Committee defeats motion to get City of Ottawa off Elon Musk’s X

The opening page of X is displayed on a computer and phone, Oct. 16, 2023, in Sydney. (Rick Rycroft / AP Photo, File)

A motion at the City of Ottawa’s Finance and Corporate Services Committee that would lead to the city suspending its accounts on X, formerly Twitter, failed to pass after a lengthy debate.

Orléans West-Innes Coun. Laura Dudas moved a motion that called on city staff to develop a plan to cease posting on the X platform and migrate to alternative platforms, and to consider a “made in Ottawa” alternative, should one prove viable.

It failed by a vote of five yeas to seven nays, with Dudas and couns. Glen Gower, Rawlson King, Jeff Leiper, and Shawn Menard voting in favour. Mayor Mark Sutcliffe and couns. Matt Luloff, Cathy Curry, Tim Tierney, Riley Brockington, David Brown, and Catherine Kitts voted against the motion.

Prior to the vote, Dudas said this was a chance for the nation’s capital to show leadership at a time when Canada is being threatened by the United States.

“I can’t think of a better day than today for us to be discussing whether or not Ottawa stays on X and whether we should be suspending our accounts as Trump’s tariffs aim to sucker punch our economy, as rhetoric from the U.S. becomes increasingly alarming. Now is the perfect time to decide what role we, as the nation’s capital, can play in demonstrating Canadian unity and strength,” she said.

The debate came on the day 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian exports to the U.S. were imposed and as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was addressing the nation on Canada’s countermeasures.

Dudas pointed to other municipalities such as Cambridge, Ont. and North Vancouver, as well as the Supreme Court of Canada, that chose to suspend their X accounts.

“If we leave, we’re in good company,” she said.

The Elon Musk connection

At issue was the ownership of X, by Elon Musk, and the rhetoric that has become increasingly prevalent on the platform. Musk has insinuated himself within the Trump administration, which has been increasingly aggressive towards Canada, with tariffs and repeated comments about annexing the country as the “51st state.” Two public delegations spoke specifically about Musk as they urged councillors to support the motion, each referring to him as a Nazi, comments which drew rebuke from Luloff, who strongly objected to the comparison.

“Calling people who don’t agree with you a Nazi collaborator is ridiculous and debases this place,” he said. “Calling people Nazis or collaborators in such a flippant manner, as we heard today, diminishes the evil and the reprehensible deeds done by actual Nazis, and shame on people for doing so.”

Luloff still referred to Twitter as “an unproductive cesspool.”

Councillors who spoke in favour of the motion pointed not only to harmful rhetoric that is perpetuated on X, but also to what values the City of Ottawa wants to represent and whether its presence on the platform reflects upon those values.

“X and other social networks are the demonstration of the manifestation of Marshall McLuhan’s famous maxim that the medium is the message and every politician in Canada has come to know what that message is: gaslighting, trolling, destabilizing,” said Leiper. “By destroying community bonds, the broligarchs are working to reduce us to isolated consumers in the service of their enrichment.”

“There’s a real battle going on right now for values in society,” said Menard. “And those core values are being challenged, as we’re seeing right now in the United States… and part of that is the bots, the hateful rhetoric that is being espoused on some platforms and this is certainly one of them.”

Menard pointed out that X is no longer as widely accessible to members of the public who do not have accounts as Twitter once was. If you are not logged in to X, you cannot see a chronological feed of any particular account, and you are limited in many other ways in terms of visibility and search. He also noted that he believes engagement on the platform has diminished over the years and questioned how many of the nearly 263,000 followers on the city’s English language account were residents of Ottawa or real people and not bots.

King said his support of the motion was not about limiting reach, but about the values the city possesses, saying X is a space where misinformation, disinformation, and racism flourish unchecked.

“It’s about ensuring that our communications take place in spaces that better reflect our values and serve our residents effectively. That’s why I think it is important for us to review this,” he said. “I think this motion represents a principled step forward, guided by our commitment to responsible government and meaningful civic engagement… and that’s harder to do with platforms such as Twitter.”

Coun. Laine Johnson, who did not have a vote at committee but spoke to the motion, said the city had a moral imperative to consider the question about its social media presence and how it chooses to disseminate information.

“I don’t want to ask a resident to wade into what they feel is an unsafe, toxic, tech environment in order to have a relationship with the city. I think that’s an unfair ask,” she said.

Goal is to reach as many as possible, say staff

Staff said the city’s communications goal is to reach as many residents as possible through its social media channels and other methods of communication. The time and resources it takes to use a particular platform are also factored into decisions about which platforms are used.

The city has active accounts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube, where it shares information, but its X account has the highest following. Last week, it began posting to Bluesky. Residents can also sign up for email alerts.

Councillors opposed to the motion said they did not agree with council deciding which platforms to favour and said that harmful rhetoric can be found across many platforms online.

“It’s always been loaded with trolls. I don’t know where magically people think it suddenly happened out of the blue. They’ve always existed there,” said Tierney.

Tierney continued to say that choosing which platforms to use based on the politics of the ownership is a “slippery slope” for the city.

“To run services like this, they’ve got to be battle-tested, they’ve got to be simple to use, and they’ve got to be effective in communications. That’s what you get with the (Twitter founder) Jack Dorsey program that was built and was acquired by someone we might not like. Do people like Galen Weston? Let’s stop purchasing anything from Loblaws immediately. It’s a very slippery slope.”

Brockington said the city’s X platform is the most popular platform the city has used, in terms of its following.

“The question comes down to, do you want people to make their own decisions in life about which social media platforms to use—the City of Ottawa uses multiple venues—or do you not like the politics and position that the owner of X is taking, that would move us away from this platform?” he said. “Some people have argued we would be complicit in staying with X, some people have labelled it as some pretty egregious terms.”

Brockington compared disagreeable posts on X to disagreeable columns or articles in newspapers and said while he might not always agree with them, he defends their right to publish.

Sutcliffe commended what he called a healthy discussion with strong arguments on all sides but ultimately voted against the motion as it was written.

“I understand what’s driving the mover of the motion and the people who support it and I understand the concerns that people who are not so supportive of the motion might have as well,” he said. “In this age of social media, we are probably going to be faced with this discussion frequently. In six months, we might be talking about Facebook, or we might be talking about a different social media platform.”

Sutcliffe said the city should have a clear social media policy that articulates the criteria that determine which platforms the city uses, rather than councillors deciding one platform at a time.

“We can get into debating how effective it is to be on X or not. If we’re discussing it at a practical level, then it’s not our decision, it’s a staff decision. If we’re debating it at a level of principle about where we should be and what criteria we should be using, then it is our decision,” he said.

Sutcliffe said he would not rule out supporting a potential future motion that aims to lay out a more robust social media policy, but said he would not support Dudas’s motion.

Made in Ottawa

While the motion did not pass, Dudas did say she has heard from some groups who reached out to her about “made in Ottawa” options for the city to consider, though she did not elaborate.

“My intent is to spark conversation, and I think we had that today,” she said. “Staff had mentioned there’s no perfect solution right now. There’s nothing that quite performs the way X does in terms of disseminating information. So, I wanted to challenge our community… We have such an intelligent population. I wanted to put out there that if there is a made in Ottawa solution, we should contemplate that. In the two-and-a-half weeks since this first came up, I’ve had four different groups reach out to me—viable options that I’m going to be sharing with city staff. It doesn’t mean that it’s going to be the solution we’re looking for, but it does mean there is innovation out there.”