A renewed battle over short-term rentals has exposed an uglier side of Folly
by Lorne Chambers | Editor
For hundreds of years, battles have been fought on the shores of Folly Beach, both literal and symbolic. And our typically peaceful little island has never been a place where people are afraid to speak their minds or fight for what they believe in. But old battle lines were drawn in the sand again this summer when Charleston County Circuit Judge Thomas J. Rode nullified the city’s short-term rental (STR) cap, ruling that the citizen-led referendum that created it amounted to an illegal tax because of its application fee structure. City Council responded on several fronts, appealing the ruling, placing a moratorium on new STR licenses, and quickly moving to adopt a similar cap of its own. At the same time, the city had already begun looking for an outside organization to study the issue and recommend the best path forward.
The flurry of activity reignited a fight many on Folly hoped had finally been settled. Both sides have dug in, and much of the battle has moved online, where the rhetoric has all too often taken an ugly turn. Name-calling, personal attacks, and even threats have fanned the flames, raising the temperature of an already heated debate.
On social media, arguments over the future of short-term rentals have devolved into name-calling and personal attacks. Elected officials and residents have had their motives questioned. Doctored and AI-generated images have been circulated to mock Mayor Chris Bizzell and others involved in the debate. In some instances, the rhetoric has veered into threats.
All of it is happening on an island that prides itself on being a tight-knit community, a place where the person you spar with online might be in line behind you at Bert’s or next to you at the bar at The Crab Shack.
So, how did a disagreement over public policy become so personal? And, perhaps more importantly, how does a community come back from it?
The Folly Current recently spoke to Dr. Michael Lee, a professor of communication at the College of Charleston and director of the college’s Civility Initiative, to talk about conflict, social media, and what happens when disagreement begins damaging the relationships that hold a community together.
Perhaps the first mistake may be assuming that conflict itself is the problem.
“Sometimes we need to have fights, and fights can make relationships stronger,” said Lee, who also hosts the podcast When We Disagree, which explores how arguments can be constructive and helpful when given the right space and context.
According to Lee, a problem arises when people fail to recognize the difference between debate and dialogue. Debate involves determining what is true or false, weighing evidence, and assessing the credibility of information. Dialogue asks something different of the participants.
“The dialogue is really more about letting go of winning and just trying to humanize,” Lee said. “Why are you here on this issue? How did you get to be here on this issue?”
That distinction may be particularly relevant on Folly, where people on opposite sides of the STR debate often say they are fighting for the same thing: protecting the island they love.
They simply have profoundly different ideas about what protecting it means.
Through the Civility Initiative, Lee studies and teaches ways of navigating disagreement at the national, state, and local levels. The initiative has also begun working with local government officials in South Carolina on civil discourse and what Lee calls “healthy conflict.”
Too often, he said, communities enter contentious discussions without establishing expectations for how those conversations will occur.
“So many times we sort of hope a good conversation happens, but we haven’t actually done anything to enable it to happen,” he said. “We just kind of hold our breath and hope it goes well.”
When the Fight Moves Online
After a flurry of special council meetings following Judge Rode’s ruling, the online rhetoric seemed to ratchet up on social media. On sites like Follitics and FollyBeachPolitics, two local Facebook groups that serve as a sounding board for local issues, several AI-generated memes of Bizzell were posted, including one of the mayor in a Star Trek suit declaring he was here to destroy the island. Others took less comical approaches, including some that inched toward physical threats. Like one poster who suggested catching the mayor in a “back alley” and giving him a “swirly.” While on the surface the post seems like just playful social media trash talk and public venting, the physical act of forcefully shoving someone’s head into a toilet and flushing it would certainly be considered assault by any definition.
As for Bizzell, he’s rolling with the cyber punches as best he can. He knows it comes with the job. A job that, it should be noted, only brings home around $800 a month. It’s much less for councilmembers, who have also had to endure personal attacks. For Bizzell, however, a line is crossed when online conversations bring his wife into the discussion.
“This past week I’m just tired from it,” he said, but added that he’s not hiding in his house. He said he will continue to be social because talking to people face-to-face is a much more productive form of communication than sitting behind a computer screen and lobbing insults and threats.
“It’s weird about social media; I can have one-on-one interactions with people that are a lot more productive and honest than what we’re seeing on social media. That’s one reason I just kind of discount all that. People absolutely trash me online, but when we’re one-on-one, it’s a little bit more civil and way more productive.”
As for the swirly threat? Bizzell shrugs it off.
“If you do that in an alley, it’d really be awful,” Bizzell said
“There are plenty of folks who are comfortable being vocal behind a keyboard, but not at council meetings or social gatherings,” said Greta Anderson, who moderates the Facebook page Follitics, which has been a part of the local dialogue for more than 15 years.
