School Trustee Candidates Opposed to Gender Ideology Received Highest Rates of Abusive Tweets in 2022 Ottawa Election: Report

Dozens of students gather at Longfields-Davidson Heights Secondary School to protest against gender ideology in Ottawa on June 15, 2023. (Matthew Horwood/The Epoch Times)

School board trustee candidates received the highest rates of abusive tweets among all candidates in the last Ottawa municipal election held in October 2022, according to a new report by the Samara Centre for Democracy, a charity.

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

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

In addition, five of the six candidates who received the highest proportions of abusive tweets were running to be trustees 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.

Ottawa school trustee candidate Nili Kaplan-Myrth, a family doctor 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 her categorized as abusive. About 1 in 10 (7,530) were deemed threats 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. Each message tracked, whether a reply, quote tweet, or mention, was analyzed and scored based on 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 make people leave the discussion.”  Threats refer to “an intention to inflict pain, injury, or violence against an individual or group.”

Identity Attacks

The report said identity attacks—defined as “negative or hateful comments targeting someone because of their identity”—were common in Ottawa trustee Twitter discussion.

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

SAMbot assesses a tweet as an identity attack whether it’s directed at the candidate or another individual or group.

“In this case, a significant portion of the identity attacks received by these candidates were not targeting their demographic characteristics, but instead, their opposition to teaching gender inclusivity and anti-racism in schools. Tweets that described these candidates as transphobic, racist, or similar terms were evaluated as identity attacks by SAMbot,” said the report.

The Samara Centre later issued a tweet on June 23 stating that, while “a key finding was the prevalence of identity attacks and anti-trans rhetoric connected to Ottawa school trustee candidates,” some have “misused and misconstrued this finding.”

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

The report explained that SAMbot uses “AI [artificial intelligence] for civic inquiry in order to better understand technology’s influence on our democratic culture.”

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

It noted that the Ottawa section of the report states: “The category of identity attacks, therefore, is a complex one, and doesn’t necessarily imply that a candidates’ specific identity was attacked. Instead it indicates that conversations about identities - their expression and related policies - are manifesting a significant volume of abuse, which is in turn shaping the substance, tone and experience of political conversations online.”

Online Abuse a ‘Significant Problem’

According to the Samara Centre, online abuse is a “significant problem” in federal and provincial elections and “digital toxicity is affecting our municipal elections as well.”

The report said the eight municipal elections saw roughly 86,000 abusive tweets with high volumes of online abuse in the Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Brampton, and Surrey elections.

The research project analyzed 465,000 tweets received by 524 Twitter accounts belonging to city council, school board, and park board candidates along with political party accounts in an effort to answer the question, “How toxic was your local election?”