Paralocal relationships: Re-placing civic engagement for the social media age

Abstract

Concerns about the decline of traditional forms of civic engagement and local news availability in the United States exist alongside developing forms of activist politics online, with one prominent form of social media-driven activism coming from First Amendment auditors. This study examines the protracted conflict between the governmental authorities of Leon Valley and First Amendment auditors to explore the re-placement of civic engagement for the age of social media, facilitated by the development of what I call paralocal relationships. Paralocal relationships describe a sense of familiarity with and concern toward a place featured in media by viewers who have never been there. First Amendment audits enable paralocal relationships by combining on-the-ground activism with clear and simple calls to action for distant viewers, helping to convert audiences into engaged and invested participants in the political life of featured places and enabling new modes of participatory politics.

Introduction

On 2 May 2018, a YouTube channel named Mexican Padilla posted a video of an encounter with Leon Valley, Texas police chief Joseph Salvaggio. Shot on a smartphone, the low-resolution footage shows the perspective of a man wandering into the Leon Valley police station. The staff largely ignores him until he asks about a closed door leading out of the lobby. “Oh, it’s just the admin wing. It’s open!” the staffer says, and Padilla questions if that means it is open to the public. “Yeah,” the staffer replies, and Padilla pushes through the door to the area beyond, recording photographs of City Council members hung on the wall until he encounters Chief Salvaggio. “Need some help, sir?” Salvaggio asks politely. The situation quickly escalates as Salvaggio tells Padilla the area he is in is restricted and to put the camera down, demanding he leave and then grabbing him as Padilla screams, “Don’t touch me!” repeatedly. Within seconds, Padilla is placed under arrest.

Jesus Padilla, owner of the Mexican Padilla channel, is part of a loosely affiliated group of activist content creators who refer to themselves as First Amendment auditors. First Amendment auditors film public servants and then post the resulting videos online as a way to test whether law enforcement and government officials respect the exercise of the rights enumerated in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, especially freedom of the press. In Padilla’s video, Chief Salvaggio not only failed the audit, but failed so spectacularly that Leon Valley began to attract the interest of other First Amendment auditors and a sizable online audience along the way. Furthermore, Leon Valley stayed under the microscope of small-town fame not for 15 minutes, but for well over two years. Dozens of auditors documented the saga across hundreds of videos, ranging from audits of other public buildings to deep dives into open records about town officials to broadcasts of lengthy City Council meetings. During this time, the town experienced dramatic political upheaval driven by coalitions of local citizens and the external audiences of First Amendment auditors, culminating in the eventual firing of Chief Salvaggio.

I turn to the protracted conflict between the governmental authorities of Leon Valley and First Amendment auditors as a case study that reveals a reconfiguration, or re-placement of civic engagement for the age of social media, facilitated by the development of what I call paralocal relationships. Just as parasocial relationships describe a sense of intimacy that viewers feel toward media personas (Horton and Wohl, 1956), paralocal relationships describe a sense of familiarity with and concern toward a place featured in media by viewers who have never been there. First Amendment audits enable paralocal relationships by combining on-the-ground activism with clear and simple calls to action for distant viewers (Silverstone, 2007), helping to convert audiences into engaged and invested participants in the political life of featured places. In what follows, I first examine the overlapping relationship between media and civic engagement in the present moment, before turning to the phenomenon of First Amendment auditors and their connection with other movements to film police. Following this, I introduce paralocal relationships, situating them both within the theoretical lineage of parasocial relationships and shifting conceptions of the local. To explore how civic engagement can be productively spurred by paralocal relationships, I detail the events surrounding the spectacular clash between First Amendment auditors and Leon Valley’s local government from May 2018 to March 2021. I conclude by discussing how paralocal relationships connect to emergent ideas of participatory politics and good digital citizenship.

Literature review

Media and civic engagement

First Amendment audits emerge at a time when local journalism is facing precipitous declines in funding and influence in the United States. In a 2015 study, the Pew Research Center (2015) estimated that in three examined metro areas “nearly nine-in-ten residents follow local news closely – and about half do so very closely.” Americans also think their local news media, where it exists, is doing a good job. Despite these positive impressions, over 1800 local print news outlets closed between 2004 and 2018, leaving hundreds of counties across the United States without newspapers (Bosman, 2019) and creating news deserts (Abernathy, 2018). The economic realities of operating local news outlets have changed substantially in an environment where Americans still desire local news coverage, but no longer consume it in traditionally monetizable ways. For example, despite only 14 percent of Americans reporting that they paid for local news in the past year, 71 percent are convinced their local news outlets are financially stable (Pew Research Center, 2019). The sense of crisis is acutely felt within news agencies themselves, but their institutional status breeds complacency in consumers. As Rebecca Colden of the now-defunct Warroad Pioneer explained, “With a 120-year-old paper, they are just so sure we’re always going to be there” (Fausset, 2019). The increasing closure of local media outlets represents the ongoing loss of an avenue of connection between citizens and knowledge about their local communities (Thompson, 2021), associated with measurable drops in civic engagement within affected communities (Shaker, 2014). But the loss of local news outlets does not necessarily represent a lack of interest in local news, as indicated above. Rather, it demonstrates the need to look to non-traditional sources to understand how people engage with local news and politics.

Beyond the decline in local news outlets, many scholars have decried what they view as decreasing levels of civic engagement in local communities. Perhaps most famously, Robert Putnam (2020 [2000]) tied civic disengagement to a decline in “social capital” within communities, going so far as to claim that “Americans are right that the bonds of our communities have withered, and we are right to fear that this transformation has very real costs” on both a personal and societal level (emphasis in original). At the heart of Putnam’s claim is that the idea that consistent social interaction, like that provided by routine evenings spent in his titular bowling alley, is necessary to build communal trust, and that “trust is an essential component of social capital” (Putnam, 1993: 170). Yet, as Levi (1996) aptly points out, Putnam “treats a whole range of relationships and expectations under the one title of trust” (p. 46), and that trust in one’s fellow citizens to be good neighbors or spirited bowlers may actually indicate little about trust in one’s government. As Siisiäinen (2003) bluntly summarizes, “Putnam’s civil society is reduced to the examination of the functions of voluntary associations” leaving him unable to deal with “distrust, and those social movements and voluntary associations that present challenges to the prevailing consensus or to integrative institutions” (p. 4). Yet distrust is especially interesting to the case at hand, as distrust in police led First Amendment auditors and their audiences to a novel form of activism, and distrust in the response of the local government led Leon Valley citizens to take retributive political action. These groups collaborated toward a shared end, broadly that of government accountability, despite possessing few or none of the social ties that Putnam describes as the basis of social capital. Clearly, motivation for civic engagement is also available by other means (Noland, 2017).

