweet or a mention, was analyzed and scored against five abuse categories—toxicity, insults, threats, identity attacks, and sexually explicit—the report said.

Toxicity is defined as “a rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to cause people to leave the discussion.” Threats refer to “an intent to inflict pain, injury or violence on an individual or group.”

Attack identity

The report said identity attacks-defined as “negative or hateful comments directed at someone because of their identity”-were common in the Ottawa trustee’s Twitter discussion.

It said SAMbot categorized a large portion of the abusive tweets received by Pfahl and Boschy as identity attacks, 16 percent (2,559 tweets) and 15 percent (339 tweets) of all tweets they received, respectively.

SAMbot assesses a tweet as an identity attack, whether directed against the candidate or another individual or group.

“In this case, a significant portion of the identity attacks these candidates received were not directed at their demographics, but at their opposition to teaching gender inclusion and anti-racism in schools. Tweets describing these candidates using transphobic, racist or similar terms were assessed by SAMbot as identity attacks,” the report said.

The Samara Center later gave one tweet on June 23 stating that while “an important finding was the prevalence of identity attacks and anti-trans rhetoric associated with school board candidates in Ottawa”, some have “misused and misinterpreted this finding”.

“In a climate where the rights and security of the 2SLGTBQIA+ community are under attack, we want to underline our support for gender diversity. The protection of trans rights is critical to a healthy Canadian democracy,” said the centre, which describes itself as non-partisan and in support of democracy.

The report explained that SAMbot “AI [artificial intelligence] for citizen research to better understand the influence of technology on our democratic culture.”

It said that because of the limitations of using artificial intelligence, “identity categorization should be considered as a way to understand the prevalence of transphobic rhetoric in school administrator races.”

It noted that the Ottawa section of the report states: “The category of identity attacks is therefore a complex category and does not necessarily mean that a candidate’s specific identity was attacked. Instead, it indicates that conversations about identities – their expression and related policies – show a significant amount of abuse, which in turn shapes the content, tone and experience of political conversations online.”

Online abuse a ‘significant problem’

According to the Samara Center, online abuse is a “significant problem” in federal and state elections, and “digital toxicity also impacts our municipal elections.”

According to the report, there were about 86,000 abusive tweets with high amounts of online abuse in the eight municipal elections in Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Brampton and Surrey.

The research project analyzed 465,000 tweets received by 524 Twitter accounts from city council, school board and park board candidates, along with accounts from political parties in an attempt to answer the questions. ask“How Toxic Were Your Local Elections?”