The District of North Vancouver is shutting down its X (formerly Twitter) account.
As of 5 p.m. Wednesday, staff were deactivating @NVanDistrict, leaving behind more than 13,600 followers.
In an interview, district CAO David Stuart said he made the call to opt out of the social media network following a rise in complaints about the municipality’s use of the platform since Elon Musk purchased it, and a decline in the amount of engagement X was providing.
“Quite frankly, we’ve been looking at this for a while, so this isn’t anything to do with American politics or anything like that. We’ve been just looking at it and we’ve received quite a few comments and concerns … about whether or not we should continue to be engaged in this particular software platform,” he said. “There are homophobic comments. There are racist comments that are now allowed on that social site and they’re just inconsistent what I think are the community’s values and our organizational values.”
The district first became active on Twitter in 2009, using the profile to share everything from reminders to renew dog licences to road closure notices and emergency weather alerts.
But Stuart said the metrics showed fewer and fewer people engaging with the district via X, and the website was becoming more trouble than it was worth.
According to the district’s stats, the number of engagements in 2024 were down 59 per cent to 6,500. The number of impressions the district’s posts made were down 35 per cent to 533,000, and the number of times people were clicking on links the district posted were down 40 per cent to just 2,700.
“Those are pretty significant declines,” Stuart said.
Stuart acknowledged that leaving X would mean one less avenue for residents to communicate with the district, which is still active on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.
Because other social media networks like Facebook also face criticisms for fanning the spread of misinformation, polarizing algorithms and censorship, Stuart said he’s ordered staff to review their use of all social media platforms going forward.
“But [X] is the one that was most egregious,” he said. “There’s lots of tools that are out there. We’ll continue to explore opportunities to make sure that residents have every opportunity to communicate with us, but we’re just deciding not to continue this particular association.”
For now, the District of North Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services account @DNVFRS remains active, but they too will have to transition to a new platform sometime in the future, according to district staff.
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