Party leaders Rachel Notley and Danielle Smith’s Twitter accounts had the most engagement of all tracked accounts. Roughly 42% of all mentions we monitored were directed at either Notley or Smith, with Notley receiving 21.5% of mentions and Smith 20.9%. Around 4% of the tweets both Notley and Smith received were abusive. Overall, the two leaders received remarkably similar volumes of both engagement and abuse on Twitter during the election period.
How we interpret abusive content: The machine learning models that power our SAMbot data analysis are not designed to discern context, consider the target of a message, or rank abuse in the way people may expect. This is especially evident in cases where attacks on identities or on specific communities occur. Tweets can be categorized as abusive whether they are agreeing with the user they are replying to or not. For example, tweets sharing anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and tweets opposing anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment will both be categorized as abusive by our machine learning models. This is why quantitative data is not enough to tell the whole story when exploring the issue of online abuse. It is important to correlate spikes in engagement and abuse with offline events.
Notley’s highest engagement on May 27 can be attributed to two tweets. One saw her thanking the mayor of Calgary, Naheed Nenshi, for endorsing her campaign. Our previous SAMbot research has shown that endorsements from current or former political leaders can correlate with elevated online engagement. The other tweet asked her followers to “[l]ike this post if you’re voting for the Alberta NDP for the FIRST TIME!”
Smith’s engagement significantly outpaced Notley’s from May 17 to 18. The leaders’ debate took place in this time period, which explains the increased engagement for both leaders, although Smith’s was notably higher. May 17 and 18 were also the days with the biggest engagement spikes for UCP-affiliated accounts across the entire election period. What explains this significant jump in engagement? Our data suggests it was related to the conduct of another UCP candidate that made news around this time.
On May 16, 2023, it was reported that UCP candidate for Lacombe-Ponoka, Jennifer Johnson (who we did not monitor as she did not have a Twitter account), made derogatory comments about transgender youth. On May 18, 2023, Smith announced that Johnson would not be welcome in the UCP caucus as a result of her “vile” comments, and later called for LGBTQ+ issues to be “depoliticize[d].” Johnson still appeared on the election ballot as a UCP candidate and was elected. Johnson sat as an independent MLA until October 2024, when she was welcomed back into the UCP caucus.
We performed a search of the presence of certain words within our Twitter data in an attempt to identify a correlation between the Johnson situation and Smith’s elevated Twitter engagement between May 17 and 18. We searched for any instance where a tweet’s text contained the word “trans.” We used only this word because it would include different usages of the term, including “transgender,” “transexual,” “transitioning,” etc.
We recognize that this approach could also capture words such as “transportation,” “transit,” or “translate.” Nevertheless, we see a definitive increase in tweets that use the word “trans” directed at both Smith and UCP-affiliated accounts on May 17 and 18, coinciding with the news and public debate about Johnson’s comments.
We also conducted the same analysis with the word “Johnson” to help confirm our hypothesis. This analysis similarly flagged any instance where “Johnson” was used at all, but nonetheless, the increase in discussion around the expected times is clearly visible.
There are other significant spikes in the use of “Johnson” on May 29, which was election day. We hypothesize the increase in discussion was in response to Johnson winning the election in the Lacombe-Ponoka riding.
Finally, Google Trends data (focusing only on users searching from Alberta during the election period) corroborates the elevated interest in this topic outside of Twitter.
In past SAMbot deployments, we observed that LGBTQ+ rights-related discussions drove high levels of Twitter engagement. In this Alberta election, we see the same trend continue. Although LGBTQ+ issues were not debated by UCP and NDP candidates during the election, multiple candidates received some of their most significant spikes in engagement when posting about LGBTQ+-related topics.
It was not just Smith who experienced high volumes of abuse and engagement around LGBTQ+-related topics. Among the seven candidates who received the highest volumes of abusive tweets, Karen Shaw, Artur Pawlowski, and Janis Irwin also saw some of their highest volumes of engagement per day during the election period coincide with tweets or news about LGBTQ+ rights issues or anti-LGBTQ+ hate. We discussed Smith’s spikes in abuse and engagement above; we turn now to the other three candidates.
Aside from election day, first-time provincial candidate Karen Shaw received the most engagement on May 26. Shaw is a former long-time Sturgeon County municipal councillor who ran for the NDP in Morinville-St. Albert, but was ultimately not elected.
Late in the day on May 25, Shaw posted a tweet showing her and a fellow NDP candidate painting a rainbow sidewalk in front of St. Albert city hall. On May 26, Shaw received 722 tweets, 40 of which were abusive. This was the most abuse she received on any single day, and the second most engagement of any day, with the first being election day.
