BEWARE OF THE DRAW TO SOCIAL MEDIA

Today is “World Social Media Day,” a celebration of that form of communications that was first proclaimed in 2010 by Mashable, a media and entertainment company that delivers its content on a variety of platforms.

Though we bet you weren’t sending greeting cards to celebrate the occasion, when we became aware of this event, we decided to think a bit about some of the pitfalls for cities, counties and states that increasingly rely on social media networks – like Facebook, LinkedIn, X or Instagram – to convey their messages to residents and even a national audience.

We fully understand that states and local governments can’t avoid using social media to communicate with residents. According to a September 2024 survey from the Pew Research Center, “overall just over half of U.S. adults say they at least sometimes get news from social media.” But our fear is that many governments enter this new territory without deliberating on its pros and cons.

Consider this praise for using social media as a primary means of communication from the Florida League of Cities: “Today, people get their information online by engaging with trusted and relatable sources that speak to their specific interests. By its very design, social media has a degree of openness and transparency that provides excellent opportunities for local governments to build trust and a positive public perception of its work and services.”

But the pitfalls are abundant.

For one thing, social media by its nature is interactive and permits individuals to respond to a post. While the fair-minded exchange of opinions is certainly healthy, it’s almost a guarantee that some of the comments will be negative or even vicious.

This puts public leaders in a pickle. If they respond to comments then they’re in the perilous position of giving credibility to the sometimes inaccurate or misleading comments of a crank.

On the other hand, ignoring such comments lets them stand unchallenged and can easily allow readers to believe that they are accurate.

You can, of course, moderate comments – deleting the ones you don’t like – but that runs the risk of accusations of censorship, a dirty word in anyone’ circles.

This is, as the old saying goes, a situation in which “you can’t win, you can’t lose, and you can’t get out of the game.”

More alarming than the fishbowl nature of social media by official government organizations, it can create a breeding ground for misinformation.

In fact, “The majority of social media influencers share information with their followers without verifying its accuracy, according to a new U.N. report . . . “ reported The Hill late last year. 

“The new study, done by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), found that nearly two-thirds of surveyed digital content creators, 62 percent, said they did not verify the accuracy of information before sharing it with their followers online.”

But without any fact checking by authors of posts, there can emerge multiple versions of the truth. This has been the case in Wyoming in which the governor and the secretary of state have been throwing virtual rocks at one another for a while.

Just last week, according to the Cowboy State Daily,  “Wyoming’s governor launched an incisive counterattack Friday in an ongoing feud with the secretary of state, accusing the secretary of lobbing dishonest social media attacks at the governor.

“Gov. Mark Gordon and Secretary of State Chuck Gray have sparred on numerous topics from whether there’s a need for additional voter-integrity laws in Wyoming to whether the state should grant leases on state lands for wind turbine projects.”

As the Governor wrote, “Although our forefathers had their differences, they did not have to contend with the hit-and-run tactics some politicos and malcontents’ resort to using on social media.”

Of course, old-fashioned means of communication for states and localities had their flaws, too. Some newspapers were known to have a liberal or conservative bias. But at least, for most of them, they were able to cordon off the politically motivated coverage to the opinion pages.

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