The Internet introduces yet further wrinkles to understandings of what constitutes productive civic engagement. Some early commentators saw the touted promise of the Internet leading to political revolution through greater participation by ordinary people as somewhere between unlikely and ridiculous (e.g. Davis, 1999), and this attitude has persisted in critiques of online organizing. Stuart Shulman (2009), for example, laments that, “the logic of collection [sic] action many scholars my age and older grew up with is dead. The Internet killed it” (p. 25). Likewise, scholarly critiques of activist campaigns around online phenomena like Kony 2012 often concluded that such movements “have short attention spans and limited shelf life” (Drumbl, 2012: 484). Other scholars have explicitly defended such practices as ways for people to take control of key informational environments and shift the dynamics of power around issues like policing (Lozier, 2016). Yet, in a meta-review of social media and citizen engagement research, Skoric et al. (2016) found that “research has not supported the pessimistic views suggesting a toxic impact of social media on engagement,” though nor had their analysis uncovered “any solid proof of social media’s presumed revolutionary impact” (p. 1818); in other words, the influence of social media on civic engagement likely falls in between the poles of being either entirely dire or radically useful to participation. Rather than indicating a simple freefall in rates of civic engagement, these data may instead point us toward the need to consider different indicators and the possibility of a “new, emergent citizenship model” of expressive citizenship (p. 47) that takes “seriously the role of social media in the political socialization and participation” (p. 46) of democratic citizens (Kligler-Vilenchik and Literat, 2025), factors highlighted in the conduct and consumption of First Amendment audits.

That is not to say, however, that there is no purpose to being physically present as a part of civic engagement. It is, after all, their physical positioning within a particular community that gave Leon Valley residents the ability to vote, sign petitions, and speak at government meetings. Likewise, First Amendment audits present an intellectually interesting example of activism in part because they rely on a combination of physical (offline) presence by the auditor and online broadcasts of their activities to distant audiences. Simply put, First Amendment audits could not function as a form of activism or social media content without auditors putting their camera-bearing bodies on the line. In a similar examination of livestreamed protest movements, Schlussel (2024) proposes the concept of networked emplacement “to explain how streamers combine techniques of embodied presence with the connectivity and urgency of social media” (p. 2), enabling viewers to feel as if they too are meaningfully emplaced among protests even if physically elsewhere. While First Amendment audits are not always live and not often part of a mass protest, they still help viewers displaced by time as well as distance to “feel emplaced in the very place of conflict” (p. 15).

This viewer emplacement is particularly significant because although First Amendment auditors and local citizens are two groups physically present for the political changes within Leon Valley, the audiences of auditors also served key roles. Auditors often call on their audiences to take direct actions against police who fail audits through, for example, conducting “call floods” in which numerous members of the audience directly call a police station to complain, ¹ leading some stations to close their non-emergency phone lines until the frenzy passes. Previous research on social movements has indicated that groups likely to be engageable in offline activism and online activism have significant overlaps, and that online and offline forms of activism “can be part of a broader action repertoire [. . .] and that online and offline activities can supplement each other” (Hirzalla and Zoonen, 2011: 492). A particularly potent example of this overlap comes from Zeynep Tufekci’s (2017) study of the Arab Spring protests, conducted by joint coalitions of online and offline activists that she dubs the “networked public sphere” (p. 6). Such coalitions often operate in ad hoc fashion, relying on “whoever shows up and is interested” to accomplish useful tasks (p. 53). This is very much how civic engagement flows from the audiences of auditors; whoever is tuning in at the time and feels motivated to act can play a role in supporting the activities of those physically present on the ground. The changes in Leon Valley thus relied on both the work of offline activists and local citizens, as well as the mediated relationships that provoked online audiences to supportive action.

First amendment auditors and filming the police

The practice of First Amendment auditing began around 2012 on YouTube, with Jeffrey Gray of the HonorYourOath Civil Rights Investigations channel uploading some of the first notable auditing videos. Gray, a Florida local holding press credentials from the now-defunct online news organization Photography is Not a Crime (PINAC), began showing up at Jacksonville Transit Authority (JTA) stations and the local Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) building and filming from public areas. Gray dubbed these activities “First Amendment tests” and later “First Amendment audits,” highlighting the purpose of testing freedom of the press, and was frequently confronted by law enforcement and government officials who tried to deter his activity. Posting these videos online, Gray discovered a substantial audience of sympathetic viewers, with his video of Jacksonville’s FBI building earning more than 210,000 views and a video a few weeks later of JTA’s Skyline Station receiving more than 350,000 views. ² But YouTube viewers were not the only ones taking note of Gray; PINAC obtained records showing that law enforcement officers ran Gray’s information through police databases over 200 times by 2014, searches conducted by more than a hundred officers across 28 different agencies (Cushing, 2014; Meyer, 2014). From Gray’s success on YouTube, other auditors took up his practices and began conducting audits across the country, and even in countries like Canada and the United Kingdom, albeit in modified form. In the decade since, auditing has also drawn academic attention, particularly from legal (e.g. Beavers, 2023), communication (e.g. Leavey, 2022), and argumentation scholars (e.g. Dewberry, 2021).

