'It's frustrating': Municipal links removed from B.C. community Facebook pages

The mayor of Princeton is voicing his frustration and concern after multiple municipal links were apparently removed from several community Facebook groups Friday and Saturday.

The mayor of Princeton is voicing his frustration and concern after multiple municipal links were apparently removed from several community Facebook groups Friday and Saturday.

“Everything that had a link back to the municipality’s website is now gone, dating back to four years,” said Princeton mayor Spencer Coyne, who added this happened on at least six community groups. “Everything my staff has put up has disappeared. Meetings, public hearings, bylaws, notices about water shut offs or road closures, anything we would post back to our main website has been removed.”

Coyne said the reason the posts were removed, according to Facebook, was because they went “against our Community Standards on cybersecurity.”

“It’s a struggle especially during the fire season here,” said Coyne. “It just makes it really, really frustrating because how do you post a PDF that says where the evacuations are, this is the map, this is the information you need to know, when those pieces of information keep disappearing from the social media channels that we use?”

Princeton isn’t alone. This weekend a link to an official government post was also removed from a Columbia Shuswap community group, with Facebook giving the same reason.

“There was nothing wrong with the post - it was a district municipal post,” said page admin Maria Otting. “Is that now a new thing? We can’t share from our City of Salmon Arm and District of Sicamous and Town of Golden? I’m super concerned about this. In fact, I’m not sure how else we would get information out if we’re not able to share it on our community Facebook groups.”

Meta told CTV News Monday “our teams are currently looking into this,” but confirmed the removals are not connected to the Online News Act and the banning of Canadian news content from its social media platforms.