With all the municipal elections going on across B.C. and in other provinces in Canada, I’ve been reading a lot about the gaffes some politicians have been making on social media.

While Twitter can be a great tool to communicate with constituents, it can also be a great way to embarrass said constituents in 140 characters or less.

As we all know, Twitter can be a platform for a perfect disaster, the arena in which the gloves come off, and a very public soapbox for stupid decisions.

For example, Winnipeg city council candidate Brad Gross tweeted out some inappropriate photos.

One picture was a re-tweet from actor Charlie Sheen (not a good start) showing a woman’s posterior in tight jeans, with the caption “I want.”

Another of these classy Twitter pictures was a woman with large pumpkins for breasts.

To make matters worse, he then proceeded to defend those tweets as “no big deal” and said they were “funny.”

Yeah, maybe these are just hilarious photos and are really no big deal — if he, his followers and all his constituents are small-minded teenage boys.

I think his last name says it all.

In 2012, Premier Christy Clark tweeted the “good news” that mining permits were reduced from 229 to 80. And it did not escape her followers that the news didn’t seem that good at all.

Her next tweet clarified what she apparently meant in the original: the backlog of mining permit applications was reduced from 229 to 85.

Twitter gaffes affect people at all levels, including federal politicians. Western Economic Diversification Minister and Calgary Centre-North MP Michelle Rempel has taken some heat over her social media accounts, which she manages herself. She posts candid and casual photos and insights about day-to-day life in the capital.

Though the inappropriateness of her photos is nothing like Gross’, some of her adversaries have questioned if there’s a place for selfies or high-fives with Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the hallways of the legislature.

There’s also a website dedicated to tracking tweets from Canadian politicians. Vancouver-based politwitter.ca is a one-stop shop for what MPs and MLAs are talking about on social media, but only if they sign up. It also keeps a list of deleted tweets from its users.

There’s also a Twitter account that tweets every time a person on a Canadian government computer edits Wikipedia anonymously. The automated account @GCCAEdits works by tracking the IP addresses of computers used to make those changes back to government buildings.

One such change was the removal of a section on Heritage Minister MP Shelly Glover’s page about the time Elections Canada requested her suspension for spending more than her legal campaign spending limit in 2011, which never occurred because she made a deal with Elections Canada to under-spend on her next campaign.

The section referencing that incident was reinstated on the Wikipedia entry, because many people can edit the entries — that’s the purpose of Wikipedia as an online encyclopedia.

A similar thing happened with the Wikipedia entry on Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu, which removed references to an ethics complaint against him.

Obviously, not every change by a government staffer is an attempt to try to erase a scandal from Canadian history (at least in the pages of Wikipedia), but it does indicate that media matters. Yes, even non-traditional media such as user-edited and social media.

When used well, these types of media can yield great conversations and engage constituents.

But when used badly — well, it’s better to not be used at all.