Auditors usually evaluate responses from governmental authorities on a pass/fail system. Perez (2022) explains, “If auditors are allowed to capture video without confrontation, then the audit is considered successful” (p. 139). However, what auditors consider a “confrontation” can vary significantly. For some auditors, even seemingly polite attempts to start a conversation or question their activities from police constitute a failure, while others only “fail” police who try to escalate beyond consensual conversation. Whether pass or fail, auditing videos are uploaded to social media platforms like YouTube, often in unedited or barely edited forms to further bolster their veridical credibility.

Auditing builds on the long-standing activist practice of filming police, with one of its more methodical instantiations being among “copwatchers.” As Toch (2012) notes, copwatching—the organized practice of community groups that follow police to their calls or patrol well-known policing locations and film the police at work—has been a part of activist practices since at least the 1960s. Some copwatchers may engage with police, but doing so is generally discouraged (Bock, 2016: 9), while others act strictly as silent witnesses, akin to legal observers (Simonson, 2016b: 425). This movement is meaningfully similar to auditors in their employment of cameras, their goal to hold police accountable, and their staunch defense of their Constitutional rights. However, copwatchers differ in that the right to record itself not what they are primarily testing, nor are their recordings necessarily distributed as content on social networks. As Dewberry (2021) explains, in contrast to the generally observational and passive role of copwatchers, auditors “have an intent to communicate by recording” (p. 98). Because auditors know police often engage with them solely because they are filming—indeed, both the activist and entertainment purposes of First Amendment auditing rely on this premise—the act of filming itself serves as a form of expressive conduct.

Mainstream media accounts of auditors often demonstrate antipathy toward practitioners, with the New York Post describing them as people who “pick fights with cops – for cash” and want to “cancel” police (Oppenheimer, 2021), and the Tucson Star accusing them of creating “videos that cater to cop-haters” (Alaimo, 2020). Some academic accounts echo these positions, framing the conduct of auditors as a form of cyberbullying or harassment (Jaffe, 2020). Furthermore, the risks of economic motivations serving as a driver of auditing have been critiqued within the auditing community itself, with the culprits labeled “frauditors” (Dewberry, 2021: 100). Yet, despite legitimate concerns over auditors’ potential commercial motivations, legal scholar Anna Therese Beavers (2023) argues that First Amendment audits can “promote a healthy skepticism of government, provide a check on institutional power, and illuminate issues of public concern” in ways that support not only the auditing movement, but “sociopolitical movements across the board” (p. 567). Moreover, in an interesting contrast to mainstream journalistic critiques of auditors, scholars have examined how First Amendment auditors often frame their work as a form of journalistic activity (Dewberry, 2021: 92; Leavey, 2022: 72), thus couching it specifically in the First Amendment protection of free press.

The popularization of First Amendment auditing has occurred alongside growing mistrust in American policing (Ortiz, 2020). The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and the COVID pandemic background a deep dip in confidence in police from a historical standard of around 64% down to 48%, even as other institutions like the medical system and public schools saw double-digit gains from their pandemic stalwartness (Brenan, 2020). Police themselves have also directly tied shifting public sentiment to the general increase in citizen filming, a phenomenon police leadership has alternatively called the “Ferguson effect” (Perez et al., 2015) or the “YouTube effect” (Davis, 2015). That these terms index the same phenomenon is interesting given that the infamous 2014 shooting of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer took place off-camera, spurring the first wave of national debate over police body cameras (Reynolds, 2021). By contrast, in pointing to YouTube, the latter term seems to instead indict the increase in citizen smartphone videos of police like that taken of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Regardless, it is clear that police have a shifting relationship with filmic media, whether produced by their own cameras or those of citizens, and this relationship is closely tied to contentious questions around trust and accountability forefronted by citizens who choose to film police. As Leavey (2022) argues, “Auditing is a way that people can cope with the twinned social epidemics plaguing the US, namely, loneliness and declining trust” in institutions and each other (p. 83).

Police officers’ shifting relationship to media is not one that they have always adapted to in productive ways. It is arguably the police (and related government authorities) who enable the social media success of First Amendment auditing. Without police responding to auditors, the videos would be little more than walking tours of municipal buildings, as Mexican Padilla initially framed the video that sparked the events of Leon Valley. Videos of unknown people noting what pamphlets are available in small-town building lobbies are unlikely to generate much online engagement; videos of contentious encounters with police, by contrast, are proven algorithmic winners. The popularity of police-based content is a major reason why police have increasingly developed social media strategies (Wood, 2020) meant to “enhance their relationships with the public” (Babic and Simpson, 2024: 2).

Yet First Amendment audit videos seem to demonstrate quite varied levels of media training and communication strategies by police (Perez, 2022), despite the development of best practice suggestions from policing and legal experts that are intended to standardize such encounters and reduce their viral potential (e.g. Daigle, 2022; Graham, 2021). Further fueling the promise of entertaining conflict offered by First Amendment auditing content, much of the public-facing police discourse surrounding First Amendment auditing has been critical. Assistant Police Chief Ed Wessing of Mesa, Arizona denied that practitioners should be called auditors, describing them instead as “social media agitators” (Scanlon, 2021), and Lieutenant Gary Vickers of the Newark, New Jersey police emphasized the growing fear among law enforcement officers of “death by media” (Noble, 2015) as an aggravating factor when responding to auditors. Police have described auditing activities as provocation, baiting (Telvock, 2022), and even as being similar to the domestic terrorist movement of “sovereign citizens” who deny the validity of legal jurisdiction (Thomas, 2019). The responses of officers to auditors thus demonstrate both a curiosity about auditing as a niche practice and the rising anxiety of police forces who are now frequently recorded by citizens (Leavey, 2022; Simonson, 2016b).

While there is robust analysis from legal and communication scholars regarding the practices (Dewberry, 2021; Perez, 2022) and motivations of auditors (Beavers, 2023; Leavey, 2022), we still know little about auditors’ effects on the civic sphere. Auditing is, fundamentally, a social media practice, distinguished from the older practice of copwatching not just by rhetorical framing or practitioners’ interventionist tendencies, but by their use of social media as the mechanism for accountability for negative experiences with police and government officials. As Leavey (2022) argues, “auditors can find meaning in their actions and connections with other auditors and their audiences/followers on social media platforms” (p. 83). Auditing is fundamentally a communal and interdependent endeavor by nature of its networked existence and the interplay of creator and audiences. The response of audiences to First Amendment auditing content, and their role in supplementing the activist efforts of auditors, is thus of fundamental importance to understanding what First Amendment auditing does to develop new forms of civic engagement.

