B.C. mayors go Facebook-free to preserve mental health, find better ways to connect with their community

A pair of B.C. mayors have given up using Facebook for the month of February in an effort to preserve their mental health and to find better ways of communicating with their community.

Merlin Blackwell of Clearwater and Ange Qualizza of Fernie, both in B.C.'s Interior, challenged each other to get off social media after realizing they were spending too much time reading angry comments that weren't helping them do their job.

"I think it was over-amplifying a small group of people in our community," Qualizza said.

Qualizza and Blackwell spoke to Daybreak Kamloops host Shelley Joyce about what they are learning from a Facebook-free February and whether they'll return to the social media site.

What made you decide to take a month off from Facebook?

Blackwell: Well, you know, the world's kind of crazy these days and I kind of felt like I was spiraling down in a sort of cycle of bad information, I think, or just, you know, the heaviness of the world. So, I felt that social media was one reason why that was happening. So you start looking for solutions to this.

Qualizza: I'd like to add to the fact that I think it was over-amplifying a small group of people in our community, as it tends to do.

And as mayors we're elected to represent the entire community, the people that aren't on social media and don't have those ways of yelling at city hall.

And it just really reminded me that I might be allowing myself to be unduly influenced by a small group of people because, almost always, the Facebook outreach never translates into phone calls to my office, they don't send emails for inquiry or requests for service. 

And so I started becoming worried that I was kind of getting unduly influenced. 

Can you explain how you were using it?

Blackwell: It's common knowledge around Clearwater that I use Facebook as a communication method, and I have for a long time, you know, [to] be part of the daily conversation about things.

It's great. I mean, you solve a lot of problems. We get a lot of misconceptions dealt with before they snowball, like they do on social media, into something much bigger than they need to be.

But it also gives people a sense that they can access the mayor, or the mayor's decision-making processes, the town's decision making process, in a way that they actually can't. I still follow internal processes.