Consider two Marblehead residents walking into Town Meeting.
One has spent the past several months following a local elected official’s detailed dispatches in a private Facebook group — long, passionate posts about the budget, the proposed override, increased fees and what’s going on behind the scenes. The other doesn’t use Facebook and has no idea those posts exist.
Both residents will cast votes that impact the town. One of them recognizes some of the names, has followed some of the arguments and thinks they know which way the wind blows. The other has been spared the noise. Both have been living their lives — down the street from each other, but in different worlds.
A recent post about town finances in one of Marblehead’s largest community Facebook groups drew 37 comments. The group has roughly 4,100 members in a town of 20,000. The post was detailed, passionate and named elected officials — grading their performance, challenging their motives and calling on them to respond publicly. Some of the officials may not have seen it. Many of their constituents probably didn’t either. Too often, this is what civic discourse has come to look like.
When residents get their local information primarily from Facebook groups, Instagram posts or neighborhood apps like Nextdoor, they’re mostly getting someone’s interpretation of events, with no editorial filter, no obligation to present competing views and no mechanism for correction except another opinion.
These are good neighbors with good intentions — nobody’s trying to mislead anyone. But caring deeply about something and reporting it accurately are different skills, governed by different standards. A passionate post about a school budget decision is not the same as a story that sought comment from the School Committee, verified the numbers and presented the range of perspectives in play.
One is an opinion shared among friends. The other is journalism. When journalism is absent, opinion fills the space — and the packaging looks identical. The Marblehead Current aims, as it noted in this space last week, “not to advocate but to inform” — a distinction that is increasingly important.
The voices that dominate online conversation are often the most motivated — which can make them the loudest, or at least the most persistent. As Desmond Tutu suggested, raising your voice and improving your argument are not the same thing.
Elected officials posting lengthy updates about town business may be sincere — but that doesn’t mean it’s fair and balanced. There’s nothing wrong with posting — the First Amendment is not the issue. The issue is mistaking it for transparency. A post that reaches a fraction of registered voters isn’t transparent. It’s visible — to some.
The feedback loop isn’t really a loop. People who disagree are less likely to be in the group to begin with — and less likely to comment publicly even if they are. What an official sees in the comments isn’t the town’s response. It’s the response of whoever the algorithm decided to show it to and who felt the urge to comment.
It runs the other way, too. A resident reading a passionate post from an elected official may (reasonably) assume it represents the official position of the town — even when it doesn’t, and even when the official says so. The post may feel authoritative, but it isn’t.
Residents arrive at Town Meeting with (potentially wildly) different versions of many of the issues — some steeped in weeks of online debate, some having caught a headline or two, some coming in cold. Increasingly, the ones coming in cold aren’t disengaged. They are people who looked at social media and made a deliberate choice to step back. They read. They talk to neighbors. They show up. They just didn’t get some of the memos — because the memos were posted in a Facebook group.
The people most embedded in online conversation have enormous informal power over how issues get framed — which concerns feel urgent, which officials seem trustworthy, which proposals seem reasonable before they ever reach a public meeting. In aggregate, a self-selected group of digitally engaged residents has quietly become a de facto editorial board of local public opinion, without accountability, without editorial standards and without any obligation to reach the people who aren’t in the room. This is what can happen when shared information infrastructure erodes and social media moves in to fill the space.
Social media has real value in the speed and reach it offers — connecting people, spreading urgent information and helping communities form, mobilize and stay in touch. But it was never built to function as a civic information system. We have those — government websites, official meeting minutes, public notices, and yes, newspapers like the Marblehead Current. They don’t get to choose their audience. They serve the town — all of it. In a spring when Town Meeting may take up one of the most consequential fiscal votes in recent memory, that’s not a small thing.
The digital divides in Marblehead are real. But they are not insurmountable. If you live online, remember there’s more out there than your feed reflects. If you’ve stepped back from all of it, your voice belongs in this conversation as much as anyone’s. And if you’re somewhere in the middle, unsure what to make of any of it — that’s probably how most of us feel anyway.
Talk to a neighbor. Show up to a meeting. The conversations that matter most still happen in person. Staying informed about your own town shouldn’t require a Facebook account. It shouldn’t require knowing which group to join or which official to follow.
It should require nothing more than living here.