From parasocial to paralocal

The concept of paralocal relationships builds upon Horton and Wohl’s (1956) foundational account of parasocial relationships. Horton and Wohl ruminate on the new media of the time, focusing on television and radio and noting that through these media, “the most remote and illustrious men are met as if they were in the circle of one’s peers” (p. 215). They compare the relationships between avid media consumers and their favorite performers to face-to-face interactions among real life social groups. In the following year, Horton and Strauss offered a clearer articulation of parasocial relationships from the perspective of the performer, noting that “what to the individual spectator is a personal relationship is to the performer a relationship with an anonymous collectivity” (p. 579). With parasocial interaction, “one party appears to address the other(s) directly, adjusting his course of action to the latter’s responses” (Horton and Strauss, 1957: 580). What was novel in the mid-20th century has become mundane in the 21st, where the idea of parasocial relationships has entered the general lexicon of online performers and audiences. Shen and Hallinan (2024) go so far as to argue that many platforms are now organized around such relationships, constituting “parasocial media” that monetize asymmetrical relationships between creators and users. Contemporary parasocial relationships also drive political inclinations. For example, Paravati et al. (2020) found that when people politically aligned with Donald Trump engaged with his Twitter feed, they felt an increased personal connection to him. Importantly, “participants seemed unaware that engaging with Trump on Twitter was affecting their attitudes and strengthening their positive feelings toward him” (p. 400). In other words, people do not need to consciously choose to create emotional connections with the objects of parasocial affection. Furthermore, parasocial relationships correlate with real world political effects and can predict political support for particular candidates (Cohen and Holbert, 2021). If paralocal relationships generate similar effects, as the case study below suggests, the concept can help shed light on political practices increasingly mediated by networked platforms.

While First Amendment auditors, like other successful creators, cultivate engaged audiences, their modes of relating do not map neatly onto the concept of parasocial relationships. First, the auditor is often hidden behind the camera, leading the viewer to visually connect with the place portrayed rather than the performer. In addition, unlike the mass media stars discussed by Horton and Wohl, who make efforts to generate intimacy between themselves and the audience, First Amendment auditors often portray themselves as deliberately unlikable as part of their activist strategy to provoke responses from the police. Nevertheless, despite these potentially dislikable personas, auditors have relationships with their audiences not just as content creators, but as activists who field requests from viewers to audit the police or governments of particular localities, requests auditors note in their videos. The performances of auditors encourage viewers to be “subtly insinuated into the program’s action and internal social relationships” which results in audiences being “ambiguously transformed into a group which observes and participates in the show by turn” (Horton and Wohl, 1956: 215). This is especially notable when auditors issue calls to action, like requesting audiences call the police departments they audit to express feedback on officer conduct.

Building on this idea, I introduce paralocal relationships, or relationships formed between a place and its residents, and audiences who have experienced the place solely or primarily through media. Just as the development of a parasocial relationship happens asymmetrically and at a distance, paralocal relationships develop with places one has never been but nevertheless feels a connection to – a connection that can provoke emotional investment and civic action. The mechanism for this development is the extensive focus on certain localities through the consumption of content on social media platforms. The viewers of First Amendment auditors largely do not seek external information from other news sources about these localities beforehand; their relationships with particular places are constructed primarily through their representation in auditing videos. The significant interest generated in Leon Valley, not the fleeting subject of a single viral video but extended over hundreds of videos by many different auditors spanning years, indicates that coverage of the town by First Amendment auditors led to the development of an enduring, asymmetrical relationship between some viewers and the town – what I call paralocal relationships. Beyond watching videos, members of the auditing community and their audiences were inspired to engage in activities like phone-calling campaigns, promoting petitions for recall elections, and donating to political funds, activities that are not the normal result of seeing an unfamiliar town in a YouTube video.

The local aspect of paralocal relationships is an important facet of their ability to generate viewer investment. That people have relationships with important places in their lives is well-established (Anton and Lawrence, 2016), but generally these locations have been physically important in some way, like home towns, or are connected to a group’s heritage and culture (e.g. McIntyre-Tamwoy, 2004). Yet Gieryn (2000) has gone so far as to argue that “everything that we study is emplaced” (p. 466). As Hess (2015) notes, this is one of the primary concerns surrounding the loss of local press, which have traditionally been the best point of information for connecting people to a given community through leveraging their “mediated social capital” (p. 486). The sense of connection people have with local places, and the social relationships these places host, “can play a crucial role on the engagement of a citizen” (Acedo et al., 2019: 1). Furthermore, Easthope (2004) notes that “ideas of ‘place’ are intertwined with ideas of community, collective memory, group (and individual) identity, political organization and capital flows,” and thus directly influence the material and ideological choices made by political localities (p. 128).

What conceptually constitutes a “local place” matters to auditors even beyond the local media gap that helps define a niche for their work. Harrison and Dourish (p. 1996) understand place, as opposed to space, as “a communally-held sense of appropriate behaviour, and a context for engaging in and interpreting action” (p. 70). Reflecting on this distinction ten years later, Dourish (2006) further clarifies that place “denotes the ways in which settings acquire recognizable and persistent social meaning in the course of interaction” (p. 299). When constructing First Amendment audits, it is this sense of place that auditors are concerned with. Indeed, their cameras provoke responses from police on the basis that filming in a given location is an unusual behavioral choice – that this is not a place where one films. Furthermore, auditors frequently attend to the specifics of their chosen auditing location in the titles of their videos, on-screen text, and through responding to viewer requests to conduct audits in certain towns. Place also matters to auditors in their attention to the law; a courthouse may have different rules for filming than a post office, for example, and different states and localities have their own statutes governing legal behavior. As Beavers (2023) notes, based on their knowledge of the Constitution and local laws surrounding filming government officials, auditors “carefully select the time and place of their audits” (p. 3) to maximize their chance of creating changes through political or legal pressure. Auditors thus localize their videos by communicating to audiences the relevant details about the place that affect their reception by local authorities and contextualize the choices they make about how to engage. These explanations help viewers to understand these localities as relatable political configurations by framing them as “primarily relational and contextual rather than as scalar or spatial,” engaging the ability of locality to express “itself in certain kinds of agency, sociality, and reproducibility” rather than simply geographical location (Appadurai, 1996: 198). This understanding aids auditing viewers in seeing themselves as agents of change who can affect the relational dynamics of featured local places, even if they are physically distant.

