Ad spotted on unrelated media
I was reading a media site unrelated to Montreal when I spotted this, although it switched to something else before I could click through. Obviously it was delivered via Google ads to some cookie on my browser, but it strikes me that this is going to be one long, relentless election campaign.
It’s very clear to me, doing this blog, that the Coderre team is not going to pull any punches. Anything that can be blamed on Valérie Plante and Projet will be, even when it’s things that nobody could have helped, like budgetary constraints from the pandemic, or things from other levels of government, like driving difficulties caused by Quebec’s construction sites. The Coderre team will be watching for any dissatisfactions mentioned on social media, and exploiting them. They won’t care if something is a fair criticism or not: they just want to claw their way back in.
It’s going to get nasty.
Kevin 12:09 on 2021-04-10 Permalink
That ad is from a “group” called Relancer Montreal, which was called Reunifier Montreal when it launched last summer.
This entity could be just one man, Nicolas Poirier, a marketing guy originally from France who doesn’t like what PM has done in his borough.
He hasn’t said who, if anyone, is paying him for this. If it is Coderre/Ensemble Montreal, I believe they’ll have to declare it to the Elections officials at some point.
But yeah, a lot of people don’t like Plante and probably an equal number of people dislike Coderre. I recommend ignoring any arguments on social media because the odds are some of the participants are being paid to take part.
Kate 15:23 on 2021-04-10 Permalink
the odds are some of the participants are being paid to take part.
I’ve suspected that for awhile, but have told myself not to be paranoid.
There are people who’ve been making inflammatory statements about Plante/Projet for a long time, but if you ask them why they think that, if you even get a reply, you can see that they actually don’t know. So maybe they’re having fun with pretending to be outraged, maybe they’re not very bright, but I wonder, I do.
A lot of the time the riposte will be something implying you’re stupid if you don’t agree with them, etc.
dhomas 15:51 on 2021-04-10 Permalink
I don’t like to drive traffic to sites I’m not sure I support, but if anyone wants to visit the site, this appears to be it:
www (dot) relancer – montreal (dot) org
Kate 18:14 on 2021-04-10 Permalink
This Brian Myles editorial about the need to revive downtown Montreal mentions something called Relançons MTL, a Chamber of Commerce site, but I don’t think they’re connected. The URL that dhomas mentions is registered with Gandi, which hints it may be connected to the French person mentioned by Kevin, as many more Euro sites than North American ones use that registrar.
Kevin 19:50 on 2021-04-10 Permalink
Dhomas
That’s the site. Also a FB page.
Kate
The paid activity has been fairly well documented concerning other issues for several years. I found it kind of amazing how, 5-6 years ago, how it only took 1-2 links to go from just about every pro-Trump social media post to a Russian propaganda site.
Those people are still at it, and joined by agents from other countries, working on different topics.
Craig Silverman is good at tracking and explaining this.
CE 20:47 on 2021-04-10 Permalink
Ever since I worked a job where part of what I did was pad online reviews of the company I worked for, I’ve taken most of what I see online with a grain of salt. For example, the company had about 8 Reddit accounts which were very meticulously sustained so they would look legit. We’d write reviews for competitors’ products under the names while also making sure sure we sprinkled in a few good reviews of our own products. We maintained Facebook groups which just fed links to news articles related to the company’s market every couple days to the members just to create pools of people to advertise to. And this was a company with just a couple people on staff. I can only imagine how much internet activity is fueled by bigger companies/organizations/governments with deep pockets and large staffs with goals to be attained. I think all social media platforms have this going on, but imagine Twitter is the worst for it.
Kate 10:24 on 2021-04-11 Permalink
CE, is that what they call a “social media strategy”?