A Harford County councilman is asking residents to cool it online as the 2026 election season turns nasty. Jacob Bennett said the tone has “gotten extremely ugly extremely quickly.”
Why It Matters: Local races are decided by small numbers of voters, and the people getting targeted are neighbors. When the online pile-ons get personal, it can scare candidates off, poison public meetings, and make it harder to talk about real issues.
What’s Happening: Bennett said Saturday, that attacks are coming “in all directions,” and he urged people to criticize actions without dehumanizing candidates and elected officials.
“When you post about local candidates and elected officials, you are talking about real life people who live here in our community,” Bennett wrote.
What We Know: Bennett wrote that it’s “good to advocate for candidates you believe in” and also “good to call out what you see as wrong actions candidates and elected officials take.” He asked residents to do that “in a way that recognizes the humanity of the person on the other side of it all.” He ended with a quote he attributed to Michael Brooks: “Be ruthless to systems. Be kind to people.”
Between the Lines: Bennett didn’t ask people to stop criticizing politicians. He asked them to stop treating politicians like they aren’t human.
The Big Picture: Local campaigns now play out in public comment threads as much as in mailers and door-knocking. That makes it easy for rumors and insults to spread fast, and hard for anyone to correct the record once a claim takes off. It also collapses the distance between “public figure” and “person at the grocery store,” because in county politics, that’s often the same person.
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