Leon Valley as a case study

I use the conflict in Leon Valley as a case study to understand how paralocal relationships are formed, what kinds of behavior they spur, and what results this form of civic engagement produces. Case studies are a rich method for close examination of events that allow “readers [to] recognize essential similarities to cases of interest to them,” setting the basis for developing “naturalistic generalizations” (Stake, 1978: 7), which “derive from the tacit knowledge of how things are, why they are, how people feel about them, and how these things are likely to be later or in other places” (p. 6). Taking advantage of the case study’s potential to empower “in-depth exploration from multiple perspectives” (Simons, 2009: 21) and facilitate a multi-sited study (Audet and d’Amboise, 2001), I consider both the events happening on YouTube and Facebook as platforms and those happening in the city of Leon Valley as interconnected parts of a larger story.

In constructing this case study, I watched every auditing video related to Leon Valley I could locate through YouTube searches, scouring channels from the involved auditors, and linked in news articles covering the issue. This resulted in a corpus of approximately 210 videos, ³ including hundreds of hours of footage from protests, local government meetings, and court hearings. I supplemented this corpus with 81 news articles on First Amendment auditors, associated paratexts like legal filings and government records, and Facebook pages devoted to local elections, activists, and campaign groups in Leon Valley. From this material, I constructed a detailed timeline of the events spanning from the beginning of the conflict with Jesus Padilla on 2 May 2018 through the firing of Chief Joseph Salvaggio in March 2021. This timeline also includes material from videos that are no longer publicly available, as I began following the events in Leon Valley in real time and took notes and gathered transcripts as the situation developed.

The political upheaval of Leon Valley

Leon Valley is a small enclave surrounded by the much larger city of San Antonio in south Texas, with a population of just over 11,000 people. Incorporated in 1952, the town’s primary legacy is staving off annexation attempts from San Antonio and subsequently capitalizing on the city traffic that flows through the municipality, more than 243,000 people a day according to the town’s government (Leon Valley, 2025). And, like its larger counterpart San Antonio, Leon Valley tends to be more liberal-leaning than much of the rest of Texas, ⁴ which has been a prominent Republican stronghold in state and national elections for over two decades. From the bright-colored playground equipment in local parks, to the gas stations dotting the highways connecting to San Antonio on all sides, to the water tower looming not-so-high over a nearby Planet Fitness, Leon Valley looks like an ordinary and unremarkable American town. Yet the controversy here became so heated that one Houston Chronicle reporter described the town as becoming “as potent a symbol as Waco or Ruby Ridge” (Selcraig, 2018).

Joseph Salvaggio was hired as the police chief of Leon Valley in 2016 over 48 other candidates (MacCormack, 2016). Upon his hiring, Salvaggio told local station KSAT he wanted to focus on community outreach (Romero, 2016). His tenure seems to have been relatively quiet until his encounters with First Amendment auditors, beginning with the arrest of Mexican Padilla on 2 May 2018. After other auditors saw the video Padilla posted of his arrest, they began appearing in the town to conduct various civil rights protests. One of the major escalatory incidents took place on 31 May 2018, when Texas auditor Jack Miller of the channel TXSHEEPDOG72 ⁵ entered a city building while recording and wearing a fake rubber gun in a holster at his hip as a combined First and Second Amendment audit in response to a sign on the building that prohibited carrying firearms. The same day, Leon Valley, in cooperation with several other Texas law enforcement agencies, procured an arrest warrant for Miller and a search warrant for his house. Miller filmed and posted the subsequent SWAT raid on his home and the detainment of his family, ⁶ where police confiscated all of his firearms, cameras, and computer and storage devices.

While the arrest of Padilla generated ire from the First Amendment auditor community, being arrested was generally understood as within the range of expected outcomes for auditors, who would then be able to file complaints and court cases that would validate their actions and result in both legal changes and professional consequences for officers. Just the year before in nearby Fort Worth, Texas, auditor Phillip Turner, who posts to the channel The Battousai, had secured a landmark decision in the Fifth Circuit that explicitly recognized filming the police as a protected First Amendment right (Turner v. Driver, No. 16-10312). Turner’s victory came after being arrested by police for silently filming a police station from nearby public property. Thus, like other activists, arrests for exercising what auditors considered protected civil rights presented potential opportunities rather than mere consequences. A SWAT raid on a family home, however, was seen as a violent, unconstitutional affront that effectively declared war against the auditing community.

On 14 June 2018, Padilla returned to Leon Valley with fellow auditor Mark Brown, who was livestreaming to the channel Tuc. Police Suck. ⁷ After attempting to enter the Leon Valley police station with their cameras, Brown and Padilla were told city policy prohibits filming and pushed to the sidewalk. Brown’s video, which is no longer available publicly online, showed police officers grabbing and arresting Padilla before turning on Brown, tasing him multiple times and breaking several of his ribs while arresting him, and confiscating and turning off his camera. Two days later, on 16 June, Phillip Turner entered the same station and remained in the foyer while filming, interacting with officers including Chief Salvaggio (who acknowledged knowing who Turner was), and filing an official complaint on camera. ⁸ After Turner was allowed to leave without incident, there was some hope in the auditing community that the city was reforming its response to auditors. This hope was quickly dashed on 18 June when auditor James Springer, from the channel James Freeman, led several other activists to the Leon Valley city hall where they flew a “Thin Blue Line” flag upside down, splattered it with red paint, and stomped on it. Auditors then attempted to carry the flag into the city hall to show police officers. Everyone present, including purportedly an uninvolved bystander (Agorist, 2018), were immediately arrested for obstructing the entryway and had their cameras seized.