Dr. Lee said the familiar explanation is “keyboard courage,” people feeling empowered to say things from behind a screen that they would never say face-to-face. But Lee seems to be interested in a potentially more consequential question: whether online discussions are beginning to replace the personal conversations neighbors once had with one another.
Despite the problems social media poses, Anderson sees Follitics as a useful way for residents to communicate and vent their frustrations. As a moderator, she tries not to steer the conversation or restrict people’s ability to speak openly.
“My responsibility as an admin is to provide a platform for folks to debate their differences. Both sides of the STR issue are passionate, just like people are about most politics, because politics are personal,” she said.
She also sees Follitics as a sort of microcosm of the entire community.
“I think the discourse on Follitics accurately reflects the division in the Folly community right now, and that the comments from what may seem like a few actually represent the feelings of many.”
Roberta Murchison, a moderator for FollyBeachPolitics, doesn’t feel the same way. She blames most of the more inflammatory online rhetoric on people who live “off,” as she puts it, referring to folks who don’t live full time on Folly Beach. She also says she can’t see some of the more incendiary posts on Follitics because she has been blocked from that site, which is why she helped start FollyBeachPolitics to begin with.
“People say we’re really divided, but who’s divided? I don’t really feel like the community—if you call Folly residents the community—is really that divided,” she contends, despite the fact that the public vote on the cap was relatively close, 53 percent in favor to 47 percent opposed.
“The people who are most upset are the people who live off, the realtors, and even James Island, but mostly not even in the state,” she said. “When I look at the local Folly people, there’s probably just a handful.”
Whether they live full time on the island, work here, own property on Folly, or just like to visit the beach, people are passionate about the STR issue. And much of what they consume online comes from these social media sites, which may or may not reflect the community as a whole. But it shapes public perception and affects our relationships.
Lee says part of the issue is that people are exposed to vastly more interpersonal hostility than they were before social media.
“Thirty years ago, we wouldn’t be exposed to that on a day-to-day basis,” he said.
That exposure can shape what people expect when they encounter someone they disagree with. Lee pointed to research where participants were asked to predict how badly a conversation about a contentious subject would go before actually having it. Their expectations tended to be considerably more negative than the conversations themselves.
In other words, watching people tear each other apart online can begin to convince us that talking to someone on the other side isn’t even worth the effort.
Common Ground isn’t Middle Ground
Dr. Lee makes another distinction that could be useful for a divided community: middle ground versus common ground.
Middle ground requires compromise—each side giving something up to arrive somewhere between their positions. Common ground requires no such agreement.
For him, civility doesn’t mean avoiding difficult subjects or asking passionate people to become less passionate. Nor does it mean that people with deeply held beliefs have to pull their punches entirely.
Instead, part of civility is recognizing that there are things one can say or do that might inflict lasting damage and consciously deciding not to use them.
“You know full well in every relationship you have, there’s something you can say that can end that relationship,” Lee said.
That may be especially important in a community the size of Folly Beach. When a national political fight ends, most of the combatants will never encounter one another. On Folly, today’s opponent remains tomorrow’s neighbor.
How do we Move Forward?
The legal and political questions surrounding short-term rentals aren’t going away anytime soon. Neither, most likely, are the disagreements about what Folly should look like in the future.
Murchison remains hopeful that the Folly community will overcome this issue as it has in the past, like with the beach alcohol ban and other contentious issues.
Anderson is less optimistic when it comes to closing the chasm that has been created by the issue.
“At this point, I worry that some of the wounds caused by this division may take a long time to heal,” she says.
Lee’s work suggests that agreement isn’t necessarily the goal. Learning how to disagree might be. And on an island where nearly everyone involved claims to be fighting for the place they love. There is, of course, another complication when talking about civility and conflict in America. Our history teaches us that conflict can be necessary. Some of the people most celebrated in the American story are those who refused to remain quiet, used fiery rhetoric, and fought against the prevailing order to bring about change. The nation itself was born from revolution.
This history can make restraint feel like weakness and compromise seem like surrender. It can also encourage people to view their personal and political battles in similarly existential terms—seeing every disagreement as another fight to be won by any means necessary.
Folly Beach even has its own small connection to that history, having played a supporting role during the Revolutionary War. Nearly 250 years later, the island is again filled with people passionately fighting over its future.
But Lee’s argument isn’t that people should stop fighting for what they believe in. Civility, as he describes it, is more about knowing which weapons not to use and recognizing that winning today’s argument may not be worth permanently damaging a relationship with someone who will still be your neighbor tomorrow.
That distinction matters even more on an island as small as Folly.
“There is no revolution on Folly Beach without everybody losing,” Lee said.
