Not very social, is it?

Published May 9, 2010 at 6:59 p.m.
The city of Charlotte wants to use Facebook and Twitter to get its news out to the public.

But, unlike Mecklenburg County and most large N.C. cities, Charlotte doesn't want people talking back publicly on its pages.

City officials fear they'll be sued on free-speech grounds if they delete the kind of nasty comments commonly hurled in online forums. Instead, they say they'll let only city staff view citizens' comments - which Facebook's privacy settings allow - and they'll encourage people to use more traditional methods to talk to city staff.

"They can send e-mail," said Bob Hagemann, one of the city's staff attorneys. "They can send mail. They can make phone calls. We're not restricting an individual's right to communicate with their government."

But that runs counter to Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Greensboro and Asheville. All of those cities allow citizens to post comments that other Facebook users can view. So does Mecklenburg County.

Some social networking experts say Charlotte's stance defeats the whole purpose of social media.

"It's essentially an anti-social policy," said Brandon Uttley, a social media specialist with Wray Ward, a Charlotte marketing firm. "Social media is all about engaging with your audience and actually encouraging feedback. If you explicitly prohibit comments, it shuts off the dialogue. And another word for that is censorship."

The city adopted its policy last month. A spokesman, Keith Richardson, said the city is training staff and working out the details for what it hopes will evolve into a city-sponsored Facebook page and Twitter feed. They could be running in the next couple of months.

The Charlotte Fire Department has long been active, using an array of social media platforms to tell the public about fires and other emergencies. It has served as the city's "test kitchen" for social media.

Now the city wants its other departments to join - carefully.

Hagemann said that's because once the city designates a public forum for people to express themselves, court precedents say the city can't stop someone from talking - or posting - just because it doesn't like what the person's saying.

The city, unlike a private business, could face lawsuits for violating the poster's free-speech rights, he said. He drew a parallel to the problem local governments faced years ago with Martin Davis, the Charlotte activist who kept coming to public meetings to read explicit passages from books he wanted banned from the library.

His X-rated rants steamed officials, but they struggled to block him because he spoke during sections of meetings designated for public comments.

"If you open (a forum) up for speech on a particular subject, you've got to be viewpoint-neutral," Hagemann said. "We don't want to create a forum in which the message we're trying to get out is drowned out by folks who might want to use it for another purpose."

'Be nice,' Mecklenburg says

Mecklenburg's Facebook page, however, uses a comment policy tailored to let people talk back, even as the county tries to steer clear of First Amendment problems.

"We do not discriminate against any views," the policy says. But, it adds, county officials will pull down a variety of offensive comments, including those that are violent, profane, obscene, hateful, encourage illegal activity, or represent multiple successive off-topic posts by the same user.

"In short," the policy concludes, "be nice."

The wording came almost verbatim from the policy federal government agencies use in approaching social media, said Brian Cox, Mecklenburg's eGovernment customer service manager.

Cox, one of several county employees who tweet out updates during county commissioners' meetings, said the county hasn't had trouble policing its pages.

"So far, people have been remarkably polite," he said. And if commenters turn nasty toward the county, "we just have to put on our big boy pants and alligator skins and live with it," he added.

For instance, the county in April posted a link to a Power Point presentation from the county budget manager in hopes of helping people understand why the budget situation had turned sour so quickly.

"So," one woman replied tartly, "the Bobcat Arena and the 3x over-budget train system, were (a) COMPLETE SURPRISE???"

A county official promptly responded that the light-rail system and the pro basketball arena weren't financed from the county's budget.

Asked about the divergent city and county approaches, Hagemann responded in an e-mail that it wouldn't be appropriate for him to comment on the wisdom or legality of the county's approach.

"The city has decided that the risks of potentially establishing a designated public forum through social media (and the consequences that follow) are not worth whatever benefit might be obtained," he wrote.

Experts say government agencies need to take care about how they limit speech on their social networking sites, but several said the city is overreacting.

"What's the point of using social media if it's not being used to generate public discussion?" asked Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that advocates free speech and privacy rights in the digital era.

"I suppose the city would have the 'advantage' of not having to host critical comments on its own Facebook page, but it would sacrifice the benefit...of engaging with the public."

Rowdy commenters can be a problem for online sites. Staffers routinely remove more than 100 of the 10,000 comments received each day on CharlotteObserver.com. The Observer encourages readers to report abusive language and acts quickly to remove it.

Governor's experience

Many government agencies, such as the county, choose to let the conversations flow, despite the occasional messiness.

Gov. Bev Perdue, who has made open government a focus of her administration, has discovered how messy things can get on Facebook, where more than 5,600 people follow her.

Her posts routinely draw off-topic responses from animal rights activists who urge her to stop county shelters from using gas to euthanize pets.

In March, she said she would delete messages the activists wrote on her wall - the Facebook section where a users' posts and activities are listed. But her account still shows recent comments animal rights activists left on Perdue posts about everything from job creation to providing housing to needy families.

Comments on many large N.C. cities' Facebook pages appear mostly tame. But they occasionally turn caustic, as when Winston-Salem posted a message about the need for people to turn in their Census forms. One man commented that most of the unreturned forms probably come from Latino households where people don't trust the English-speaking world.

"If they don't trust the English speaking world," another woman responded, "tell them to go back to Mexico. This is our country."

Warren Cooksey, a Charlotte City Council member and diehard Twitter user, said he and other council members will need to step forward to satisfy local social media lovers' appetite for city-related information.

But he added that he couldn't fault City Manager Curt Walton for trying to shield the city from potential lawsuits.

"I'm not thrilled with it," he said, "but I understand where the manager's coming from."

Back | Read more at Charlotte Observer local