Auditors were fed up at this point and decided that if police would continue arresting small groups of them, they would appear in a larger group instead – a show of force of dozens of cameras. On 23 June 2018, a number of auditors converged on the city and walked around filming various public buildings and police throughout the day. Chief Salvaggio reportedly told some of the auditors he would hold a press conference at 4:00 PM to address their complaints, and to have everyone gather outside the police station. At the appointed time, Salvaggio and a contingent of police officers emerged from the station and began arresting those present for the fake press conference, as well as confiscating all recording equipment from everyone nearby. Salvaggio’s justification for confiscating equipment was that the devices might have evidence of death threats directed at police in the form of YouTube comments posted by viewers of the auditors’ YouTube videos. ⁹ Five auditors were criminally charged as a result of these arrests (Bishop, 2018).

Two weeks later, 11 auditors filed a joint lawsuit against the police department and the town of Leon Valley alleging unlawful arrest, excessive force, and improper seizure of property (see Ibañez, 2018). In addition to compensatory and punitive damages, the auditors sought a declaration that Leon Valley’s policies regarding public recording were unconstitutional. Between the civil lawsuit filed by auditors and the criminal charges several of them faced, the next few months were filled with hours of detailed testimony in courts from auditors and city officials. In the meantime, with many prominent auditors either banned from public property in Leon Valley or advised by their lawyers to refrain from further auditing activities during litigation, the phenomenon of auditors physically appearing at Leon Valley buildings subsided. This was not, it turned out, indicative of a victory for the city, or a general loss of interest in the city’s activities among YouTube viewers.

A substantial audience on YouTube had taken note of the goings-on in Leon Valley, some of them Leon Valley locals or nearby Texans, others scattered around and even outside of the United States. With many of the auditors involved in the conflict to this point either refraining from further activities or inexperienced at directing social movements outside of auditing, in their stead emerged Justin Pulliam, an activist accomplished at pressuring local governments through open records requests and investigative reporting. Pulliam describes himself on his YouTube channel Corruption Reports – Justin Pulliam as an independent investigative journalist focused on government corruption with “an emphasis on stories about local government because the city-county level of government is what most people can successfully change – and this channel will teach you how YOU can make a difference” (Pulliam, 2022). With this as his goal, the goings-on in Leon Valley presented the ideal location for Pulliam to deploy his mix of investigative skills and his interest in building local activist movements.

In over a hundred videos spanning across three years, Pulliam conducted in-depth investigations into Salvaggio, the Leon Valley police force, and the local government of the city. His coverage resulted in an almost farcical amount of disorder in Leon Valley. In short summary, Pulliam’s news reports and work with a local activist group formed in the wake of auditor arrests, the Change Leon Valley Project, contributed to the departure of the City Manager, the firing of Police Chief Salvaggio, and the election of a new mayor. Two City Council members were recalled by voters to break up the standing majority voting bloc and replaced with candidates more favorable to the auditors. After City Manager Kelly Kuenstler stepped down, citing in part the chaos caused by First Amendment auditors, her replacement Gilbert Perales lasted just four months on the job. He too resigned, saying that he had only agreed to take the job because the “council agreed to focus on the future and place the turbulent past in the rear-view mirror,” an agreement he did not feel they fulfilled (Huddleston, 2021). At one point, the City Council threatened to change their bylaws so that only property owners and residents of the city could speak during the public comment portion of meetings; Pulliam subsequently began investigating acquiring several feet of property in the town. His coverage fostered intense struggles between Leon Valley political leaders, with Salvaggio at one point requesting an external investigation from the Texas Rangers to determine if city leaders were withholding information from open records requests.

Leon Valley was a town already in political conflict before auditors arrived. In 2017, voters supported a home rule charter that afforded council members and the city manager more opportunities to remove each other from office and stymie each other’s proposals. The two council members recalled by voters had previously used these powers to oust a fellow member on a 2-1 vote; voters later reinstated the removed council member. Business leaders and city officials had been at each other’s throats for years over enforcement of city regulations, and the city was rife with ongoing lawsuits, a major contributor to burning through seven different city managers in under 20 years. In other words, every wart and flaw of Leon Valley was exacerbated by the laser focus on the town by auditors and their ability to reveal yet another way in which city officials, elected politicians, and everyday citizens were out of step.

The resolution to the auditors’ saga with Leon Valley came with the official firing of Police Chief Salvaggio on 5 March 2021. His departure had been in the works since auditors and local citizens collaborated to successfully elect favorable candidates to key city positions in 2020, and Pulliam had revealed internal memos between Salvaggio and the city negotiating his resignation since 1 February 2021. Initially it seemed a settlement had been reached and was proposed to the City Council on 11 February, where Salvaggio’s terms were read into the record and set for a later vote. By 24 February, however, Salvaggio removed his offer to leave and demanded a settlement of at least five times his initial offer. The City Council was done; Salvaggio was fired, according to him, amid complaints about ongoing illegal behavior by other city officials (Virgin and Sharma, 2021). Pulliam and the auditors announced their victory over the town after a three-year blitz of lawsuits, on-the-ground activism, open records revelations, political campaigns, and general civic mayhem. Pulliam’s video announcing Salvaggio’s firing has been viewed over 155,000 times on YouTube as of March 2025—an audience 14 times greater than the population of the city Salvaggio had served for five years. ¹⁰ “I said I wouldn’t stop until things get better,” Pulliam wrote in the video description. “And it has. I will continue to create positive change. With your support, we will continue to win victories.”

