Damage Control: How Campaign Teams Interpret and Respond to Online Incivility

ABSTRACT

Social media are critical to election campaigns, but they also expose candidates to incivility and abuse. While there is a growing literature on online incivility faced by politicians, little is known about how campaign teams interpret and respond to it. To address that gap, we analyze in-depth interviews with 31 candidates and campaign staff from the 2019 federal election in Canada. We find that campaign teams interpret incivility according to the intensity of messages’ content, but also their frequency, source, and target. They use these criteria to assess potential harms in three areas: security and psychological wellbeing, strategic campaign activities, and inclusive democratic discourse. Based on these assessments, campaign teams use a limited set of platform affordances to ignore, monitor, engage, or block uncivil voices. Our analysis shows that interpretations of incivility are more nuanced and multi-dimensional than most scholarship recognizes. We also reveal the often-hidden labor that campaign teams devote to content moderation, as they try to balance protecting themselves, defending their campaign messaging, and creating space for civil discussion. By paying closer attention to campaign teams’ mediation and moderation of online incivility, scholars can better understand its consequences for democratic political participation in elections.

KEYWORDS:

• Electoral politics
• incivility
• social media
• negative campaigning
• content moderation

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Elizabeth Dubois, Maite Taboada, and Erin Tolley for their feedback on drafts of this article; to conference discussants Kate Kenski, Lilac Nir and Tamara Small for helpful remarks; and to our four anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. For their research assistance, we wish to thank Jaskiran Gakhal, Sonya Manuel, and Veronica Stolba.

Disclosure Statement

Grace Lore was involved in the research and drafting of this paper until August 2020, when she decided to run for political office. As soon as Lore declared her intent to run, she ended her involvement in the research and writing of this paper.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2022.2137743

Notes

1. Of the six interviewees who did not complete these evaluations, we did not ask two because we had already received responses from a member of their campaign team. Four declined because they lacked direct knowledge of how Twitter accounts were moderated.

Additional information

Funding

Digital Ecosystem Research Challenge, funded in part by the Government of Canada;Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [892-2020-0064].

Notes on contributors

Chris Tenove

Chris Tenove is Research Associate and Assistant Director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia. He researches political communication, political theory, and media policy, with a focus on relationships between digital technologies human rights and democratic participation.

Heidi Tworek

Heidi Tworek is Canada Research Chair (Tier II) and Associate Professor of History and Public Policy at the University of British Columbia. She directs the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Her work examines history and policy around communications, particularly the effects of new media technologies on democracy.

Grace Lore

Grace Lore is currently the Member of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia for Victoria-Beacon Hill. She was involved in research and drafting of this article from August 2019 to August 2020, during which time she taught in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria.

Jordan Buffie

Jordan Buffie is a recent graduate of the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, where he focused on democratic theory and political communication. He is currently pursuing a degree in education at Simon Fraser University.

Trevor Deley

Trevor Deley is a PhD candidate in e-business at the University of Ottawa. He has a BSc in neuroscience and an MSc in biology and data science. His research focusses on political discourse and computational methods.