Victoria mayor deletes Facebook account, says it’s not a place of healthy discourse

The mayor of British Columbia’s capital says she’s deleting Facebook because it’s no longer a space for healthy dialogue.

Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps, who has actively engaged with constituents online since she was elected in 2014, said she deleted her Facebook account on Friday.

“There’s example after example after example where I’ll post something like, ‘new fire hall,’ or ‘this amazing community event is happening.’ And five comments in, it starts to become about something completely other than what the actual post is about and people yelling at each other on my page.”

Helps said the anger she sees online seems to be bleeding into wider arenas. At a recent town hall meeting, a man yelled at a city staff member until the staff member broke down, Helps said. Although she doesn’t know if the man uses Facebook, she said it seemed representative of a larger erosion of civil discourse.

“I think Facebook legitimizes that kind of behaviour. Facebook rewards anger and outrage. The more anger and outrage you express, the more shares you’re going to get,” Helps said.

Constituents can continue to contact her by email, cellphone, text, office line, Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, at community drop-in sessions and more, she said.

Chris Cochrane, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto who specializes in political disagreement, said he isn’t surprised by Helps’ move.

“Why do these platforms seem to fail so spectacularly for civil disagreement? The best hypothesis I can come up with is there’s something fundamentally dehumanizing about disagreeing in a setting where you don’t interact with a person, you don’t actually see them face to face,” Cochrane said.

Political disagreement generally lends itself to tribalism and that’s more pronounced on social media platforms, which can act as echo chambers of opinion, he said.

“When you meet someone in an interpersonal interaction and you’re actually speaking with them, you see them right in front of you as a human being. You may immediately recognize certain similarities between them and yourself,” Cochrane said.

“But on social media ... It’s you trying to motivate and follow your tribe or your group and you’re against these other tribes and other groups.”