CHICO — The internet isn’t what it used to be, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead for Butte County leaders. Quite the opposite.
While newspapers and TV news had better glory days, for better or worse it’s clear the internet has taken the lead in the dissemination of information.
Emerging from dark days of COVID-19 lockdowns, local politicians and government leaders have more recently been using internet media to create messages of their own — alongside participating in traditional news outlets.
This year alone, Chico Mayor Kasey Reynolds launched a 1-minute long show in March called “Mayor’s Minute” highlighting local events and city infrastructure updates, and Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea started a podcast in May called “The Sheriff’s Mic” to discuss the topic of public safety in depth. They followed shortly after Gov. Gavin Newsom launched his podcast in February, “This is Gavin Newsom.”
City councilors are also reaching constituents with their social media accounts regularly, including Chico City Councilor Addison Winslow, who curates informational posts on Chico policies, as well as Oroville City Councilor Shawn Webber who posts daily about public works, code enforcement and public safety information.
The nature of social media, being a sort of modern “town hall,” as put by Webber in an interview with this newspaper, in many ways is revealed in online content and comment section, both progressive in discussion and destructive in trust.
Yet the motivation behind these leaders efforts in media creation can be seen as an honest contribution to local discussions, and in many ways, an attempt to combat tides of hatred and misinformation.
Webber, who was elected to Oroville City Council in 2022, said he personally decided to not be a part of hatred on social media in a world coming out of COVID-19 lockdowns.
“There was almost like angry vitriol between and from both sides. I’m not saying one side. I’m saying straight up, both sides, angry vitriol, and the insults, and the hurls, and the slurs, and the anger,” Webber said. “You could read the anger. I mean, you feel it. It’s palpable. You know, it’s like, if somebody said this sentence in real life, it would just floor a room.”
Instead of getting pulled in by anger, Webber said he made an important point to go against the divisive grain.
“I choose to look forward to the good things. You know, the lovely things. The wonderful thing. I choose to look for that every day, and that’s a choice. Or I could just sit back, and I could hyperfixate and focus on something negative, and point out, and be very, very critical, Webber said “I don’t want to be that.”
Leveraging media
On his Facebook page, Webber posts parks being built, public works crews repaving roads and snippets of local speakers at community events. He also played a role posting evacuation and emergency shelter during the Thompson Fire in 2024, helping families get connected and safe at the Church of Nazarene, the declared evacuation point at the time.
He had no training in media, and only joined Facebook when he began running for government. Yet said he found a calling to communicate to his constituents with a positive intent behind his messaging.
“People want to be informed about what’s happening with our parks or what’s going on with these roads or what’s happening with the budget or whatever’s going on — People are eager to be informed. And so I found that to be a winning formula, how to simply get out there and pump out a positive narrative,” Webber said.
‘Road To Redemption’
Webber knows negativity — he’s seen some dark days as a former Butte County bank robber. That’s right, a former-bank-robber turned city councilor is now using social media to disseminate information.
The sentence is striking, and one likely wouldn’t recommend their children following Webber upon first read. But a bit of understanding into Webber shows how transformation goes right here in Butte County in a story maybe not so likely to be told in the days of traditional media.
Sheriff Honea’s podcast covers Webber’s story in its fifth episode, “Road to Redemption: From Bank Robber to City Councilor.”
“Shawn Webber is a good one because that is a story about redemption,” Honea said. “That’s a story about how someone who was involved with the criminal justice system in a very negative way. Turned his life around, right?
“And I think that’s an important part of being the sheriff is recognizing when people have overcome adversity, have turned their lives around, have gone through the system. My thought process is, you know, as sheriff, that’s the outcome that I would want to see with every single person that my deputies arrest and we put in jail, right?”
Honea said he seeks to interview officials in different disciplines on public safety, and so far he’s interviewed a former Sacramento Sheriff about recruitment challenges; Cal-Fire Butte County Fire Chief Garett Sjolund about fire safety and Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey about how the Bidwell Mansion arson began.
In an interview with this newspaper, Honea said his intent behind the podcast is to expand on the nuances behind public safety and the criminal justice system — and during his tenure, his role in providing for the public safety has “really expanded beyond what I think the traditional role of the sheriff has been.
“My predecessors never had to deal with massive fires or potential dam brakes or all of those kinds of things that are not specifically law enforcement related, but definitely have public safety ramifications.”
No more negativity
Honea and Webber both share a view that negativity is not their way when posting online.
In the time Webber has been active on his Facebook platform to speak directly to his roughly 3,300 constituents, as well as Oroville at large, he has gone forward voicing his messages knowing not everyone will like him.
