For the third year in a row, the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) electoral office banned the use of Twitter for campaigning.
Chief electoral officer (CEO) Sean Finn said his decision this year was based on “past precedent,” or rather the 2010 decision from then CEO Sagal Osman to ban Twitter.
Twitter is too difficult to monitor, in large part due to the use of nicknames, Finn said.
Finn said he’s not about to try and change the rules since his job is just to follow them.
“The rules are plain here,” he said. “We have to follow the rules; it’s not our job to amend them.”
A change to the Twitter policy would require amending section 12.7 of the electoral code, which requires all campaigning material to be submitted to and then vetted by the CEO before going up.
At least one candidate already had a Twitter slip up.
Executive candidate Tomisin Olawale received an electoral warning Feb. 9 after posting a series of tweets on his personal Twitter account. Olawale, a vice-president (student life) candidate with A Better Carleton, re-tweeted a Charlatan tweet about executive videos, writing “I ROCKED THIS.”
The ban on Twitter, considering Facebook is allowed, has A Better Carleton presidential candidate Alexander Golovko displeased.
“I personally did not see the reason why one social media would be allowed over another,” he said. “I don’t see an adequate reason behind this.”
Although fellow presidential candidate Sarah Cooper said she thinks Twitter should be allowed, she doesn’t think this year is the right time to overhaul the rules.
“I just think that this year with the climate of the elections and having them needed to be very fair and very regulating . . . implementing brand new things this year is something the CEO wasn’t prepared for,” she said.
While Twitter is an effective reporting tool for elections, associate journalism professor Elly Alboim said it’s not as useful for campaigning, making the decision to ban Twitter less consequential.
“It’s useful again as an alerting device, ‘We have a rally on Thursday’ kind of thing,” Alboim said. “But in terms of substantive submission exchange, the limits on Twitter are enormous . . . it’s very much a kind of pull medium as opposed to a push medium.”
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