Election season pits Minnesota mom against TikTok attacks

Tuesday is Election Day.

If you take nothing else away from this story, remember that. Minnesota votes on Nov. 7, and there's still time to figure out who you're voting for and why.

In an ideal world, we'd do the work ourselves. We'd study the candidates and their platforms. Do a little sleuthing online to make sure what they say lines up with what they do. Read the local newspaper. Check with the parties and interest groups that align with our interests to see who they endorse.

In the real world, sometimes you just look around for someone you trust to see what they think. Life is short and the school board candidate lists are long.

Ellen Hock, a working mother of two, set out to research the dozen candidates running for her local Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan school board.

She shared what she found with her 55,000 followers on Tik Tok – including a post where a school board candidate seemed to endorse a statement that Native American children who struggle in school come from a culture "similar to the urban black community that exhalts [sic] 'thuggery' and ghetto slang like a badge of honor."

Hock posted her low opinion of that opinion and added it to the growing list of posts on her popular and policy-oriented Tik Tok account, tallmomrunning.

"I had a platform, why not use it?" said Hock, who started posting on Tik Tok about a year ago, creating "mom content" focused on meaty topics like paid family leave or the astronomical price of child care.

Then came the backlash. Attacks directed not at the message, but the messenger.

Conservative sites picked up her posts and shared them around, funneling taunts, nasty comments and threats from complete strangers and, worse, from neighbors.

They called her a paid shill for the teachers' union. They tagged the FBI in posts about her. They suggested that bad things might just happen to her children.

The insults poured in. "I'm a paid clown, I'm hysterical and condescending. All these negative words," she said. The one thing they didn't call her was a mom, sharing her opinions about the candidates who wanted to shape policy at her children's schools.

"It was just horrible," she said. "They were telling me they were going to call [child protective services] on me. They were threatening acts of violence. One person said 'Let's see what happens when your kid gets hurt.'"

There's an interesting policy debate to be had about our schools. But the point of this sort of online harassment isn't debate. It's annihilation.

It's easy to assume that somebody has vetted the candidates running for school board. At least until somebody noticed that there's a Holocaust denier running for the Roseville school board this year.

There are more than 300 school districts in Minnesota and only about two dozen daily newspapers left. May Minnesota bless and keep the citizens who do the deep dives on down-ticket races. May we have their backs when online mobs mobilize.

There was a moment when Hock was tempted to quit. She sat in the waiting room at the pediatrician's office, comforting a little one with strep throat, staring at a mockup of a Spirit Halloween costume with her face photoshopped onto it. "Liberal White Supremacy Disguise (feminized cuckold husband costume not included)."

She kept posting, she said, for all the people who don't have the option to walk away from the color of their skin or their sexual orientation when they're attacked online.

"There are people who have to live with it every single day. People just openly hate them every single day," she said. "I'm lucky. I could just be like, 'No, I don't want to do this anymore.' And then I could just move on with my normal life. But that's not the case for so many people."

It's so close to the election, it doesn't feel fair to name and shame the candidate in her video. You can figure it out for yourself with a little research. The candidate did not respond to an interview request, but the post about Native children remains on the campaign's Facebook page.