Solomon's choice, to read more about one's self or to save school crossing patrols?

Was the £110,000 residents paid for social media monitoring worth it?

“Bristol’s in no way paranoid mayor Marvin Rees,” to quote Private Eye, has paid £110,000 of taxpayers money to find out what people say about him on social media. Why should we care?

1) it’s our money;

2) the administration seems to use the data to not only reject Freedom of Information requests, but to identify individual Tweeters;

3) the council has limited resources so paying this much money to seeing what people say about him means that he had to cut money from elsewhere.

Those cuts seem to correspond to the exact amount paid to school patrol services in 2018.

The initial contract for his social media reports was £90,000 (later extended to £110k).

The amount cut from lollipop ladies and men was £90,000.

Inevitably, and as predicted by the Equalities Impact assessment (“It will impact on the safety of young children crossing roads”) accidents and injuries to children increased. In December 2018, Oasis Academy New Oak school in Hengrove was calling for its lollipop lady to be reinstated because a boy had been hit by a car.

The council cut 50% of crossing services that directly helped keep children safe.

When I’ve written on Twitter about this, people were shocked at the amount of money spent on monitoring social media but thought that probably there was a special budget for this kind of thing. Well, no. The money comes from the revenue budget. It’s the same budget that pays for services to keep children safe.

This was a direct choice of prioritising the mayor’s brand awareness over children’s lives.

After complaints, media coverage, and requests, residents were finally able to read the reports.

The company Impact Social, buys search results of the terms: "Marvin Rees" / "mayor of bristol" / @MarvinJRees / @BrisMayorOffice / “Bristol Council” from a separate company called Brand Awareness. These results ensure the information is primarily about the mayor rather than the general residents’ worries.

If it was about the latter, we wouldn’t need to pay £40,000 a year for the quite detailed, comprehensive and rather good Quality of Life Survey run annually.

The social media reports contain a list of Twitter users who have publicly said the most about the mayor in that period of time; there are also bullet points covering ‘positive trends’ and ‘negative trends’.

One of the problems in analysing these reports and figuring out exactly what we residents are paying for, is the disparate nature of the commentary. It’s clear they try to make the mayor feel better about negative comments: criticisms come from “Political opponents” and only in “mainly echo-chambers”; complaints were “largely mitigated by the Mayor’s intervention”; the mayor’s comments were “twisted by some into an ‘attack on the NHS’” etc.

Some of the analysis is plain wrong. The first report said that Rees bringing US-style of politics to Bristol was a positive trend, whereas the one article and radio interview that comment relied on was in fact very negative and referred to excessive payments to a few officers.

About a story that went national, the council ordering a diesel fleet of vehicles just when they decided in Cabinet to ban diesel vehicles in the clean air zone, was relayed to the mayor as: “Accusations of double standards related to the council’s purchase of diesel vans in light of the upcoming diesel ban, although these did not catch on in any major way.”

I know that the story was printed in the Times, the Sun, The Metro, The Daily Telegraph, and the Daily Mail because at least three of those papers paid me for it.

We know the mayor benefits personally from these reports, they are sent to the mayor’s office and no one else in any other party knew about them until I wrote about their existence.

When asked by Bristol247’s Ellie Pipe at his press conference, about the £110,000 paid for these reports and how he could justify it, he said that he would advise other local authorities to do the same.

Now that we can read them, how best to learn more about them? I’ve been pondering about this for a while.

By chance, I discovered the other day that every single report thus far published, makes some reference to air quality; and, in nearly every instance, the comments were marked as negative by the writers.

There are references to air miles when the mayor flew to Singapore, one refers to the diesel fleet story, and others noted the airport expansion, which attracted a lot of negative ‘chatter’.

The percentage of negative comments on air quality ranged from 2% to 31% over the 21 months. Frustrations with Rees’ inaction over air quality were apparent every month.

“Families are moving away due to pollution,” the mayor was told; there “persistent complaints about air quality in the city,” “a lot of complaints about the Mayor’s support for airport expansion” (February 2019), the mayor’s attack on a doctor who asked him to intervene to stop children dying came up twice.

When the mayor refused to implement the Clean Air Zone, he knew most deaths from air pollution were in the poorest parts of the city; When he supported the airport expansion because people are going to fly anyway and we should profit from it, he knew that residents were opposed to it.

We know that he knows about all of this; so does he simply choose to ignore it?

I would ask the council but they have blacklisted me since I wrote about his evangelical faith advisor and the mayor’s meetings with pro-Trump pastors who think they can heal the sick and believe gay and trans people are sinners. She worked in the mayor’s office but we don’t know who paid her.

The mayor has also been in New York, flying out there this week as one of 40 mayors to learn from pro-fracking Michael Bloomberg’s Harvard City Leadership Initiative.

We don’t need the council to tell us, however. We can see the information they are given. We pay for it and so we should inspect it very carefully.

Now that I’ve seen it, read it, and read it again, I have lodged a complaint with the council’s external auditors about the £110,000 spent on these reports, which are not only centred around the mayor but also ignored.

I will let you know the results.