Opinionated Toronto media consultant claims he was blocked from the mayor’s Facebook page after leaving critical messages on the wall.
At the start of Rob Ford’s mayorship campaign last year, Toronto media consultant Max Valiquette began writing his thoughts on the Rob Ford for Mayor of Toronto! Facebook page. “I was somewhat disappointed in his policies,” says Valiquette, who claims he was using Facebook as a forum to receive updates from the Ford camp and express his discontent.
But when it was revealed earlier this summer that Ford was skipping out on this year’s Pride Parade, Valiquette decided to question Ford’s decision on the official Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Facebook page.
“Pride Parade brings money to the city so doesn’t supporting pride make fiscal sense?,” Valiquette wrote in his first post. He followed it up with another post that questioned if the Mayor was homophobic, given that Ford had offered an official welcome to visitors for Caribana (now known as the Caribbean Carnival), but did not do the same for Pride.
The next thing Valiquette knew, his post had been removed and he was blocked from the Mayor’s page, resulting in his inability to post on the wall. For Valiquette, the ban only goes to show that the Ford camp is using social media to suppress rather than respond to public opinion.
“I don’t think for a second Mayor Ford is running that Facebook page. Workers who are paid with taxpayer money are running that page so it’s essentially my tax money that got me kicked off,” says Valiquette, who adds that when a public figure has a Facebook page, he or she must be willing to leave both the good and bad in order to facilitate discussion.
Adrienne Batra, press secretary for the mayor and one of the few people in Ford’s office who monitors his Facebook page, admits that the administration strives to keep discussion on the page on the positive side, and that some users are removed when foul language is used.
“I don’t even want to repeat what has been said [on the page],” says Batra. “If you look at the page, [you'll see] we keep the message as positive as possible. But there is discussion—you can see the banter back and forth.”
However, when asked if removing contentious posts suppresses public debate, Batra declined to comment, since no one has approached the Mayor’s office with that particular complaint.
