The Mayor who lost his Meta

Last week, the mayor of Tieschen, a village in Austria, posted a note on Facebook comparing Donald Trump to the German AfD party. By his own account, it was polite and contained no swearing. Just another political pamphlet.

The next day, an email from Meta notified him that his account was suspended. The email featured a button to lodge an appeal, so he clicked it. An hour later his account was permanently deactivated anyway. All three Meta apps he was using: Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook – gone.

Why? Nobody knows. His lawyer has filed a complaint; he’s weighing an injunction; who knows what will happen?

But here’s the reason I’m writing about this. He was using Facebook and Instagram as the main channels for communicating municipal information to residents. He was using WhatsApp to coordinate with staff. A moderation decision at Meta, probably an automated one at that, killed his administration’s communication channels, and appealing was about as useful as arguing with a vending machine.

The fix isn’t glamorous: elected officials (and most businesses, really) should be communicating via channels they own and control: a website, a mailing list, something like that.

That doesn’t mean giving up on social media. It just means you publish on your own platform first, then syndicate out to Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFace, whatever… When one of those accounts dies, and it will happen, you just lose some reach, not your whole ability to communicate. In nerd talk, that’s called POSSE.

And yes, it’s also another digital sovereignty story. The opaque rules of some company in California were applied to the communications of a small Austrian municipality. You shouldn’t rent your relationship with your own citizens.

Colin

PS: The source (in German)