Paralocal politics and good digital citizenship

The changes in Leon Valley were the result of a coalition of local and paralocal civic engagement. Those affected most by the changes to policing and council leadership were the residents of the municipality, but a number of instigating incidents, as well as background financial and informational support, were driven by people who were not local but nevertheless embraced a particular kind of activist investment in Leon Valley. Paralocal engagement from outside viewers, enabled by First Amendment auditors, was not the ultimate cause for the police chief’s firing, or multiple city managers quitting, or city councilors being recalled or elected; local citizens drove these actions. But First Amendment auditors and their audiences were notably and unusually proximate to these changes, reporting on them, provoking embarrassing incidents for city officials to deal with, donating toward campaigns, and vocally supporting citizen recall efforts. First Amendment auditor provocation and their subsequent coverage of the strife in Leon Valley demonstrates one way in which social media forges new connections to local places – even for people who are not actually locals. The interest in Leon Valley, mediated through the YouTube channels of First Amendment auditors and enabling far-flung audiences to participate in localized struggles, challenges common wisdom about who has an investment in the local politics of a given place. Such behaviors indicate that paralocal relationships play on both the media’s power to shrink perceived distance (Silverstone, 2007) and parasociality’s power to shrink perceived difference (Horton and Strauss, 1957). These factors come together to give paralocal audiences both an investment in the outcomes of distant places and a belief that they can usefully intervene.

For Silverstone (2007), “distance” is not simply a spatial concept, “not just a material, a geographical or even a social category, but it is, by virtue of all of these and as a product of their interrelation, a moral category” (p. 172). Overcoming the problems of distance in terms of people’s feelings of connection, influence, and responsibility toward other places and people requires what he terms “proper distance,” or “the critical notion that implies and involves a search for enough knowledge and understanding of the other person or the other culture to enable responsibility and care, as well as to enable the kind of action that, informed by that understanding, is in turn enabling” (Silverstone, 2007). Achieving proper distance has long been the goal of news media, but the reality has instead often resulted in the unfamiliar being “pushed to a point beyond strangeness, beyond humanity; or it is drawn so close as to become indistinguishable from ourselves” (Silverstone, 2007: 172). The former impedes the belief that intervention is possible; the latter denies differences that can and should shape interventionist choices. However, as Tamar Ashuri (2010) notes, despite his deep theorizing on the role of distance, “Silverstone pays almost no attention to the questions of how and by whom a ‘proper’ distance can be determined” (p. 108). Paralocal relationships present one possible answer to these questions, as the interactions between media presenters, distant audiences, and local residents work to triangulate productive routes of civic engagement from both near and far actors.

Paralocal relationships thus intervene in mediated perceptions of distance and difference. The paralocal is not ourselves, but it is like ourselves in meaningful ways that enable empathy, allow distant viewers to envision change, and encourage them to empower local people to achieve these changes. As an expression of proper distance, paralocal relationships simultaneously acknowledge that strangers, and strange places, are different from ourselves and our own localities, yet recognize in their similarities opportunities to be compassionate and productive. The issue-driven nature of First Amendment auditing likely helps to enable this relationship; it elides differences that are outside of its scope of activism, and builds instead upon people’s similar goals for curtailing perceived governmental overreach. This might explain, in part, why First Amendment auditing, despite being an overtly political practice, evades many of the partisan political battles that dominate American discourse. There is no question that First Amendment auditing, or other methods of developing paralocal relationships, do not give a full view of a place or its people, yet their narrow view is well defined in advance, and enables people who care about these very particularized goals to self-select into an engaged and issue-oriented audience.

In their analysis of public trust in news media, Hanitzsch and colleagues (2018) note that trust is built over time and based on past experiences that lead to future expectations about how trusted actors will perform. Trust, they argue, is thus most “essential specifically where verification is most difficult” (p. 5), and entails audiences making themselves vulnerable to the possibility of being misled, of having that trust violated by a failure of news media to perform to expectations. By narrowing their scope to a very specific issue and enacting a repeated process to address that issue, First Amendment auditors are able to build trust with their audiences by rigorously adhering to the limited activities they claim to do: filming from public spaces and ardently defending their rights to do so when confronted. They need not address the wide range of issues expected of traditional national or even local news, but can specialize into building trust with their audiences within a bounded area of concern. Their open advocacy for their cause serves to reinforce this relationship of trust; while they often portray themselves as journalists, as highlighted by both Perez (2022) and Dewberry (2021), they do so in a way that positions them antagonistically toward what they often describe as “establishment media” or “corporate media.” And while other scholars have aptly described how auditors fit within the category of citizen journalists, I contend that their ability to develop trust from their audiences is more connected to their role as activist or advocate journalists.

Contrasting advocate journalists with the traditionally lionized model of objective journalists, Ashuri (2012) explains that “like the objective journalist, the advocate journalist testifies in the public space about events witnessed firsthand, but unlike the objective journalist, the goal of the advocate journalist is to change the reality by making it public” (p. 40). In other words, because First Amendment auditors do not pretend to be objective about their cause, they cannot break trust with their audiences by being partisan in this endeavor. Their premise is that they will advocate for their cause using journalistic methods like publicly recording, questioning government officials, and disseminating information; they have thus aligned their message and their medium. This is not to say all auditors succeed at building trust with audiences, and there are certainly still ways that they can violate established forms of trust, as noted before with intra-community disputes around “frauditors” who are more dedicated to generating social media content than furthering the cause. But First Amendment auditor methods, sincerely and consistently executed, may nevertheless offer audiences the deep levels of trust within narrow fields of interest that create optimal conditions for the development of paralocal relationships. And trust, Silverstone (2007) notes, “is a way of managing, that is reducing, distance” (p. 123). First Amendment auditing videos thus occupy, in narrowcasting form, the same space Ashuri (2010) once outlined as being the purview of the broadcast television industry, serving as “a space of social and political communication, a space in which the relationships between the remote and proximate, the foreign and familiar are articulated, constructed, and destroyed” (p. 106). Paralocal relationships emerge from the representations of places offered by auditors within this negotiated space of meaning. They enable audiences to envision represented places as familiar, known, and cared for rather than as distant and untouchable elsewheres. And, in making such places feel familiar, paralocal relationships encourage a sense that intervention elsewhere is possible, much as it is on one’s own local level.

