Councillors don’t run to represent the rage lobby – why waste time on Twitter?

Just over a year ago, the Twitter account ‘Best of Nextdoor’ – a comedic account dedicated to posting screenshots of the most outrageous posts and interactions on the neighbourhood social media platform Nextdoor – shared a post from a community in California: “Has it ever occurred to any of you that NextDoor is a Russian propaganda tool created to tear neighbourhoods apart?”.

It’s a great piece of satire highlighting the bizarre reality of online culture: hyperlocal social media – whether that be Nextdoor, Facebook, WhatsApp or even Twitter – are some of the most toxic spaces on the internet. Which raises the question: why are you there?

It has been a working assumption for almost a decade that social media is an essential tool for councillors to win votes and connect with constituents. But when we put this under a microscope, it begins to fall apart.

Firstly, it’s worth looking at whether there is evidence that political persuasion on social media works. In the hype surrounding the Cambridge Analytica scandal, much was made about how their persuasion campaign may have won the election for President Trump – but not many folks remember that their first gig was on the failed primary campaign of Senator Ted Cruz.

In 2017, a ‘massive study’ was conducted in the US into whether traditional campaigning ‘works’, and the results were surprisingly bad. The researchers commented that to have an effect “campaigns need to think outside the box” – so it’s worth councillors keeping this in mind when peers anxiously claim that you need to be spending more time tweeting or you’ll lose your ward.

As a party dedicated to helping the most vulnerable in society, social media can be a toxic distraction for Labour councillors. Data from 2020 shows that the most insecure socioeconomic demographic is the least likely to use social media, which creates the danger of ‘Disengaged Battlers’ – as they’re referred to by UK think tank More in Common – being left out of key conversations, which frame local issues for councillors.

Combine this with the fact that social media’s algorithms are designed to seal us in echo chambers full of hyper-engaged, similar individuals, and you end up with councillors having their thinking disproportionately influenced by more affluent voices. These reactionary voices are the most powerful and undemocratic lobby in local politics – the rage lobby.

The behavioural science phenomenon of social proof – the idea that we are influenced by what people around us say and do – means that this rage lobby can place disproportionate pressure on local democracy as councillors over-estimate how many people in their community hold reactionary views on, say, the development of social housing or bike lanes. This is bad policy and politics: it might be scaring us out of taking necessary action on homelessness and climate change, and it might leave us out of step with what the broader electorate believes.

“‘Skew’ isn’t a strong enough word,” a Labour councillor tells me. “There are a handful of angry people on social media who are framing how we see tough decisions. You regularly hear colleagues say, ‘Oh Twitter is going to hate that’. People are really tired of the abuse so naturally they subconsciously try to avoid triggering more.”

Social media rewards content that generates engagement by promoting it to the top of users’ timelines. Put another way, social media rewards extreme, terse and uncompromising language. Our brains reward engagement too: every like and retweet gives us a hit of dopamine, and so the incentives of Twitter lead us all down a dark road where people no longer discuss ideas, they just shout past each other.

The same councillor described their experience of the 2021 Senedd election campaign: “It was a surreal experience going door-knocking for the first time post-Covid. We’d just spent a year getting shouted at by residents on social media and were all really anxious about door-knocking. But then when we went on our first round, it was like we were in a different ward – nine out of ten people were happy to see us.”

At its best, social media can help frame local issues for journalists, provide a platform to communicate local achievements and campaign on local issues. But when it so often is used for local mudslinging, it’s probably time for us to reconsider our relationship with it.

Fundamentally, this is about seeing time and energy as a social justice issue. Social media, with its toxicity and the subsequent mental health effects on users receiving large amounts of criticism, wastes energy. It’s energy that produces toxicity and advertising revenue for social media giants while distorting our thinking away from the issues that matter. You don’t have to quit, but if you want to be the best advocate for your community you might have to set some boundaries.

Remember that social media isn’t real life. Don’t engage with trolling and misinformation. Take a break and get back to your community. You didn’t run for local office to represent the rage lobby – so why waste your energy on them?

If you want to say hi, you won’t find me on Twitter, but I am on LinkedIn, where people tend to be a little nicer.