Election war waged on Internet nastier than campaign

TORONTO - The Ontario election battle being waged in cyberspace is proving far nastier than what voters are seeing on the campaign trail, with the Liberals responsible for the most scathing attack ads, an Internet electioneering expert suggested Wednesday.

In terms of party presence on the Internet -- be it on websites, personal blogs, video or social networking sites -- both the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives are dominating, but their tactics differ greatly, said Ryerson University professor Greg Elmer.

While the Liberals are playing hardball, posting largely negative ads about Conservative Leader John Tory under a variety of aliases, Elmer said the Conservatives have taken an uncharacteristically playful approach -- slamming the Liberals in a YouTube parody of The Simpsons, for example.

Though it's unclear exactly who is posting some of the videos, particularly in cases where the aliases change frequently, Elmer said they appear to be the work of war room experts.

"(The Liberals) are consistently uploading negative videos, particularly on Tory, that are getting the highest number of views compared to the other two parties,'' said Elmer, whose Infoscape Research Lab is tracking how both the "official'' and "unofficial'' election campaigns are playing out online.

"We would definitely say in the research that we're doing that the Liberals are off to a fast start.''

That's in spite of Premier Dalton McGuinty's insistence Wednesday that the Liberals are taking the high road in their re-election efforts and leaving the negative campaigning to their more desperate rivals.

But while the incumbent Liberals seem to be taking a more "backroom'' approach with unattributed yet highly polished partisan ads, Tory is playing up his technological savvy with links to YouTube and the popular social-networking website Facebook on his campaign site.

Premier Dalton McGuinty's home page offers little in the way of interactivity, while the Tory campaign posts links, images and speeches on Tory's website and regularly updates his Facebook status, Elmer said.

Tory's decision to get a leg up on the competition and start campaigning a week early may not have helped, researchers found -- last week's five most popular election videos featured Tory in a less-than-flattering light.

In just four days, Tory's "U of Zero'' gaffe, where he told a University of Ottawa student about the unsavoury nickname he had for the school in his younger days, has had more than 5,000 hits after it was captured on video and posted to YouTube.

Elmer said Tory's controversial comments about funding religious schools and teaching creationism have also dominated blog discussions, which Elmer said he expects will become more critical as the campaign progresses.

Researchers did find, however, that while there were two positive videos posted about Premier Dalton McGuinty, most people preferred to watch the negative ones.

As for the NDP's "Get Orange'' campaign, Elmer said it's all but absent from the web, possibly because the party's supporters tend to favour grassroots, on-the-street activism over Internet politics.

"The NDP seem to not have adopted that technology at all as of yet,'' Elmer said. "I don't think that's part of their strategy.''

According to the Infoscape Research Lab, the Green party saw the largest increase in membership on Facebook last week -- a 126 per cent jump to 508 members.

Overall, the referendum on electoral reform dominated Facebook groups with many suggesting the new two-vote system, called "mixed-member proportional,'' would mean more females in the legislature.

Raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour, the arrest of 18 suspected terrorists in the Greater Toronto Area more than a year ago and support for an Ontario student strike were among the other most popular election-related Facebook subjects.

The lobby group Working Families also got in on the Internet action, launching an online contest Wednesday to create an ad that will be broadcast during the election.

The independent organization, which seeks to give a voice to working Ontarians, said this is the first time in Canada that a political ad created for the Internet will be chosen and aired on mainstream television.

The public will have a chance to vote for one of three ads and the winning submission will receive up to $100,000 worth of commercial airtime, spokesman Patrick Dillon said in a release.