The City of Richmond won't be leaving the social media platform X just yet, but they will monitor how posting more on another platform goes.
Coun. Laura Gillanders originally brought forward a motion to get the city off the platform, owned by Elon Musk, but she altered it to have the city analyze X engagement in Richmond, increase posting on Bluesky to the same level as X and report back on progress.
The city currently has almost 900 followers on Bluesky and more than 10,500 on X.
At Monday’s committee meeting, a Richmond software engineer, Will Wang, told council he’s deeply concerned about the city considering leaving X.
“It’s not just a matter of platform preference,” he said. “It’s a question of government transparency, accessibility and responsibility of public institutions to engage with citizens where they are, not where officials’ preference prefers them to be.”
X is one of the largest social media platforms for “real time public discourse,” Wang added, and is still being used by many municipalities as well as the provincial government.
“If the goal is to increase engagement, why abandon a platform with a significantly larger audience in favour of one that is still in its early adoption phase?” Wang said.
Richmond resident Sheldon Starrett also told city council they should dismiss the motion.
“It is a little bit mind-boggling that a city council wants to cut the lines of communication in one area where the city can communicate with the public,” Starrett said.
Richmond’s director of communications Clay Adams said the city has started posting on Bluesky, but he called it a “slow-moving platform,” and noted it has some administrative difficulties such as not allowing the scheduling of posts.
Furthermore, it doesn’t have a lot of growth, he added.
Adams said every platform has a different focus; for example, X is more focused on news. The city is looking at new platforms such as WeChat to communicate.
Adams also noted “another Lower Mainland municipality” left X recently and went from about 13,500 followers to fewer than 100.
“It’s struggling to get its audience back and I think it points to the issue that it’s not simply a matter of going from one platform to another. It takes time to try and win that audience back,” he added.
The District of North Vancouver stopped posting on X in January.
At that point, they noted it was something they had been considering for a while.
According to North Vancouver’s stats, the number of engagements in 2024 were down 59 per cent to 6,500.
The number of impressions the district’s posts made were down 35 per cent to 533,000, and the number of times people were clicking on links the district posted were down 40 per cent to just 2,700.
Gillanders' motion passed with only Coun. Alexa Loo voting in opposition.
With files from Brent Richter/North Shore News
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