8 Simple (Pages of) Rules for Engaging With Katie Neustaeter

Katie Neustaeter says she welcomes disagreement, tough questions and honest debate. So I decided to see how that actually works.

Katie has published a set of Social Media Rules of Engagement for her re-election campaign. There are eight pages of them, which seems like a lot of material for something that starts with a fairly simple idea: you don't have to agree with me, but you do have to be respectful.

Facebook comment sections can get pretty ugly, particularly during an election campaign, and I think candidates are entitled to establish some boundaries around how people interact with them. Katie's rules distinguish between ordinary political disagreement and things such as harassment, personal attacks, threats and attempts to turn her page into what she calls a space for "abuse or pile-ons."

There are also parts of the rules that I think are worth acknowledging. Katie says she welcomes disagreement, tough questions, constructive criticism, political debate, lived experience and corrections. She even provides examples of comments she considers acceptable, including "Katie's vote on this issue was wrong, and here's why" and "Why did Katie support this decision?"

That sounds reasonable. So I decided to look beyond the rules themselves and see what happens when people actually use Katie's Facebook page that way.

Editorial disclosure: I've written critically about Katie Neustaeter and her record as a Kamloops councillor, and I've publicly questioned some of her decisions and statements. I've also commented on her campaign posts, including questions she hasn't answered. In two of the exchanges discussed below, I was attempting to correct statements I believed were inaccurate or misleading and referred to source material to support my position. I'm including those exchanges because readers should know about my involvement rather than having to discover it themselves. I don't believe Katie is obligated to answer me personally. The purpose of this article is to compare the rules she has published with the way she engages with residents publicly.

Katie does engage with critics

The first thing I found was that this isn't a case of Katie simply deleting every comment she doesn't like.

There are plenty of critical comments underneath her recent posts. People have questioned the Arts Centre, Build Kamloops, the Alternative Approval Process, public safety, homelessness, taxes and Council's priorities. Some have told her directly that she won't get their vote. Katie responds to quite a few of these people, sometimes at considerable length.

One exchange about public safety is a good example. A commenter challenged the City's priorities and questioned why money was being spent on the Arts Centre when there are concerns about crime and homelessness. Katie responded with a lengthy explanation of the different responsibilities of municipal, provincial and federal governments and made the case that recreation, arts, employment and public spaces can all play a role in a safer community.

I don't have to agree with that argument to recognize that Katie actually engaged with it. That's important because it would be unfair to portray her as someone who won't tolerate criticism. The comments don't support that.

What they do show is that Katie is selective about how she engages, and that's where her rules become more interesting.

Tough questions are welcome, apparently

Katie specifically says residents can ask her to explain a decision, policy, vote or position. That's a pretty reasonable thing for an elected councillor seeking another term to offer.

I've seen examples where residents do exactly that, but the response isn't always an answer to the question in the comment. Sometimes Katie invites the person to an open house or suggests they contact her directly. Again, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. A face-to-face conversation can be far more useful than a Facebook argument, and I have no problem with politicians making themselves available to residents.

The difficulty is that a private conversation isn't the same thing as a public answer. If someone asks an elected official why she voted a particular way and receives an explanation at an open house, that person gets the answer, but everyone else doesn't get to hear the question or decide whether the explanation makes sense.

That matters more when the question concerns public money or a decision made by Council. A resident asking about a personal issue may quite reasonably want a private conversation, but a question about a $211-million municipal project has a public dimension that doesn't disappear simply because the conversation moves to Facebook Messenger or an open house.

The $7-million question

That's what caught my attention when Katie announced the $7-million federal grant connected to Build Kamloops. I asked whether the money would actually reduce the roughly $211-million cost of the Arts Centre or whether it would simply provide another $7 million that could be used to enhance the project.

Katie didn't answer the question.

That by itself wouldn't be particularly remarkable. Her rules say that her account doesn't have to respond to every comment, and I agree with that. Nobody can reasonably expect a politician to answer every person who comments on a Facebook post.

But Katie was actively participating in this discussion. She answered other critics and spent considerable time explaining her views about municipal spending, public safety, homelessness and the City's major projects. The question was sitting in the middle of that conversation, and it was left unanswered.

There was another issue with the same announcement that I raised in the comments. When I compared Katie's post with the City's announcement of the grant, it appeared to me that Katie had closely reproduced wording from the City's announcement without clearly identifying the source. I wasn't suggesting that she shouldn't share information released by the City. I was questioning why material from the City's announcement appeared in a campaign post as though it were her own communication.

I also thought that was worth pointing out because Katie's rules specifically say corrections are welcome. If I've got the comparison wrong, it should be easy enough to show me where. Katie didn't respond to that either.

Then there's the legal judgment

A similar situation arose when Katie discussed her legal battle with Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson.

Katie has made public statements about what the judge found in that case. I believe some of those statements give readers a misleading impression of what the judgment actually says, so I went back to the source document and responded with a reference to the judgment itself. In particular, I pointed to the passage I believed contradicted Katie's characterization and also questioned her statement about the court's treatment of costs.

