A city councillor is pushing the City of Ottawa to suspend all of its accounts on the social media platform X, which she calls “very negative,” rife with misinformation and tied to the threat of punishing tariffs against Canada.
Orléans West-Innes Coun. Laura Dudas has given notice of a motion she will make to council’s finance and corporate services committee next week. It asks city staff to draw up a plan to suspend the accounts and migrate to other platforms.
In her motion, she said X and owner Elon Musk no longer uphold the values of “transparency, impartiality, respect and accountability,” which Dudas views as core principles for the city.
Some municipalities are too small or otherwise unable to run their own mastodon server. Some can barely figure out how to maintain a static website. The City of Ottawa should be able to do it, but it might be a stretch even for them in this age of governments being completely dependent on commercial providers to do anything that wasn’t set up 80 years ago by our better-organized ancestors. They should be given accounts on the provincial system set up for this purpose.