These initial discussions won’t address everything at once, but there is a good chance the comments that follow will cover so much more.

The biggest problem with dirty politics is the all-in attitude that comes with it. If you support Certain candidates, those building the team ensured you were 100% behind that team. There was no room for middle ground. You supported the team entirely, or you were labelled as the enemy and treated as such.

Those who supported Smith would gang up on anyone questioning him and those opposing anything he stood for could expect several people to pile on. Despite this, there were some fairly well educated, informed individuals who continued to object. Despite several people arguing points with these people, they stood their ground and stood for right. So to combat them, a new tool was utilized. Many of the people participating in these debates were concerned about what their neighbours, their family and co-workers might think if they truly got nasty online. Why worry? To intimidate people into silence, people were labelled addicts, their safety and that of their pets were threatened, business they owned were attacked. Nobody likes this type of behaviour. So, Fake ID’s were created and used on a very regular basis.

One of the early ones I recall was the “Crowing Rooster”. Eventually those using these fake ID’s realized their reputations were failing so they stopped using cartoon type names and created real looking ID’s with fake names. Many went to the added effort of adding legitimate photos to support their ploys. Eventually open source software allowed people to search images and many of these ID’s (In Wasaga Beach) were exposed.

Imagine being able to enter a conversation, lie about someone, slander them, demean them and have zero accountability. This was the tool those with ill intent now possessed. If the argument was particularly distasteful, they would just create several fake ID’s and get them to agree with each other.

THESE METHODS WERE EMPLOYED IN WASAGA BEACH!

Fake ID’s were being congratulated for speaking the truth by each other, when in fact most of what they were saying was a lie!

There was one way to regulate this and that was through group administrators. Sadly, for those tasked with these decisions this fell into the difficult decision of measuring where controlling content was just prudent practice, or if it was censorship. In some cases, they didn’t care as long as it created entertainment. Some group administrators didn’t care about truth.

In a few Facebook Groups however, ID’s that used their anonymity to spread lies were prohibited. Often, after a particularly nasty post or obvious lie, the person would be banned. No problem for the bully, as a new ID would appear a day later and get back to it. Once certain groups had good control of it, the nasty ones just created copy-cat groups with similar names. Then they only allowed the lies to be spread in their groups.

There is so much more to this whole examination of election strategy… stay tuned. This discussion will continue for a few more days.