Again, I wasn't simply saying that I disagreed with Katie. I was saying, in effect, here is the document you're talking about; this is what I think it says; if I've got it wrong, please explain where.

Katie didn't respond to that comment either.

I'm not suggesting that proves she was wrong. It doesn't. It also doesn't prove that she deliberately avoided the question. There could be any number of reasons she chose not to respond.

What it does mean is that the public discussion contains a disagreement about a factual matter, and Katie hasn't explained publicly why she believes my interpretation is wrong.

For me, that's where the idea of a "correction" becomes important. If I've misunderstood the judgment, I want to know that. If I've misrepresented what Katie said, I'd like her to point that out. And if I've got it right, then I think the public record should be corrected.

What if the comments have been hidden?

There's one other piece of this that I think readers should know about.

I asked someone who isn't a Facebook friend of mine to check whether my comments were visible on one of Katie's posts. They weren't. I can't know from that alone exactly what Facebook setting was used, but it leads me to believe that some of my comments may have been hidden from other people.

I don't have a problem with Katie moderating her campaign page. Her rules specifically give her and her campaign team discretion over moderation, and if she believes something I've written crosses one of her lines, she's entitled to make that decision.

But hiding a comment and correcting the record are two different things. If the comment is wrong, explaining why it's wrong would be useful. If the comment is right, correcting the original statement would also be useful.

Either way, the public would be better informed.

That's also the standard I try to apply to myself

I don't consider myself a journalist in every sense of the word, and Kamloops Critic isn't a traditional newspaper. I do, however, have my own standard for editorial integrity, and I put a very high value on accuracy and on earning and maintaining the trust of the people who read what I write.

That trust shouldn't depend on whether someone agrees with me. If somebody finds an error in one of my articles, I want to know about it. If I've misunderstood a City document, a court judgment or a Council decision, I want somebody to point it out, and if I've made a claim that can't be supported by the evidence, I'd rather have it challenged than leave it sitting there simply because it happens to support the argument I'm making.

That's particularly important when I'm criticizing someone else for getting something wrong. I don't think I can reasonably expect Katie to correct the record when she's wrong if I'm not prepared to do the same thing myself.

So no, I don't expect Katie to answer every question I ask. What I do think is reasonable is that when I challenge a factual statement and provide the source I'm relying on, she either explain why I'm wrong or correct the statement if I'm right.

That's not a special rule for Katie. It's the standard I would like to see applied to everyone involved in local politics, including me.

Mike O'Reilly provides an interesting comparison

There's another councillor seeking higher office who has taken a somewhat different approach to social media.

Mike O'Reilly recently posted a video called "Elected Officials Read Social Media Messages." I wrote about it because I liked the basic idea. He invited residents to send him questions and comments, including some that weren't particularly flattering, and then read them publicly and responded.

That doesn't mean O'Reilly gets a free pass on his answers. He can give a bad answer just as easily as anyone else, and responding publicly doesn't make a politician's position correct. But there is value in having the question and the answer sitting there where everyone can see them.

Katie's approach is different. She has taken the time to spell out eight pages of rules explaining what residents can and can't say on her campaign page, while also inviting people to attend her events and speak with her directly.

Again, I don't think either approach is necessarily wrong. O'Reilly's approach emphasizes what are people saying about me? Katie's emphasizes how should people engage with me? For voters, that's an interesting difference.

So what do the rules tell us?

After reading Katie's rules and then going through the comments underneath her posts, I don't think the evidence supports saying that she refuses to engage with people who disagree with her. She clearly doesn't. There are plenty of examples of Katie responding to criticism, sometimes with detailed explanations of her position.

What I think the comments show is that engagement and answering questions aren't necessarily the same thing. Katie decides which comments she responds to, whether she answers the question that was actually asked, whether she invites someone to continue the discussion privately and whether a comment remains visible on her page.

She's entitled to make those choices on her campaign page. The question for voters is what they make of those choices.

For me, the most important distinction is between a disagreement over politics and a disagreement over facts. I don't expect Katie to convince me that the Arts Centre is a good idea, and she doesn't need to convince me that I'm wrong about every issue I raise. But when one of us makes a factual claim, there should be a way to establish whether that claim is supported by the record.

That's why I found the eight pages of rules worth examining.

Katie says she welcomes disagreement, tough questions and corrections. I've found examples where she does engage with those things, and I've also found questions and factual challenges that she hasn't answered publicly.

Mike O'Reilly has chosen to put some of the criticism directed at him directly into his own public conversation. Katie has chosen to establish rules for how people engage with her and to offer private opportunities for residents to talk with her.

Neither approach tells us who will make the better councillor or mayor.

But it does give voters something else to consider: when you have a question for the person asking for your vote, do you want an opportunity to ask it, an opportunity to discuss it privately, or an answer that everyone can see?

Katie has told us the rules for engaging with her.

The comment threads give us a chance to see how those rules work in practice.

More about Katie Neustaeter

As one of the central figures in the chaotic council years of 2022 - 2026, Neustaeter has had more than her fair share of Kamloops Critic coverage. If you want to know more about her, you may find some of the articles below of interest: