A new policy barring Facebook comments has been suggested for the Town of Hurley. The proposed legislation has been touted by town councilmember Tim Kelly as a way to protect the town from legal liability. But the town’s information officer and the town supervisor see his proposal as a form of censorship.
“Disabling comments on our Facebook posts is a tacit way of telling our residents that what the town says goes, and we don’t care what they think,” argued public information officer Jeremy Schiffres in the Public-Be-Heard portion of the March 26 meeting of the town board. “This sends an awful message, and despite the position of those who might support this resolution, or what they might have been told incorrectly, we are not legally liable for comments made on our posts by other people.”
Kelly said the resolution he had sponsored had come out of sessions held by the state Association of Towns, which recommended that towns disable comments because of liability issues.
Later in the meeting, town supervisor Mike Boms joined Schiffres in opposition to the resolution.
“I think it’s it is a form of censorship. I have spoken to Jeremy, and he’s decided that if he has to make a comment or to clarify something on a post, he will talk to me about it and get my approval and go from there,” Boms said. “I think it’s a necessary thing for us to hear comments from the people on this Facebook page.”
Boms said comments could be turned off.
All I did was provide a link
Kelly had initially tried to cut Schiffres off because the latter’s allotted two minutes during Public Be Heard had expired, but Schiffres continued, saying he gave a lot of extra hours to the town and was asking for an extra minute.
“This appears to be aimed me because the member who wrote tonight’s resolution is for reasons I do not understand upset that I shared a link from our website in a Facebook comment thread,” said Schiffres. “I did this merely to set the record straight amid rampant misinformation about the property reassessment process in Hurley, and again, all I did was provide a link to information that has already been posted on our website.”
As the administrator of the Facebook page, Schiffres added, he had the ability to hide or delete comments deemed to be improper, and in extreme cases to block users from posting.
Schiffres said he had checked official Facebook pages of 30 other communities, 19 in the Hudson Valley. Only three disabled comments.
“Also allowing comments, by the way, are the official pages of the New York State governor’s office, all New York State departments, including police and corrections, and the New York State Bar Association,” Schiffres said.
A lot of potshots
Kelly was unconvinced. “As many people have seen, people can be a lot less than decent in these in these social-media forums. When the town actually creates a post, that is an official government communication,” Kelly said.
“That’s subject to FOIL [Freedom of Information Legislation], so removing or deleting or hiding comments is technically censorship of free speech,” Kelly explained. “So we’re actually protecting free speech by disabling the comments, because there are many other forums such as emailing the town board as a whole, calling town hall and coming to public-comment periods,” Kelly said. “There’s many other forums, and Facebook tends to be where people take a lot of potshots.”
Kelly said the City of Kingston had done as he has advocated on its police department page and city pages.
Facebook’s in your living room
“I like the comments, to be honest with you,” Boms argued. “I like hearing what you have to say. Because a lot of times it’s very difficult for you to come to town hall or write an email. Facebook is right in your living room, more or less.”
Kelly responded that he didn’t want the comments to spiral out of control.
“I just really don’t want somebody’s 14-year-old saying ‘Oh, Mommy, I’m checking the town website for this type of information’, and there’s somebody having a diatribe in the comments,” said Kelly.
Schiffres said that scenario hadn’t occurred during the 15 months he has handled the Hurley Facebook page.
“What you’ve got here is a solution in search of a problem. And what I mean by that is not to insult you, but to tell you that as the administrator of the Hurley Facebook page, I can tell you, the comments are few … few and far between,” Schiffres said. “In the 15 months I’ve been doing this, I have run into exactly one comment, one that I deemed so offensive that it needed to be removed, not because it was necessarily libelous or slanderous. It was vulgar, and it just needed to go. And that’s part of the reason you have me here is to monitor, for lack of a better word, to police this page.
Kelly said that the removal of individual comments rather than disabling a class of comments was more likely to run afoul of First-Amendment rights. Applying a rule to all citizens equally was more defensible than deciding to limit the speech of one person for “some sort of a vulgar or inappropriate comment on the page.” Kelly said.
Town attorney Matt Jankowski recommended tabling the resolution for review. The town board agreed.
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