Resident alleges city social media used to promote mayor and raises potential ethics concerns

Josh Keck of Staun Road raised concerns Feb. 24 that Huntington’s official social-media accounts have increasingly promoted the mayor and that content from the mayor’s personal accounts and from a partisan page was reposted on official city channels.

Keck told council that city Facebook posted 722 times in 2024 with about 29 posts mentioning the mayor (roughly 4%), and that in 2025 the city had posted 70 times with a substantially higher share mentioning the mayor. He said some posts were screenshots of the mayor's personal tweets and that screenshots are inaccessible to screen readers, creating an accessibility concern. Keck also said the material was reposted rapidly by a local partisan Facebook page and suggested the pattern looked like deliberate coordination or a single person posting across accounts.

Keck cited a provision he identified in the state ethics code (referred to in the meeting as “6 b‑2 b‑3 subsection c,” paraphrased by him) and characterized the reuse of a personal account’s content on official city channels as problematic. He told the council that earlier the same day some reposts had been removed or corrected on city pages and asked the council to do its own fact-finding.

Council did not take formal action on the allegation during the meeting; the speaker said corrections had been made before the meeting. Keck framed his request as a call for transparency and for the city’s official accounts to be the primary distributor of city-produced material rather than personal or partisan accounts.