Why Your City's Facebook Comments Aren't Community Engagement (And What Actually Works)

Catherine Huckaby
2 days ago
6 min read

A city posts about a new park plan on Facebook. Within hours, 200 comments pile up. Some residents demand more parking. Others insist on dog parks. A few passionate voices dominate the thread, typing in all caps about what the neighborhood "NEEDS."

Meanwhile, the single mom working two jobs never sees the post. The elderly couple that doesn’t hang out online has no idea the conversation is happening. The Spanish-speaking family scrolls past because the whole thing is in English.

Six months later, the park opens. Half the neighborhood feels blindsided. "Nobody asked us," they say. The other half feels ignored. "We told you what we wanted," they counter.

This scene plays out in communities across America every single week. Our cities face a question that determines whether democracy works at the local level:

Do we solve problems by shouting louder through social media and packed public meetings, or do we invest in building stronger systems for genuine partnership?

The answer shapes everything from park designs to budget priorities to whose voice actually matters in your neighborhood.

When Shouting Becomes the Strategy

Social media changed civic engagement overnight. Suddenly, residents could speak directly to their mayor. Movements could organize in hours instead of months. Information spread faster than any newsletter or town hall could manage.

But here's what we've learned: the loudest voice in the room isn't always the most representative one.

When governments lean too heavily on social media for community input, several problems emerge. The platforms reward emotional reactions over thoughtful solutions. Busy officials struggle to separate constructive feedback from noise. Important voices get drowned out by whoever has the most time to post and argue.

Nonprofit CEO Ellen Young describes what real engagement requires:

"It's getting everyone together but not going in to be prescriptive. It is when we come in, listen first, and then say, 'Okay, my observations are this. Now, how do we keep you all connected?'"

Her words made me think about what's actually missing when we rely on shouting matches in comment sections. We're not just lacking better conversations. We're lacking the table itself.

Ellen uses a powerful metaphor: she sees her role as providing the table where everyone can sit down together, while community members bring their own contributions to share.

"You make the good dip, barbecue, and the salad—you're going to bring everything to our table, so everyone has a place to sit down and have a conversation."

That kind of accountability and connection is nearly impossible when feedback comes through a fire hose of Facebook comments, tweets, and Instagram stories scattered across a dozen threads.

The People Missing from the Conversation

Here's the uncomfortable truth: 65% of people believe community decisions get made by "the usual suspects." Less than 9% feel they receive public information on time. Nearly half report feeling little connection to where they live.

This isn't apathy. Its exhaustion mixed with exclusion.

The retired teacher who wants to weigh in on school safety can't make a 3 PM meeting. The restaurant worker finishing her shift at 11 PM misses the Facebook post entirely. The family navigating a recent move to a new city doesn't see themselves reflected in the neighborhood association that meets in a community center they've never entered. These aren't edge cases. They're your neighbors.

Their perspectives matter just as much as the retired engineer who attends every council meeting or the young professional who live-tweets city budget hearings.

When engagement happens primarily through social media or traditional public meetings, we hear from people with time, internet access, language fluency, and often economic stability. Everyone else? They're making decisions about your community without you.

What Building a Stronger Table Actually Means

Director of Corporate Relations Kathy Marcum, whose work centers on authentic collaboration, frames it this way:

"True collaboration isn't just working side-by-side. It's about creating an environment where everyone feels valued and heard."

That requires structure, not just sentiment.

Cities building stronger tables for engagement create formal systems that work proactively instead of reactively. They establish youth councils that give teenagers real say in decisions affecting them. They set up participatory budgeting where residents directly allocate portions of city funds. They create community advisory boards for specific populations who've been historically excluded from planning processes.

They also upgrade their communication toolkit. Instead of relying on social media algorithms to determine who sees important information, they use dedicated digital engagement platforms that provide context, moderate discussions productively, and track who's participating to ensure they're hearing from a representative cross-section of the community.

Most importantly, they close the loop. Housing & Community Development Director Victor Turner, emphasizes this point:

"Publicly reporting the outcomes of community engagement can be transformative for community understanding."

Think about the last time you offered feedback to your city.

Did anyone tell you what happened with your suggestion?
Did you see how community input shaped the final decision?
Or did your comment disappear into a void?

When cities report back, specifically, clearly, and honestly, about how input influenced decisions, they build trust. Even when they can't implement every suggestion, explaining the constraints and trade-offs maintains credibility in ways that silence never will.

The Question Nobody Wants to Answer

Building a stronger table isn't just about better systems. It's about confronting who's been left out and why.

Some states prohibit compensating people for serving on boards and commissions. That means civic leadership roles go to people who can afford unpaid service. Single parents juggling childcare costs can't volunteer 10 hours a month. Hourly workers can't take afternoon meetings without losing income.

This isn't an accident. It's a structural barrier masquerading as tradition.

Cities serious about community engagement are experimenting with small stipends for high-demand roles, offering translation services before anyone asks for them, and hosting conversations in community spaces where people already gather, not just in government buildings that feel intimidating or inaccessible.

Technology as a Bridge, not a Barrier

The digital tools emerging for civic engagement offer real promise, if we use them right.

Dedicated platforms can moderate conversations productively, provide background information so people understand context, and collect demographic data to ensure feedback comes from a representative group. They can offer translation in multiple languages automatically. They can work asynchronously so people participate when their schedule allows, not just during a 90-minute window on Tuesday evening.

But technology alone won't fix broken trust or inequitable access. Durham, North Carolina learned this through its trust audit framework. While residents gave sanitation services high marks for reliability, they rated planning departments poorly. That insight redirected engagement resources toward land-use processes where distrust ran deepest, something no app could have diagnosed without the human work of asking and listening.

The point isn't choosing between digital tools and face-to-face connection. It's using technology to enhance human relationships, not replace them.

What Community Engagement Success Looks Like

Cities getting this right don't measure success by counting meetings held or comments collected. They track different metrics:

Did participants understand why the meeting happened?
Could they see themselves in the problem being addressed?
Was the format accessible?
Did they feel their feedback was encouraged?
Can they point to specific examples of how input shaped final decisions?

These experience-based measures matter more than attendance numbers because they capture whether engagement actually worked—whether people felt the process honored their time and valued their voice.

When you get that right, people come back. They bring their neighbors. They move from skepticism to partnership. They start seeing local government not as a distant bureaucracy but as a collaborative tool for solving shared problems.

The Choice Ahead

Social media isn't going anywhere. Public meetings will continue. Passionate residents will keep showing up to advocate for what they believe matters.

But if we want governance that reflects our full community, not just the loudest or most available members, we need better infrastructure for partnership.

That means political courage to try new approaches.

Financial investment in staff, training, and technology. Willingness to share power instead of just collecting input. Commitment to closing the loop and showing how participation shapes outcomes.

It means treating residents not as a hurdle to get past or a box to check, but as essential partners with problem-solving capacity that government alone doesn't possess.

The megaphone will always have its place for urgent calls to action and accountability. But only the table, built with care, designed for inclusion, maintained with transparency, can create the sustained partnership our communities need for the complex challenges ahead.

The question isn't whether your neighbors will participate. It's whether you're building something worth showing up for.