City of Cape Coral wrestles with social media challenges
The city of Cape Coral joined the national debate on social media parameters and protocol for politicians last week when Mayor Marni Sawicki suggested the need for a policy after criticizing three fellow Council members for how they use Facebook.
Sawicki clarified her comment Wednesday, saying that while it might be beneficial for the city, she would not be proposing formal rules for Cape Coral City Council members.
“I don’t think that would be possible,” she said in a telephone interview. “With elected officials, I don’t know how you could have it apply.
“If we could, I’d be happy to comply,” she added.
The local tussle over social media applications began after charter school superintendent Nelson Stephenson accused Sawicki of interference in the operations of the municipal school system, saying she had attempted to intimidate him into rehiring a teacher whose contract had not been renewed for the current school year. Sawicki denied the allegation and fired back, saying Stephenson improperly aired an issue she thought had been resolved to call attention away from a less-than-desirable audit report.
As the accusations flew back and forth, social media blew up. Much of the criticism was aimed at the mayor, who then added the audit report to the next city council agenda, a day ahead of a scheduled Cape Coral Charter School Authority meeting. Critics and supporters for each side filled the Council chambers, with most supporting the school system and Sawicki subsequently taking Rana Erbrick, Jessica Cosden and Richard Leon to task for their actions on Facebook.
Sawicki said Wednesday that her policy reference last Monday was directed not at those council members but at the charter school system, particularly toward its staff members.
“Just to keep things on a professional level,” she said.
Both the city of Cape Coral and the municipal school authority have social media policies. The edicts are only administrative, however, meaning the protocols apply to employees but not members of the Cape Coral City Council or the Charter School Authority, an oversight board appointed by Council on which Cosden sits as chair and liaison.
The city’s social media policy was implemented in 2010 and contains provisions that are similar to those in Lee County’s more extensive Social Media Standard Operating Procedures manual, which was last updated in October.
The policies deal with such nuts-and-bolts items as site creation, administration, passwords and purpose. Cape Twitter and Facebook sites, for example, are intended to either provide a vehicle to either share time-sensitive information or promote or market the city. The policies also include posting parameters for staff and the public, as well as records retention requirements because in Florida, posts made to social media sites are public records.
For the Cape’s elected officials, though, much of the terrain is uncharted and direction is determined individually.
Opinions on page content range from the view that site content should be highly managed to an almost hands-off approach that welcomes critical comments as long as they stay issue-related.
Sawicki has, perhaps, the most managed Facebook page.
She said she views her mayoral page as more of a “fan page” where comments should be kept positive. To that end, while she does not delete comments, she will make negative posts invisible to those who visit the site. She also blocks those who don’t adhere to her positive-please posting policy.
“I ‘hide’ them; you can ‘hide’ them but I can see them as an administrator,” she said of posts, adding this is compliant with public records retention requirements.
As for “blocking” users, she is unapologetic for taking away posting privileges, especially from those she says have made ugly or profane personal attacks.
“That’s uncharted territory,” Sawicki said of blocking users. “(City Attorney Dolores) Menendez says that the laws have not caught up with that yet.”
Sawicki said she initially just hid the comments she found inappropriate but that people just continued to post or re-post.
“I hid them, but I didn’t block people,” she said. “I didn’t, but some of the comments where so hateful. I do block and I knew it would make some people mad.”
One of the residents who disagrees with the blocking policy, the subject of its own controversy, is Jennifer Smolarz.
A resident since April of 2009, Smolarz says she watches the meetings on her iPhone since she can’t attend. She likes to provide input and was doing that by posting comments to the mayor’s Facebook page. While she says she kept to the issues, never made a personal attack or was profane, Smolarz found herself banned about three weeks ago for disagreeing on an issue.
“I didn’t say anything bad,” she said. “I didn’t use any bad language. It just was not her view. That’s censorship.”
Smolarz said residents who go to the mayor’s official Facebook page should be able to express different opinions.
“I think everyone has the right to see both sides of view. That’s what can get us to grow as a city,” she said, adding she finds it ironic that the mayor “hides” posts and blocks those with divergent views while saying she believes in transparency.
Leon, who the mayor threatened last week with a defamation lawsuit if he continued posting comments about her on Facebook, is at the other end of the comments spectrum.
“As an official, it’s input from anybody, it’s our job,” he said. “I’ll take the input, I’ll take the criticism.”
He does not typically “hide” comments although he deleted a thread where he called a poster a name and almost immediately regretted it.
“I hit ‘send’ and ‘delete’ right away,” Leon said. “I took screen shots for public record purposes.”
He has blocked posters who he believes cross the line, but only temporarily. Leon said no one has been permanently blocked.
While the requirements on record retention are clear, there is neither case law nor an Attorney General Opinion on the issue of “blocking” citizens who want to post, according to Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation, a free speech, free press, open government advocacy group.
That may change.
Multiple media sources reported in October that Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine was sued by a county resident and activist who was blocked from the mayor’s Facebook and Twitter sites for making critical comments. Grant Stern wants, among other records, Levine’s “block list,” which the suit maintains is also a public record.
Erbrick and Cosden, criticized by Sawicki for Facebook “likes” and posts respectively, also maintain professional, or city, Facebook pages.
Interviewed individually, each said they do not delete posts, critical or not.
“I’m always thinking, what if, what if, what if,” Erbrick said of record retention. In all likelihood, the poster has probably already screen-captured the post to share if it can’t be viewed on the page, she added.
Councilmember Jim Burch has a different view on social media.
While he has a Facebook page that he created when he ran for his seat, he has rarely used it since he was elected – and when he does, he does not use it for city business.
“If you hang around it long enough, based on the laws of our state, you’re going to get in trouble,” Burch said of social media. “I’m not prepared to do that.”
He’s also not prepared to enter the fray.
“It’s not a place to conduct a war of words,” Burch said. “It was never intended for that.”
As to the possible pitfalls, not only do state Government-in-the-Sunshine laws dictate record retention requirements, an Attorney General Opinion warns that social media use could require public meeting notification if it appears city business is being conducted by two or more members of the same board.
The city of Cape Coral believes it has the public records portion of the challenge in hand.
The city has been working with a vendor to assure posts are retained and has had ArchiveSocial perform testing, according to city spokesperson Connie Barron.
“We’ve been testing for a few months now,” she said.
Once up and running, all city sites and pages that use a city email would then be automatically archived without any action needed on the part of the person managing the page, Barron said.