The Social Media Dilemma
In recent years, cities across the country have worked to engage their residents through social media. Social media can be a quick and inexpensive way to communicate with residents and other stakeholders.
Cities often measure the success of these programs by the number of hits on a website, likes of a post and followers on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. This activity is an important way for cities to inform and engage residents, and is valuable to residents as a source for information.
There is, unfortunately, a darker side of social media, and one that will be a challenge for local governments in the years to come. When there is a controversy in a community and the city is seen as being partial to one side, social media posts by stakeholders can devolve into communication that is misleading and mean spirited. The mean-spiritedness, while disturbing, is actually the easier issue.
Insulting Commentary
As anyone who has sat through enough city council meetings knows, some people are emboldened by the public forum and attempt to make undeservedly rude comments. Online this is magnified, as people post things that are harsher than they would say to someone in person.
Social media gives a large number of people access to council members and staff. When there is a controversial issue, it can be difficult for elected officials and city staff to handle mean-spirited comments, as any response at all has the potential to escalate the conversation and the negativity associated with it.
Training helps, and city managers as well as communications professionals at cities should make sure that council members and staff are prepared for online attacks, have a response, and understand that often the best response is no response at all. Unfortunately, even choosing not to engage can backfire as the government can be portrayed as unresponsive and uncaring.
Cities that handle this successfully have a professional communications person involved at all stages to ensure that the right message from the city gets out there. Social media posts that are misleading, however, are a completely different issue, and one that is beginning to plague governments.
Case Study
While I was interim city manager in at a southern California city, a developer used an initiative process to get approval for a land use project. This involved the developer getting enough signatures to place the item on the ballot. Once this was done, the city council legally approved the development, avoiding the cost of an election.
Opposition groups immediately responded with their own successful petition drive to refer the item to the voters for approval. While all of these actions were completely legal and part of the democratic process, the lead up to the actual vote was controversial and social media posts became not only vitriolic, but propagated information that was untrue.
The City’s Role in Communications
The city’s role in communicating about the project was confusing to the public. The council had unanimously approved the project, which led the public to believe that “the city” was for the project. Council members also publicly supported the project, which was their right. However, by law, the city could only publish the facts of the initiative. California law states:
“An officer, employee, or consultant of a local agency may not expend or authorize the expenditure of any of the funds of the local agency to support or oppose the approval or rejection of a ballot measure, or the election or defeat of a candidate, by the voters” (California Government Code 94954).
City staff was directed by council and given the resources to publish factual information about the proposed project during the referendum. The confusion that the public had between the political role of the council and the governing role of the city to publish factual information was leveraged by those opposing the project.
Is Government Believable?
The parties for and against the project ran strong campaigns that included mail, ground, media and online information. At the same time, the city published information online and in print about the facts of the project. Many of those opposed to the project attacked the city and the city’s information.
The more the city tried to get the actual facts out there, the more those facts were publicly challenged by opposition groups, often with misleading information. Perhaps not surprisingly, it seemed far easier for those opposed to the city to get people to doubt the city’s information than it was for people to believe the city was telling the truth.
The Challenge
What is the truth to an audience? This is the social media challenge of the future. To take a hypothetical situation, someone can have a post on social media that includes a doctored photo, claiming that sewage is being dumped into a river or stream. If the city responds that this is not true, even if the city provides water quality test results, it is likely that some percentage of readers will believe the first post. It doesn’t help that national stories like Flint, Michigan, make it harder for the public to believe government information.
There is a real and important push for transparency in government in the United States. As we have seen on both the national and local scale, publishing the facts, and getting people to believe them are two entirely different issues. The discussion on this evolving dilemma for local governments is just beginning, and I encourage you to share both success stories and lessons learned.
