Mayoral candidate Cecil Clarke has shut down his campaign page on Facebook, saying it has been sabotaged.

Clarke, a hopeful in the run for mayor of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, says he noticed a flood of unwanted ‘likes’ and messages on his page overnight.

He says some of the postings were just plain nasty.

“With campaigns, emotions can run high. But there doesn’t have to be personal attacks, negative comments, that are really not part of what a mayoral campaign is all about,” says Clarke.

The alleged spamming was the talk of Monday’s campaign trail.

Fellow candidate Rankin MacSween was quick to deny any involvement by his team, calling the incident an unwanted distraction.

“When this stuff happens, this mischief, it just distracts away from the main, important issues,” says MacSween.

However, another rival is accusing Clarke’s team of tampering with its own page to artificially boost its number of ‘likes.’

“I noticed his Facebook page went from 1,422 ‘likes’ within a short space of time to 2,170 ‘likes’ and it fixed there,” claims candidate Glenn Jessome. “When I ‘unliked’ it, it didn’t change. When other people ‘liked’ or ‘unliked’ it, it didn’t change.”

With the rise of popular social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, elections are impacted by the Internet more than ever.

Not only are candidates relying heavily on social media to campaign, this year is the first in which voters in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality can cast their ballots online.

Social media expert Mark Carabin advises businesses on the use of social media. He says it can be a useful campaign tool but, like other platforms, social media also has its pitfalls.

“This kind of thing is similar to robocalls. You get a lot of fake accounts, fake people,” says Carabin. “If you look at the United States, Mitt Romney got a few thousand Twitter followers overnight.”

Carabin says it comes down to people using common sense.

Meanwhile, Clarke says he has notified Facebook and plans to reinstate his campaign page if the problem is resolved in time for the election on Oct. 20.

With files from CTV Atlantic's Ryan MacDonald