Two Perth councils have narrowly voted to make public whether their elected members or families are involved in running community social media pages in a move labelled as both a win for transparency and an “atrocious breach of privacy”.
At separate meetings on Tuesday night, the Town of Cambridge and City of Bayswater both passed near-identical motions to implement a “social media interest register”, where elected members will have to admit any online community pages they or their family are behind.
Bayswater Cr Elli Petersen-Pik devised the proposal, which was also put forward at Cambridge by Cr Xavier Carr, for councils to publish a register on their websites.
Cr Petersen-Pik said the register aimed to “improve transparency and discourage inappropriate usage of community and social media platforms for political purposes” after complaints from Bayswater locals over councillors running community pages.
Elected members would be “required to disclose whether they, or their spouse/partner, manage, administrate or moderate any community social media account”, such as a Facebook page or group that is “relevant” to each council.
The Cambridge council went further to specify the register should include former spouses and immediate family members such as parents, children and siblings.
The Cambridge council voted 5-4 to create a register, with mayor Keri Shannon, Cr Alaine Haddon-Casey, Cr Kate Barlow and Cr Jane Cutler opposing it.
Cr Carr listed Facebook groups Save the Town of Cambridge and the Truth About the Town of Cambridge as examples of groups elected members should declare their involvement in.
“This motion should give the community confidence that the behaviour we see in some Facebook groups is not a reflection of the councillors or the mayor sitting here or anyone closely associated with them,” he said.
“It removes all doubt in the community’s mind that councillors or other elected members are beholden to certain Facebook groups or play a role in running or administrating them.
“It gives the community confidence that this council is completely independent and will not bow down to echo chambers online.”
But Cr Haddon-Casey said revealing family members’ social media use was “a most atrocious breach of privacy” and there were already processes to report councillors to the town for spreading misinformation on social media.
“To expect me to expose the name of my relatives or my friends or my former spouses to me is absolutely outrageous. Where are we living? Are we still in Australia?” she said.
“This just smacks of totalitarianism to me.”
During public question time, Lee Katavatis asked whether it was correct Ms Shannon had “refused” to allow her to ask a question about her alleged involvement with the Facebook group Save the Town of Cambridge.
Speaking after the meeting, Ms Shannon said the preamble to Ms Katavatis’ question “adversely reflected on all councillors as it contained an unsubstantiated allegation”.
Among the questions seen by The West Australian, Ms Katavatis had wanted to ask was whether Ms Shannon or her husband were involved with the local Facebook page.
“For the record I personally have no involvement with the Facebook group Save Town of Cambridge,” she said.
“It is unrelated to Save Our City Beach Our Floreat which was run by a community member and was archived.”
Bayswater’s proposal was passed in a 6-5 vote and was backed by a petition signed by 90 residents.
Cr Petersen-Pik said it was a “milestone for transparency” and hoped other councils would adopt similar registers and the State Government would introduce legislation around elected members’ management of community social media pages.