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Town Hall Meetings Moving Out of Rooms and Onto Facebook on Staten Island

By Nicholas Rizzi | October 3, 2014 12:17pm | Updated on October 6, 2014 8:49am
 Assemblyman Joe Borelli will hold Staten Island's first Facebook town hall on Oct. 7, 2014.
Assemblyman Joe Borelli will hold Staten Island's first Facebook town hall on Oct. 7, 2014.
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DNAinfo/Nicholas Rizzi

STATEN ISLAND — Town hall meetings are moving into the 21st century.

A Staten Island assemblyman is holding his next gathering not in its usual community center, but Facebook.

Assemblyman Joe Borelli will host the online town hall on Oct. 7, where he'll publicly answer questions from residents on the social network for two hours.

"You spend all this time trying to cultivate your social media following, why not use it to advance democracy and be more open and transparent?" Borelli said.

"You get to be more blunt and less formal than answering an email."

Borelli asked residents to submit questions on a Facebook page he set up by Oct. 7. So far Borelli's gotten dozens of submissions that he promises to answer on the page.

He said he got the idea after he noticed the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, regularly takes to Twitter to answer questions from his constituency with the hashtag #askboris.

"I think that's a great way to actually engage people informally," he said. "I use my Facebook page personally, I'm already used to asking questions on it, so I figured why not?"

He chose Facebook because he didn't think he had enough followers on his Twitter page for it to be successful, but said at least with Facebook he can see where people are from and focus on answering Staten Islanders' questions. 

"I'm expecting the occasional, 'Hey Borelli, you stink' on it," he said.

"That's not enough of a reason to not engage people. I've been called worse to my face."