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.
I’d love to see the city spin up their own mastodon server to broadcast their announcements—city recreation on one @ottawa.ca account, Planning, development, and construction on another, etc, etc. They could own their own content and be unbeholden to any one platform’s philosophy.
The city is technologically savvy enough that I think it could be done.
I’ve said this for years … The city shouldn’t have social media
I can’t find anything that’s happening,because I refuse to use the crap they use, and their public facing site is a cluttered mess of links.
More like don’t put your eggs in the same basket, and use open protocols, RSS, ActivityPub, etc. (Even email newsletters for those who don’t want to fuss around with other apps).
They already have a site, they just need to make it easy for people to find the info, keep the clutter to a minimum, and remain easily informed.
Ehhh I wouldn’t go that far. I think there is something to be said for meeting people where they’re at.
there are plenty of microblog solutions they could use.
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What? This is the citys page…why is anyone meeting anyone on a public information site about services and upcoming ideas etc…
The CITY shouldn’t have social media for news and updates on a platform they don’t control.
For certain public information center meetings, it is the law that notice must be posted in at least two newspapers with enough time for the public to organize and respond.
The legal concept that government must communicate where its citizens actually get their information is over a century old.
I think that I agree. They’d probably spend more time on the site if they weren’t posting to Twitter all the time. Cities across Canada in general would likely benefit from spending a bit more time and money on improving the quality of content of their public-facing sites. Half the time I need to find something, it’s placed on some weird standalone page whose link I found halfway through a paragraph instead of in an organized sidebar or a list.
Would probably improve accessibility too, though I wonder if the current site is frustrating to people who need to use screen readers or if it’s only annoying to (some?) sighted people.
Yeah my city is the same.
They do have a comprehensive website but it’s extraordinarily difficult to navigate. So bad in fact that they created another website like instead of mycity.com you have to go to mycityevents.com. It’s still terrible in that the information thereon is very vague and always text based. No maps or really useful information.
It seems that the best source of information for events is indeed to follow them on facebook and scrutinise whatever they post in the lead up to community events, and the useful information about parking et cetera is often in the comments. Obviously I’m not going to engage with that.
I’m not adverse to them using social in some way but you should not be required to use social in order to find information.
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.
