MONTREAL – The 2014 provincial election campaign has once again raised the issue of privacy on social media.
Is there such a thing?
Steven Fleurent, a young Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) candidate in Rimouski, learned the hard way that, in fact, there is not.
READ MORE: Naked Quebec election candidate gets lots of exposure
French-language media outlet TVA posted a photo on its Facebook page of the young man with his pants down while sitting on the toilet in the bathroom.
The caption read: “If you aspire to a career in politics, beware of the photos that can be found on your Facebook profile.”
Embarrassing? Perhaps.
Appropriate? That depends on who you ask.
Taïeb Moalla, who first broke the story for the Journal de Montreal, argued in his article that the photos were easily accessible to the public.
He went on to say that one didn’t need to be Facebook friends with Fleurent to view a plethora of photos featuring Fleurent’s bottom.
Judging by the other comments on TVA’s Facebook page, the issue wasn’t so much that the information was in the public domain, but that it was being used in a new and different way.
Many said that the photos were being taken out of context and showed poor taste on behalf of the journalists.
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Francis Ouellet commented: “When media reach the point of taking profile pictures of a drunken night out to make headlines, it’s pathetic!”
Nathalie Demers echoed the sentiment: “Really journalists have reached a new low, bravo!!”
Others, such as Evelyne Morin, had harsher words, going so far as to accuse the media of bullying and hypocrisy.
“I understand that the candidates have their share of responsibilities such as leading by example and not having compromising material publicly accessible” she wrote.
“But what I don’t understand is that the media is participating in the public sullying of a person with little experience in the field.”
She continued, “Really, hats off to you hypocrites who denounce bullying in your lengthy reports but then contribute to building awful reputations for people like this man from Rimouski.”
Some readers viewed the post as a ploy by the Parti Quebecois and Pierre Karl Péladeau’s Quebecor-owned media outlets, as a way to discredit other political parties.
One pundit noted that TVA, which was owned one owned by Parti Quebecois candidate Pierre Karl Péladeau, could be accused of impartiality for focusing on the Coalition Avenir Quebec.
“Oh yes, I’d forgotten that your boss, Pierre Karl Péladeau, was running for the Parti Québécois and that you needed to find something provocative about the other parties,” Philippe Dufour wrote.
Fleurent was not the only candidate who came under scrutiny Thursday after a thoughtless post on social media.
A Parti Quebecois candidate resigned after a controversial post was revealed on Facebook by a supporter of the opposition party looking through past posts.
READ MORE: Parti Quebecois candidate resigns after controversial Facebook post
Many Quebecers were left wondering whether the judgement of political leaders can be trusted if the parties are choosing candidates without reviewing their social media history.
When asked why a background check on social media had not been done on candidates representing the CAQ, Guillaume Simard-Leduc, the party’s press attaché, defended the CAQ’s recruiting procedures.
“We do run background checks but we have 125 candidates,” he said.
“We haven’t reached the point yet where we go and verify every single photo from a person’s past.”
The embarrassing photos have been removed from Fleurent’s Facebook profile, and are, for the most part, being chalked up to errors of youth.
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