We made a tongue-in-cheek post earlier on Twitter after a user had spotted an error on the public Facebook profile of local councillor Mark Hood:

Councillor Hood ignored the joke, instead taking exception to the tweet for containing a picture of his family and demanding we delete it. We pointed out that the picture was publicly available on his Facebook profile but that his family weren’t actually pictured in our tweet. We had deliberately taken steps to protect the privacy of third parties by blocking out their faces.

Nevertheless Councillor Hood ignored our explanations and continued to demand we delete the tweet, adding that he found the tweeting of a blocked-out picture offensive. A 13-tweet long exchange followed which ended with Councillor Hood tweeting:

@lgelly won’t take it down, they think they have the right to behave like this – I see no decency In the way they behave

Then he took to Facebook, posting the following on his Councillor Mark Hood Facebook page, attacking the volunteers at Loch of Shining Waters:

Ordinarily we would not blog about a tongue-in-cheek tweet, let alone a daft twitter spat, but Councillor Hood is an elected public representative who has used his position to promulgate a highly distorted version of events and to attack multiple volunteers in an established and valued local community group.

As Councillor Hood well knows, using Twitter and Facebook in the way he has encourages others to join in, which creates a campaign of misinformed and unjustified abuse against individuals who are barred from defending themselves (Councillor Hood has been known to have blocked and deleted users from his Twitter and Facebook accounts). When teenagers do this, it’s called cyber-bullying. These comments have appeared so far beneath his Facebook post:

For the record:

Loch of Shining Waters did not post any pictures that identified Councillor Hood’s family members. Loch of Shining Waters did not make any personal attacks on Councillor Hood, merely posting a tongue and cheek tweet to which Mr Hood over-reacted. Loch of Shining Waters did not ‘snoop’ on our local councillor’s Facebook page which is publicly available and is used for political campaigning.

This is not the first time that our volunteers have been treated in a hostile manner on Twitter and Facebook by Councillor Hood and his former election agent Stevie Murray. The latest attacks and misrepresentations are nothing more than an ill-thought out attempt to try to discredit a community group in the most vexatious manner possible. We will not allow our volunteers to be bullied or intimidated by elected representatives.