Twitter storm hovers over Allegheny County Council race between Hallam, Doven

That escalated quickly. A race for an at-large seat on Allegheny County Council had barely gotten underway this month when attacks started flying. Many of them came from observers of the race on social media, particularly Twitter, and almost immediately put the race’s two candidates on the defensive. Joanna Doven announced her candidacy for Allegheny County’s Democratic at-large seat on Jan. 4, challenging incumbent Councilwoman Bethany Hallam. Doven, 38, of Squirrel Hill, runs a public relations firm and previously worked as a spokeswoman for former Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl. Hallam, 33, of the North Side, is completing her first term on county council. A few days after Doven’s announcement, screenshots of old tweets from her personal account started to circulate online. They included a 2015 post that praised Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, another post that called an interview with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump “refreshing” and one that compared transgender people to a white woman who pretended to be Black. “So if a man can feel like he is a woman and vice versa — why can’t a white person feel like they are black?” Doven tweeted in 2015 in response to the national story about Rachel Dolezal, a white
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