Behind the Headlines: A Selfless Act in Tuckahoe

So a debate at the Southampton Village Board, which isn't really news on its own because there's been a lot of debates at the Southampton Village Board lately.

But this one is about the use of social media by the village.

Why are they having this conversation?

Sure.

So at South End Village Board the other night, there was a resolution on the agenda regarding the village social media pages that had to do with both the comments and the content of it.

And it's important to note here that With how comments work, especially on Instagram, the village's official account does not allow any comments on posts.

However, let's say if it's a post made by the Chamber of Commerce, for example, and they invite the village's official Instagram account to be a collaborator on there, it'll show up on the village.

They

basically tag them, right? They would tag the village and include them as a...

It's not even tagging because that's

another...

Tagging is a separate feature.

When you collaborate on somebody, this will actually show up on the main feed there.

However, when that happens and it's on the village's official page there, the comments are on for that because the village does not have control of that.

The individual poster does.

And I think this led to some confusion with this resolution and the discussion there on Thursday night.

So what the resolution was, it was introduced by Trustee Willa Bernstein.

She wanted to put in a policy that would it would disallow public comment on, quote, some individual posts.

But when it's allowed on others, she wanted to establish this, quote, viewpoint neutral criteria for a moderator to evaluate their comments.

And this was a proposal that did not fly over very well on the board here, specifically from Mayor Bill Manger there.

Nancy Kane, who is the Villages Communications Consultants, who runs the Instagram and the social media pages there, she addressed the board and she warned, like, as soon as you start, if you allow comments, if you take even so much as one down, then it can start becoming a First Amendment issue there.

And basically, yeah, the argument was if you allow comments and if you start taking any of them down, then it just becomes very difficult to enforce.

And we should probably point out that I think a lot of what prompted this was a letter to the editor that we got in the last couple of weeks from Jessica McInerney, who is a village resident who is often critical of the Manger administration.

And she pointed out this idea where she thought the village was allowing comments on some posts, but not on others.

I think we got to the bottom of the way you described it, that it's about the collaborative posts that the village doesn't have control over, but the village wasn't allowing comments as a rule.