Sunday evening, while I was celebrating Chinese New Year at a banquet hosted by the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, I was also, apparently, getting back on Facebook. A page called “Lisa Helps – Victoria Mayor” with my photograph and an initial post that sounded eerily like me appeared.

“Hello Victoria! I have decided to start using social media again to engage with this city better, and look forward to many productive and positive discussions in the future!”

Except that it wasn’t me. More worrisome were the posts that followed. Meant to be satire but tinged with homophobia and racism, they were close enough to reality to be read as reality by the careless reader. And who reads social media carefully anyway?

The worrisome thing about these fake posts – spending $21 million on rainbow crosswalks and turning churches into mosques – is how many times they were shared and commented on. And, according to Head of Engagement at the City, Bill Eisenhauer, who read through some of the comments, “it certainly looked like some people did believe that it was an actual site from the mayor.”

City staff contacted Facebook to ask them to take the page down, which they did within a couple of hours.

I work really hard to communicate as directly as possible with residents in a number of ways. Through my bi-weekly Community Drop In, on Twitter, through my blog and in face-to-face conversations whenever I have the opportunity. Some people even text me with ideas!

It’s really troubling that somebody would create a fake page to spread false information when it’s difficult enough to get the facts out about the work we’re doing and the decisions we’re making at City Hall. I’m grateful that Facebook has shut the page down, but it doesn’t prevent another one from popping up tomorrow. This is the second time in the same number of months that someone has created a fake page, pretending to be me.

I shut down my Facebook page last year after outlining the reasons why in this blog post. Facebook is a toxic echo chamber that is unhelpful to politics and community building. And, it even affects the way we think and how we relate to one another. The fake page reminds me of why I left. The fact that on Facebook, somebody can actually become me, look like me, sound like me with no repercussions until we tell Facebook ‘Hey, that’s not really me,’ says there’s a problem with that social platform.