He’s aware of his own appearance: He’s white, an evangelical, conservative Christian. But he knows his district is a “melting pot of everybody, you know, agnostics, atheists, Christians, Muslims, gay, heterosexual — whatever — everything that you could imagine,” he said.
“So if I were to only represent from the worldview of the certain political ideologies that maybe I adhered to, then I wouldn’t be doing the service to my entire community by just doing that because then that would be, it’d be a very narrow focus,” Webber said.
“I’m elected by a bunch of my constituents who were very liberal, some very conservative … I felt I had a duty to try to represent, unilaterally, all of them.”
When he was running for council, Webber recalls seeing “both sides of the aisle” saying “crazy stuff,” and making accusations. “And if I remained positive in my messaging, then I got more positive response back. And I was also at that time, I was watching closely like the local political pages, the politics and discussion page, and I was watching the sheer divisiveness of it …”
“I’m just watching this and I’m thinking, man, this is just so toxic. And so that was right there in the middle of my campaign … I started realizing that the messaging absolutely had to be positive.”
Finding resonance
Honea said he became interested in making podcasts after spending a lot of time listening to them during COVID-19 lockdowns. He discovered he was really into informational podcasts coming from business and politics creators.
“What I found was, they were relatable to me because of my own personal experiences,” Honea said. “Also, the politization of COVID, the desire to understand different perspectives and so forth kind of drove me to this whole thing.”
Honea said he reads the newspaper every day, but he really liked the organic nature of how podcasting could delve deeper into a specific topic, and appreciated the nature of the medium’s on-demand listening.
For his job, he regularly speaks to groups about public safety related issues, and over time he decided that if he could do a podcast, he could create the an “experience for more people who could consume the information when they were available to consume it — it would allow me to talk about public safety related issues.”
He said the intent behind his podcast is to make public safety related issues in another format, one that he had a connection to.
“(It) allows me to bring on subject matter experts or guests, and then we can delve deeper into those topics. We’re not as curated. We’re not as edited,” Honea said. “It’s almost like, hey, it’s like you and I are sitting down for a cup of coffee and we’re just talking about an issue and we’re inviting the entire community to sit around the table and listen to it.”
Webber said he knows that when he makes social media content, he’s setting himself up for scrutiny — but he’s ready for it.
“I know for 100% that if I do a video on a road, that there’s a strong possibility that I’m going to be teed off on by a bunch of people about, ‘why aren’t you repaving them all?’ And I go into it knowing that. But it’s more important for me to educate. And to show the positivity that it is,” Webber saaid. “Sometimes decision makers make decisions out of fear of what people are going to think about it; what the repercussions will be.”
Staying safe on the net
In a sea of information — arguably misinformation with notions of division — people and groups can take educated precautions to help stay safe on the net, just like looking at both sides of the road.
Webber said he insulates and protects his children from all things on the internet, but he warns them that there’s a lot on the net that can be really damaging.
“I think educating your child is key, having a conversation with them about the dangers. The biggest danger I think we see in social media is strangers having influence over our kids through whatever they may be.”
Webber and his wife Maria Webber now have two daughters who just graduated high school, and after watching closely for years — not allowing them to have any and every phone app — he knows he can’t shield them forever.
“They are now at the age where it’s like, you know, I’m releasing them into that, you know, I’m going to trust you as an adult, you can make good decisions,” Webber said. “The best lessons of life are the ones that sting the most. I’m not saying go out there and intentionally make mistakes, but sometimes you got to touch the flame to understand that it’s hot.”
Honea said he has a granddaughter, and that he speaks to his daugher. about how they hope they can forestall as long as possible exposure to smartphones and tablets.
“I think social media has made it so much more difficult to be a young person, especially, you know, a preteen and a teen than it has ever been before. And I think it’s harder for parents to navigate that because there is so much trash out there on social media that invade the lives of kids,” Honea said.
“Before when a kid came home, hopefully they were in a safe and protective environment, insulated from the outside world. Now if they’ve got a phone, they can be in their bedroom and the entire world can get to them.”
Honea has the personal experience of having to control misinformation; being the sheriff he is motivated to make sure residents have information to make safe decisions.
“The problem with social media is, and, you know, it is one way to provide people with information, but it becomes a cesspool of, you know, it can get easily hijacked,” Honea said. “What we find with some of the citizen run information pages is that a lot of times the initial information, although fast, is not always accurate.
“You spend all of your time essentially arguing with people who aren’t really interested in the facts or just interested in the drama that is so prevalent on social media. There are other times where if it is an inaccuracy that, you know, has a negative impact on public safety or could, you know, you know, drastically, you know, or could result in, you know, a loss of confidence in public safety or other issues.”