This is interesting. As many of you know, there was a Facebook group created by people upset about Cheri DiNovo's support for Peter Shurman's motion in the Legislature against Israeli Apartheid Week, called NDP Supporters or Members who Agree that Israel is an Apartheid State.
But the Facebook blowback didn't end there for DiNovo. For International Women's Day, DiNovo posted a status update on Facebook in support of equal pay, affordable child care, homes for all women, and freedom from violence for her sisters around the world. She followed up with a comment post specifying all women, including Iranian women who are being tortured.
A number of her "friends" (like most politicians, she "friend-collects" and currently has over 4000 friends) posted well-thought-out and respectful comments about her support for the Conservative motion against Israeli Apartheid Week, a motion which accused Palestinian rights activists of "hate speech" for using the word "apartheid", and branded them anti-semites.
The discussion thread is currently around 30 posts long, and would be much longer, except that DiNovo (or whomever looks after her page) keeps deleting most of the dissenting posts from her "friends", and then apparently defriending a good number of them.
This has not stopped the flood of posts. Except that now, people are starting to post them not just in that thread, but on a number of her most recent activity announcements on her FB page about the issue itself, and also asking her why she's been deleting her comments.
And now, someone has created a Facebook group called I Was Defriended by / I Defriended Cheri DiNovo, and it has 29 members so far, all of whom claim to either have been defriended by or defriended her, or had comments deleted by her.
What I find really interesting about this whole situation, beyond the politics around the Israeli Apartheid Week motion, is how social media is somewhat of a leveller now. Politicians who want to do the folksy "Be my friend!" thing and "I'm such an approachable person of the people!" thing on social media like Facebook will discover that their "friends" might just treat them like "friends" and speak their minds when you do or say something that hurts them.
And if you try to respond with the usual politician damage control, by deleting comments by your "friends" and "defriending" them - it just makes the situation worse, because they have almost as much (and often more) power as you do on a medium like Facebook.
So the more people she defriends, and the more people's comments she deletes, the more power she gives to this new group that is protesting her inaccessibility and her refusal to hear criticism from people she has disappointed.
It's an interesting dynamic. Should be interesting to see how this all plays out.
