School board trustee candidates received the highest proportions 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.
This finding is contained in the Ottawa section of a larger report issued June 20, titled “Online Abuse in Local Elections: the SAMbot Municipal Report.” The project used a machine learning bot to track online abusive sentiment in eight municipal elections across Canada between August and November 2022, in Vancouver, Surrey, Ottawa, Brampton, Toronto, Winnipeg, Yellowknife, and Charlottetown.
In Ottawa, 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….