On September 23, 2024, a town councilor in Fairfield, Maine found himself locked out of the place where his town actually happens. Adam Lerette had been appointed to the council earlier that year, and like everyone else in Fairfield he kept up with local business through a Facebook group called “Fairfield Maine Our Community Group.” After a dispute with the group’s founder — a resident named Casey Begin, who was at the time running, unsuccessfully as it turned out, for a council seat herself — Lerette was banned. Not from a comment section. From the closest thing Fairfield has to a public square.
The group had about 6,600 members at the time, which is notable because Fairfield’s most recent population count was 6,484. The town of Fairfield has no official social media presence of its own. So the practical situation is this: a community’s civic information system is a private Facebook group, run by a private citizen, who can — and did — expel an elected official from it. If you want to know what’s going on in Fairfield, you need a Facebook account, and you need to stay on the right side of one volunteer moderator.
It’s tempting to read this as a quirky small-town story, a bit of Maine color. It is better read as an infrastructure story, because Fairfield is just the place where the arrangement became visible enough to write about. Across an enormous number of communities, the functions we used to associate with public notice — emergency updates, road closures, council business, lost dogs, boil-water advisories, shelter information during a flood — now live inside a single private platform. It happened quietly, and it happened for a reason that is almost embarrassingly simple: Facebook was free and it worked, and the municipal alternative was neither.
How the bulletin board moved
No town council ever voted to move civic life onto Facebook, which is part of the point. There was no procurement process, no contract, no service-level agreement. There was just a gradient. A resident starts a group because the town website is a PDF graveyard last updated during the previous administration. The group is useful, so people join. Officials notice that posting in the group reaches more residents in an hour than the website reaches in a month, so they start posting there too. Each step is rational. Nobody decides anything. And then one day the town’s entire information ecology is a feature of an advertising company in California.
Begin, the Fairfield group’s founder, made this case plainly enough: during the December 2023 flood, residents used the group to find shelter, electricity and contacts — things the town website, in her words, “really doesn’t do.” She’s right, and that’s the uncomfortable part. The platform didn’t capture this function by force. It won it, fair and square, against an incumbent that had stopped trying. The town website is the public option, and the public option is a stack of meeting minutes.
The problem is what the platform owes you in return, which is nothing. A road, a water system, a bulletin board outside the town hall — these come with obligations. Someone must maintain them, and if they fail, someone is answerable. A Facebook group comes with a terms of service. There is no continuity guarantee, no service obligation, no appeal that reaches a human. The town’s information system can be deleted, throttled, sold, or ruined by an algorithm change, and the town’s recourse is the same as anyone’s: a help-center form that goes nowhere.
The plug gets pulled
If Fairfield shows the volunteer-with-a-grudge failure mode, Princeton, British Columbia shows the corporate one. In September 2023, the town lost the ability to post links from its website into community Facebook groups, and municipal posts on at least six local groups were deleted going back four years. The explanation offered was that the posts violated “community standards for cybersecurity.” Mayor Spencer Coyne asked for a review. The review was denied. The town kept its three official pages, but as Coyne pointed out, those have a fraction of the following and engagement of the community groups — which is exactly why the town had been posting in the groups in the first place.
Princeton has no radio station and no TV station. Facebook is the instantaneous channel. Coyne’s warning was specific: in a wildfire evacuation, this is how people find out where to go. The timing added a layer of farce — the removals came just after Meta had blocked news links across Canada in retaliation for the Online News Act, a law meant to make platforms pay publishers. A dispute between Ottawa and a trillion-dollar company over journalism economics ended, in one small town, with the evacuation plan losing its distribution channel.
Neither town did anything wrong, exactly. They used the tool that worked. That’s what makes the situation hard to fix and easy to mock from a distance — some people will say official bodies should treat their own websites as priority one and social media as a last resort, and they’re not wrong, but they’re describing a discipline that costs money and staff time, which is the thing small towns don’t have. The platform’s offer — free, instant, already where everyone is — is not one a part-time municipal communications department was ever going to refuse.
Private terms, public function
The useful way to think about this is not that towns made a bad choice, but that a category error got baked in. We treat Facebook as a venue — a place where communication happens — when for these communities it has become infrastructure: the thing communication depends on. Venues can close and life moves elsewhere. Infrastructure closing is an event. The difference only becomes apparent at the moment of failure, which is why the dependency stayed invisible for so long. Everything works until the algorithm changes, the group is deleted, the moderator holds a grudge, or the company decides your links look like a cybersecurity problem.
There’s also a quieter exclusion running underneath all of this. The people without accounts — the ones who deleted Facebook years ago, or never joined, or got banned by a volunteer — are simply outside the town’s information system now. They haven’t opted out of a social network. They’ve opted out of knowing when the water is safe to drink. A public notice used to be public because of where it was posted. Now it’s public only to members in good standing of a private service.
The standard we apply to every other piece of civic infrastructure is boring and non-negotiable: it has to work for everyone, someone has to be responsible for it, and it can’t disappear because a moderator is feuding with a councilor or a content filter in another country misread a hyperlink. The bulletin board met that standard by being a literal board. The replacement meets none of it, and it won, because it was better in every way except the ways that turn out to matter. Fairfield’s group is still running. So is everyone else’s. The question isn’t whether the arrangement fails — Princeton already showed how — it’s whether anyone builds the boring alternative before it does.