As you may know, municipal elections in Alberta take place on October 20, 2025. If a person wants to serve as a councillor, mayor, reeve, or school trustee, that will be their chance to put their name forward.
My name is not going to be on the ballot. I’m not seeking re-election for the next term.
How it started / How it’s going
This is not the time for good byes or thank-yous or predictions or thoughtful wishes for the future. That will come in time. The term is not up yet and I’m going to keep working as hard as ever.
This decision is one I came to quite some time ago. It was a hard one. I’ll spare you the whole story. One of the biggest factors was this: Shortly after being elected, I was promoted at my day job (this is, after all, a part-time gig, allegedly). This of course entailed greater responsibilities and a greater workload. I was able to balance the two jobs (although the regularity of my posting eventually took a hit — but let’s be honest, I’m a politician, not a social media influencer). I eventually came to realize that keeping it all up, while campaigning for the next term at the same time, would take too much of a toll on me and my family. I did not want my performance at either job to suffer. You, the citizen, deserve the best of whoever is representing you. I gave you my best but I didn’t want to risk getting to the point where I wasn’t able to do that anymore. Nothing worse than a politician who is just phoning it in.
A friend asked me if I’m going to use my newfound free time to become the “most annoying citizen” (presumably with regard to what the new city council is doing?). I don’t set out to do that, others can decide if I have suddenly “become” annoying. I do intend to remain present and vocal, and to contribute to the civic life of our community. It’s what I’ve always done and I’m not going to stop. And I’m probably not finished with politics forever either, we’ll just see how it goes.
There is still work to be done over the next few months. A lot of the work we’ve put in over the years is bearing fruit and you’ve seen it manifesting in the business we’ve been conducting of late. I’m proud of the work this team has done in setting Leduc up for success in the decades to come. It’s not done yet, and neither am I.
Me in 2021, with beard and shorter hair. “Hey, can you get a picture of me like, leaning on the railing, looking out? Like I’m looking to the future or something?” – me, probably
I’ve mentioned it in a few other places but it basically comes down to this: I’ve grown sick of social media.
I’ve been on the computer for … many years. For me it goes back to dialing up to local BBSs using a 2400 baud modem. It goes back to Telnet and Gopher sites, and using the Internet from the time before GUIs like Netscape were available. The first web browser I used was Lynx (which still exists?). I remember typing in IP addresses to access sites. For instance.
All of which is just to say my history goes back some ways, and keeping up with the times is something I’ve taken seriously. When a new development came along, like blogging or later on, social media, I adapted. I learned the social and technical language of those cultures. My engagement has been by turns enthusiastic but also critical. I think it has to be that way for everyone and for all things. What good does this thing do? What could make it better? What about this experience is tedious, or even harmful?
I’ve been letting social media drive me absolutely crazy for years now. “Letting it” because I’ve seen the way it manipulates and twists, and has perversely dominated discourse in our society for nearly a generation.
And yet.
If I want to be heard, if I want to stay in touch with people, if I want to participate in public life, there does not seem to be much else in the way of options.
Consider when I ran in the Leduc municipal election in 2021. I worked my ass off getting my message out to people. It’s possible that I worked harder than any other candidate. By far the most effort I expended was in the time-tested practice of door knocking. It was of course worth it and is a big part of the reason why I won. Even in this, the Year of Our Lord, there is no better substitute than going to people where they are, looking them in the eye, and telling them, “This is what I stand for,” and following up with, “Will you vote for me?”
I also approached social media in a way that no other candidate ever did in our city (and I still do). I invested a lot of time and resources and targeted audiences strategically. I experimented with methods and messages. The feedback I consistently got (and still get) is that my approach is fresh, vital, innovative, and appreciated.
2021 was a different election year for Leduc and not an ideal one to run in as a non-incumbent. For a non-incumbent to win a seat on council where there are no openings is a once in a generation rarity. Happily, I managed to pull it off. It was the sum total result of all of my efforts, and social media played a part. Probably a large part. It was the fulfillment of a life ambition and serving as a councillor is the highest of honours.
Social media has also been an almost indispensable tool in communicating with citizens. This council has had to weather a greater number than usual controversies this term, and citizens have rightfully demanded communication, transparency, and accountability. They demand it in large part through our messaging: What we do and do not say, how we say it, and whether it’s a message that they even receive.
The number one way for the City, and for us as individual elected representatives, to get our message out is over the Facebook platform specifically. There is just no substitute lately in terms of where people get their news, and where they express what they are feeling. For almost a generation it is essentially our agora (especially in view of the decline in local news).
But Facebook in particular has also broken a billion brains (as has X The Everything App). I’ve been exposed to that in ways in which I honestly couldn’t have imagined before, even though we all have an idea. And, let’s not forget, many social media enterprises are straight-up bad companies run by bad people, and things have only gotten worse since Trump was re-elected.
In the last six months or so it’s come to a head for me and I’ve had it. I decided to explore other options and venues, and wondered whether and to what extent I can just withdraw from social media, personally and professionally.
The first step was deleting my personal account on X The Everything App, which was easy because it was the first of the big platforms to go completely to shit. I had realized for quite some time that my council account on that app was also of very little use because it got little engagement, very little of which was reaching local people, so I just stopped posting (eventually I deleted, I didn’t even bother saving anything from it).
I also began trying to disengage from the Meta apps, Facebook and Instagram (I have a Threads account, but so what, I think it was just automatically reposting whatever I put on Insta). This was and is hard, because these remain the best ways to reach local people. I’ve decided that this wind-down has to been deliberate and strategic, and that I would be doing people a disservice if I simply stopped posting, stopped reading what people were saying in the various community groups, or just deleted without notice. (A big step for me was winding down my personal account, which involved telling hundreds of people individually what I was doing, and making sure they had my contact information in case they had any use for it).
I’ve maintained my presence on LinkedIn (which is becoming a much better for reaching community members), and have started posting on Bluesky. Bluesky remains of limited value in terms of reaching local people, but it has the following advantages:
fewer bots
fewer outright terrible accounts (e.g. fascists and white supremacists, which seem to have taken over so many other places)
more humane engagement
It also just has more “signal to noise,” and for instance I’ve been introduced to more useful blogs and newsletters than ever. It’s actually a big part of what I see the way forward to be.
So this brings me to what my pivot is going to be: This blog, along with other tools I’m going to experiment with (like a newsletter) are going to be what I put my communication efforts into going forward. Here, I have freedom, I’m not going to be soft blocked or barricaded or reported to a bullshit moderation service that’s going to arbitrarily cut me off from the world, and I’m not subject to a character count (for better or worse).
I wish for a flowering of the same in the world. More websites. More people taking control of things for themselves. More people breaking away. Less concentration and homogenization of voices. Less monopolization of the public square by trillion dollar companies.
Back to the promise of what the Internet was supposed to be. Back to the future.
Ryan Pollard - Councillor, City of Leduc 
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