Last week while I was away on holidays a story popped up in my Twitter feed that I'd previously been wanting to write about in this stupid column of mine.
In case you were also on holidays, the social media firestorm of last week happened when One City's rookie council candidate, Brandon Yan (@CitizenYan), scrubbed a load of his old tweets off of Twitter. It resulted in a bit of a social media crisis for him, one he addressed quickly and which soon faded away.
Mostly drunk tweets into the ether from when I was 22 (my alcohol tolerance is much lower now), some challenging mental health days, pictures of dogs, thoughts about cute boys on #Transit, probably some angry rants about things. If you'd like to know more about me, ask away :) https://t.co/wtBVGn6vCX
— Brandon Yan ??? (@CitizenYan) July 23, 2018
The questionable tweets are gone from his account but I'd put money on the fact that someone downloaded his Twitter history months ago. Right or wrong (okay wrong, but to be expected), he'll be talking about his questionable tweets again right before the election when they magically arrive in reporters' inboxes care of some shadowy source not bound by the new fundraising rules.
Since I missed the boat on writing about it at length before it got stale I'll simply share two articles you should read, in case you missed them:
- Delete that tweet — or not? Vancouver city council candidate criticized for scrubbing Twitter posts - Douglas Quan for the Vancouver Sun
- Vancouver council candidate Brandon Yan deleted his old tweets—in 2018, he would have been stupid not to - Travis Lupick for the Georgia Straight
Something I'm not late to the party on is Mayor Gregor Robertson's Twitter activity. It's ongoing, of course, and it seems to be mostly free of drunk tweets he'll regret.
As the head of his party and of this city he lets people know about initiatives the City has launched, and he sometimes shares his personal opinion on things like Doug Ford's moves in Toronto and the Kinder Morgan pipeline project here in our backyard.
He shoots out a lot of links to specific pages on the City's vancouver.ca website, and he tweets and retweets the odd link to news stories that show favourable coverage of things he and his party have achieved. I went back to January 1st of this year and charted the number of times he's shared stories from various local media outlets so far in 2018. Check it out below.
Hello, here is a graph. Enjoy the graph.
One notable exclusion from Gregor's link love is The Province, even though its sister paper the Vancouver Sun is ranked pretty high. There's nothing about the mayor's quibble that I can track down on the internet, but years ago he had a major issue with the paper.
I once heard him refer to it as "a rag" while speaking in public at an event which was meant to bring together young movers and shakers. He didn't like the paper's local politics coverage at the time and went on a heated tirade telling the audience what a POS he thought it was. There may have been something about lining a birdcage with it, but I can't recall. He most certainly called it a rag though (it wasn't and it isn't).
I enjoy the Province myself, and I imagine you read it too. Based on him not tweeting anything from them in the recent past I'll conclude that Gregor still seems to not be a huge fan.
However looking at the tally above he does seem to have a thing for Daily Hive. Perhaps the thinking is that they've keep that millennial cred going for Vision leading into the next election on October 20th, 2018?
