Where is the civility?

Vallejo Mayor, City Council Members and City Staff:

I have written before and thanked you all for your service that often remains thankless at best, and criticized and attacked at its worst.

We all have witnessed the loss of civility around the country at such a rapid pace and at such levels never before seen until Trump and the 2016 election and earlier campaign. It was never right or good, but Trump got away with his behavior until social media platforms were finally forced to act and revoke his privileges. The first few times it was temporary. Later it was indefinitely. And he still remains off of social media indefinitely to this day.

I personally don’t know the details inside of social media platforms surrounding such thresholds as to when these companies are forced to revoke account holder privileges.

But I continue to see posts online about our former officials and mayor (past and present) that are truly beyond the pale — some coming from professionals within the community that have influence.

Again, I don’t know the details behind what level of hateful messaging finally triggers these companies to revoke privileges, but I am hoping that someone at the city is tracking social media posts and keeping copies of these inflammatory and hateful posts with the purpose of one day making a complaint with several screenshots providing these offensive, hateful, inflammatory, and harassing posts.

Consider a tweet posted by Ms. Melissa Nold, attorney at law: “The punk ass mayor of Vallejo threatened to throw impacted families out of the city council meeting via police enforcement because there was grumbling in the audience. F--- that dude.”

This is just ridiculous and continues to escalate because these individuals feel they know the laws so well that they can exploit them and openly attack and harass all of you with zero consequences. They feel empowered to do whatever they possibly can to manipulate the outcome of elections in their favor. They even feel the power to shorten career tenures by despicable tactics and campaigns such as these. Hopefully there will be accountability at some point and consequences for these types of flagrant and open attacks of individuals, public or private, occurring on social media platforms.

— Ashley Epes/Vallejo