Distance, as I have discussed it here, is less about physical proximity or even relatability than it is about denoting the places in which people feel they can effectively intervene. In this way, paralocal relationships are distinctly unlike the parasocial relationships discussed by scholars since Horton and Wohl (1956), despite both operating via mediated, asymmetrical affiliations. Where parasocial relationships have often been viewed as unidirectional, flowing from audiences toward the media figure who serves as an object of mass affection, paralocal relationships encourage a multi-way dialogue and interactivity between participants. In Leon Valley, mediated communications flowed in multiple directions – from auditors to audiences and audiences back to auditors, from citizens to distant audiences and audiences to citizens. The tactics of auditors, often calling upon their audiences to take very specific actions like calling a police station, remove ambiguity about how people should participate; the affordances of social media, like the ability to join a Facebook group specifically about Leon Valley recall efforts, make supporting distant local efforts accessible to the average person. First Amendment auditing demonstrates that activist creators can lead audiences into intervening via clear and direct calls to action, lending auditors’ protest actions significantly more attention and political weight. In other words, First Amendment auditors were the conduit for paralocal relationships in Leon Valley, but audiences were the ones who experienced such relationships and whose subsequent conduct of viewing, donating, and assisting local citizens in retributive actions intensified political pressure on city leaders.

In this way, auditors serve less as traditional parasocial figures and more as trusted intermediaries for paralocal relationships. That is, auditors are social brokers who are able to build long-term relationships of trust with their audiences and use these relationships to validate particular actors and struggles in unfamiliar places. Stovel and Shaw (2012) understand brokers as people who “trade in gaps in social structure,” and through bridging these gaps, “help goods, information, opportunities, or knowledge flow across that gap” (p. 141). To this definition, I would add “trust.” In other words, First Amendment auditors lend the trust they have developed with their audiences to local actors in the places they want to change. And with this trust comes the increased possibility of civic engagement by non-local audiences. Whatever else the political takeaways from Leon Valley may be, auditing audiences participated to a degree uncommon for viewers of YouTube videos. This may be due, in part, to their recognition that “civilian filming of the police is not only a tool of police accountability, but also a method of power transfer from police officers to the populations that they police” (Simonson, 2016a:1561). Audiences’ desire to shift this balance of power in favor of local citizens and the direct and actionable requests for engagement issued by auditors both contributed to fostering paralocal relationships between auditing audiences and Leon Valley. Taken in combination, these factors point to a desire for engagement with local politics, even as the methods for doing so change alongside the rise of social media.

The development of paralocal relationships is one path by which people can engage with local politics, both proximate and distant, and is especially important in the increasing absence of traditional local news as a spur for civic action (Hayes and Lawless, 2015). While their investments in the outcomes of Leon Valley’s power struggle did not hold the same implications for everyday life as local citizens, paralocal audiences chose nevertheless to engage in expressive conduct around the events of Leon Valley, which Kligler-Vilenchik and Literat (2024) argue is both “a form of political participation in and of itself,” and even “normatively expected of ‘good citizens’” (p. 131) on social media. The paralocal relationships that auditing audiences developed with Leon Valley, and their subsequent participation in its politics, is not an intervention easily explained by traditional models of citizenship but instead intimately bound up with the mediation of distance and locality, shifting understandings of what it means to be a good citizen in the digital age, and emergent forms of political content on social media. Supplementing the role of consuming and participating in First Amendment auditor content as a form of political engagement, Pulliam also posted frequent explainers for his audience on how to conduct similar operations in their own localities, from how to request open records to how to organize activist groups. As Kligler-Vilenchik and Literat (2025) argue, regardless of the success of particular activist endeavors, they still provide an opportunity to teach people “skills and provides them with civic energy that we would want to see in participatory citizens” (p. 130). Pulliam’s videos trained his audience to take the same kind of actions he had taken in Leon Valley within their own local communities and other relevant locales. He thus positioned himself as a replicable example for what civic engagement aided by paralocal relationships might look like.

First Amendment auditors have taken lessons from Leon Valley about the relative power of driving large online audiences to engage with small localities, increasingly traveling to smaller towns rather than major cities and often invoking the specter of making local officials face “the next Leon Valley.” Recent examples of localities targeted by non-local auditors include Gastonia, North Carolina (population 80,411), Rosenberg, Texas (population 38,282), and tiny Mountainair, New Mexico (population 928). This latter locality is perhaps the most telling; auditor James Freeman has posted at least a dozen videos from Mountainair, with the most watched totaling over 275,000 views ¹¹ —275 times more views than the town has citizens. These efforts indicate that First Amendment auditors view the events of Leon Valley, and the harnessing of paralocal relationships, as a kind of ideal model for how activists, audiences, and local citizens can work together to reshape politics.

The development of paralocal relationships is one path by which people can engage with local politics, both proximate and distant. They demonstrate that people are still driven by an interest in local politics as a place where change is possible, but that they may not perceive a lack of physical proximity to the local as a deterrent. This study’s findings are limited, focused as they are on a single case study across a period of three years in one small American city and following a niche, though growing, form of activist content creation. Leon Valley voters, representing a tightly-knit and slightly more liberal area than much of the surrounding state of Texas, may have responded to auditors more favorably – or more unfavorably – than nearby areas. In addition, it is hard to measure whether paralocal engagement with Leon Valley spurred viewers to engage more fully with their own local communities, or to know if these viewers were already the type to be more politically engaged to begin with, though Leon Valley auditors did offer resources and training for how to engage. In many ways, Leon Valley was likely the perfect storm of a situation, with a coalition of local people ready to be activated by the right goal and a group of paralocal activists who had the resources and desire to engage. The case study approach serves, however, to introduce the still unfamiliar phenomenon of First Amendment auditors and to record in detail their methods, concerns, and ways of capturing attention and disseminating information. Finally, though the “First Amendment” is limited to the United States, the general methods of auditing as a practice have increasingly been taken up by social media activists in the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere, indicating the potential for similar effects to be studied in other national contexts.