X-iting: Local Governments Are Stepping Away from Musk’s Platform

In February, the Fraser Valley Regional District changed the way it posts information on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

“In February 2025, the account limited the content posted due to repeated instances of the platform being unreliable,” reads a staff report for a coming district meeting.

“From March 2025 to now, the account has only published automatic Alertable posts and reshared posts from relevant government partners.”

But that didn’t stop the problems with X.

The district’s Alertable posts — a third-party service that local governments use to send out important emergency information — started to get hit with spam responses.

Bot accounts on X were referencing the emergency in the posts “to appear credible and mislead users,” leading to a situation where residents “may be unsure whether the comments are genuine or spam,” district staff reported.

They recommended that the Fraser Valley Regional District stop using X altogether — a move already made by several other municipalities and local government bodies in B.C.

“We don't have a massive communications budget, so we need to try to get the most bang for our buck and try to see where is the best place to put our resources,” said Patricia Ross, an Abbotsford city councillor and chair of the regional district board.

“And staff have discovered that there are a lot of people removing themselves from Twitter or X. So where is our audience and where is our money best spent?”

The regional district, which serves six municipalities and 325,000 residents from Abbotsford to Hope, is just one local government struggling with changes to X and a fragmented social media environment. The board will vote on the staff recommendation later this month.

X went through dramatic changes following tech CEO Elon Musk’s purchase of the company in 2022. Since that time, Musk has cut content moderation staff, restored previously banned accounts and used his own 225-million-follower account to amplify conspiracy theories and far-right talking points and interact with white supremacist accounts. Musk was a key promoter and funder of U.S. President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.

Following Musk’s purchase of Twitter, longtime users reported experiencing more harassment and toxicity.

Following Trump’s win in November 2024, there was a mass exodus of users from X to the alternative platforms Bluesky and Threads. The Guardian reported that by Dec. 16, X had lost 2.7 million active users, about 8.4 per cent of its base, while Bluesky — a Twitter-like competitor — had gained 2.5 million.

The X brand in Canada was further tarnished when Musk was filmed giving two Nazi salutes during a speech at Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20. On Feb. 24 he posted that “Canada is not a real country” during a period when Trump was repeatedly threatening to annex Canada.

Some Canadian municipalities have specifically cited the political environment as a reason to leave X. When the B.C. city of Mission voted to leave the platform, Mayor Paul Horn said his vote had been swayed by one councillor’s succinct argument: “I’m a proud Canadian, and the owner of X says Canada is not a real country.”

Other local governments have said that concerns about both hatred on the platform and declining engagement on X led to the decision to leave.

“Although the account had over 13,600 followers, engagement had decreased dramatically over the last few years. There had been a considerable decline in interactions with and views of our content,” Ryan Schaap, a communications staffer for the District of North Vancouver, told The Tyee in an email. The district decided to deactivate its official X account in January.

“Following the deactivation, we received some complaints from residents who disagreed with the decision, but we also received significant support from those who felt it was right thing to do.”

Speaking to CBC in January, the chief administrative officer of the District of North Vancouver said he’d heard complaints from residents about the platform being “bigoted” and “homophobic.”

(The Tyee left X in February — you can read our explanation here.)

Bypassing social media to communicate with residents

Kevin Skrepnek is currently the manager of community and emergency services for the Thompson-Nicola Regional District; he was previously the chief fire information officer for the BC Wildfire Service.

Skrepnek said the Thompson-Nicola Regional District still uses X, but only for broadcasting emergency information, not for responding to questions or complaints.

“That's because we don't see a lot of engagement there,” he told The Tyee, adding that getting information out to news media and other agencies still using X is one of the key reasons the district posts about emergency situations on the platform.

“In terms of us actually trying to reach our residents, we are focusing more on Facebook and Bluesky.”

Skrepnek pointed out that local news media in B.C. have been shrinking. Some towns have lost community newspapers or have seen staff at those papers shrink dramatically.

“It's also just, unfortunately, the state of the media industry — there are just fewer reputable sources out there,” Skrepnek said. “I live in Kamloops, a town of 100,000 people, and we don't even have a newspaper anymore.” (The community is served by the Kamloops Chronicle, which publishes a monthly print edition, but has lost both daily and weekly newspapers.)

Since 2023, Facebook and Instagram have prevented news media from displaying content to followers and deactivated links to Canadian news stories. The parent company, Meta, was responding to a Canadian law requiring social media companies to pay news producers for their content.

Skrepnek said that makes it more difficult for residents to find and share vetted information about emergency situations like wildfires, and makes the spread of misinformation harder to stop. At the same time, mistrust in government has been growing.

Skrepnek and Ross said they increasingly see municipalities having more success by reaching residents directly instead of relying on social media.

Ross said Abbotsford has started an effort to provide bite-sized information about council meetings and upcoming votes through a newsletter and blog called “Your Council in the Community,” which residents can receive by email. She said the Fraser Valley Regional District’s “Have Your Say” page, which includes short posts about district initiatives with surveys residents can fill out, has also been successful.

Skrepnek said the Village of Cache Creek has also had success with reaching residents directly through the Voyent app. Like the Alertable service that Fraser Valley Regional District uses, Voyent is a third-party app that municipalities can use to send information directly to residents’ cellphones if they sign up to receive alerts.

(The province also uses an emergency notification cellphone system for police Amber Alerts, “dangerous persons” events and other civil emergencies, earthquakes, tsunamis, high-risk flood and fire evacuations and severe weather warnings.)

Cache Creek has been hit by a series of devastating floods and wildfires over the past decade. During the last serious flood in 2023, Skrepnek said, the village was using the app every day to get information directly to residents.

“They can send out an alert that's pretty alarming and makes a loud noise — your phone goes crazy to get your attention,” Skrepnek said.

“They can also send out alerts that are more informational, where it's just like any other push notification to your phone. They were basically using that as their communications channel, instead of trying to do social media or put out press releases.”

When it comes to local governments trying to decide how best to use their communications budget, Skrepnek said his team has had success recently using a very targeted approach on social media. He said his staff will find small community groups on Facebook and ask the administrator if they can join the group or be allowed to share information — a tactic that’s been especially effective for small rural communities.

“Geographically we're huge and we have lots of rural communities,” Skrepnek said. “In almost every one of those communities, most people are talking to each other on a little Facebook group.”