BRATTLEBORO-In Brattleboro, a significant amount of public discourse happens online. While social media can be a great tool for engagement, it also opens the door for something more subtle and more troubling.
A Town Meeting representative has been posting in local Facebook groups, asking questions that resemble formal outreach: What does the community think about this issue? Should the town consider doing that?
On the surface, it seems like an official request, made by a holder of elected office with invitations to contact a Town Meeting representative, a Selectboard member, or them.
But these posts aren't part of any official process - and there's no transparency about what will be done with the responses.
The information is being solicited from the population of the specific Facebook group, where there's no way of verifying that the people in the conversation live in our town and where it is possible for one person to have multiple accounts, effectively giving them more than one voice.
This "opinion gathering" often appears to be filtered through a pre-existing agenda. During the last election cycle, this same individual was outspoken and divisive, and I know that there are community members who either blocked them or chose to not engage with them.
I believe at one point the representative may have also blocked some members of the community - which, if that is the case, would mean that not everyone who might have wanted to reply could have accessed the question.
The result? The online discussions now have a skewed feedback loop, where most of the responses come from people who already agree because they are the majority who still engage with them, giving the illusion of a larger body of people who hold a specific belief than most likely do.
Yet the responses seem likely to be presented as evidence - ammunition to attempt to sway Selectboard decisions or dominate public conversations. When views don't align with the posters, the tone shifts. Comments turn judgmental, with statements like "In my opinion, your comment is short-sighted" or dismissals of differing views as uninformed. What began as "gathering input" often ends with an attempt to control the dialogue.
This is not representation.
It's fine - valuable, even - for residents to share their views online. But when those views are solicited under the guise of town engagement, and when disagreement is shut down or criticized, we should call it what it is: personal advocacy dressed up as a public process.
It also raises a larger question of fairness. When our town has already voted on an issue, it's not democratic to use selective online outreach to try to undermine that result. The people who showed up, voted, and followed the process shouldn't have less influence than those who further engage on Facebook. That's not how representative government is supposed to work.
If you have to manipulate the process to get your way, maybe your position isn't strong enough to stand on its own. In a time when trust in public institutions is fragile, misrepresenting informal online chatter as community input doesn't build trust - it breaks it.
Angela Earle Gray
Brattleboro
This letter to the editor was submitted to The Commons.
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