Artur Pawlowski is a street preacher and activist, and was a first-time political candidate in the 2023 Alberta election. He has long cultivated a following based on his opposition to gay and transgender rights, and received media attention for his involvement with the 2022 border blockade in Coutts, Alberta, and for his subsequent phone conversations with Premier Smith regarding the blockade and his related legal proceedings.
While Pawlowski received little support at the polls, winning just 99 votes, or 0.4% of the vote, in the Calgary-Elbow riding, his online popularity is notable. Pawlowski, who actively campaigns against public health orders, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ+ rights, received significant online engagement during the election period. His account received the fourth highest engagement of any candidate.
Some of his biggest spikes in engagement surrounded anti-LGBTQ+ events and individuals.
These spikes coincide with a series of tweets from Pawlowski about a May 2023 visit to Calgary from 16-year-old high school student and anti-trans activist Josh Alexander. During this visit to Calgary, Alexander attended an event at Pawlowski’s church, was featured in multiple videos that Pawlowski posted on his Twitter account, and was arrested at an anti-trans protest held in front of a Calgary high school. Alexander, who is from Renfrew, Ontario, endorsed Pawlowski during the election.
When Pawlowski posted a video with Alexander on May 16, it received significant engagement compared to Pawlowski’s usual tweets. May 17 was the date of the Calgary protest and Alexander’s arrest, and on May 18 Pawlowski announced via Twitter that he would be holding a ceremony celebrating Alexander’s protest efforts the following weekend, a tweet which also received heightened engagement.
These events are likely a significant reason for Pawlowski’s elevated engagement and abuse levels on May 17 and 18.
Janis Irwin was first elected as the NDP MLA for Edmonton-Highlands-Norwood in 2019. She served as the NDP’s Critic for Status of Women and 2SLGBTQ+ Issues and, at the time, was the only LGBTQ+-identifying MLA in the Alberta legislature. She was subsequently re-elected in the 2023 election.
On May 27, Irwin posted a tweet that congratulated a local Pride organization, and featured a video of her meeting with constituents and dancing at an event in Edmonton. This was the highest volume of tweets she received during the entire election period.
In our analysis, we noticed that Irwin restricted replies on many of the tweets that she posted during the election period. Restricting replies means only users who the poster (in this case, Irwin) follows can reply to the original post. However, it does not stop non-followed users from mentioning the poster in tweets that aren’t direct replies. This May 27 pride parade post notably did not restrict replies.
LGBTQ+ Canadians who aspire to run for office, or even just want to be part of civic conversations, encounter abusive anti-LGBTQ+ messages online. This abuse sends a powerful message about who is and is not welcome in civic discussions, and may dissuade LGBTQ+ candidates from running for local office or being part of public life at all out of fear of being on the receiving end of hate, or threats or violence.
It is also worth considering how astroturfing efforts may be impacting these online anti-LGBTQ+ discussions. Last year, a number of moderators in Alberta Reddit communities noticed odd activity—many Reddit accounts suddenly started sharing anti-LGBTQ+ content and downvoting other LGBTQ+-related posts. These reports coincided with the release of data by Reddit showing that, based on geographic location, Russia was the third most common region of origin among users in many of these communities (behind Canada and the United States).
Foreign-sourced campaigns spreading anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment have been observed in the EU, as misinformation about LGBTQ+ people rises on platforms like Twitter. Our data suggests that similar anti-LGBTQ+ astroturfing campaigns could be targeting online discussions in Canada.
Out of the 50 candidates who received the most engagement on Twitter during the election, 23 were first-time provincial candidates.
Of these first-time candidates:
It’s important to remember that the UCP had more incumbents running than the NDP since the UCP was the incumbent majority government. Some first-time candidates also received some of the highest volumes of abuse.
Out of the 20 candidates who received the most abuse on Twitter during the election, eight were first-time provincial candidates.
Among these candidates:
This data tells us that it is not only well-known or well-established candidates that face abuse in online spaces. In fact, first-time Alberta provincial candidates received significant rates of abuse online, some even eclipsing many highly visible candidates who previously held positions of power. For example, first-time NDP candidates Karen Shaw and Michelle Baer received levels of abuse comparable to those of outgoing Deputy Premier Kaycee Madu.
Why is this noteworthy? First-time candidates are likely to have less funding, support, and experience which means their capacity for dealing with online abuse is limited. The very fact that they face considerable abuse immediately upon entering provincial politics could deter them from ever running as a candidate again. And this abuse could dissuade other potential candidates from running at all. Online abuse, in other words, has become a condition of work for candidates on the digital campaign trail, with a possible chilling effect on our democracy.