Data report · September 2026 · Public Square Analytics

The New Topics Arriving on Local-Government Feeds: Data Centers, E‑Bikes, Cameras, and AI Are Rising Fastest

Every communications calendar is mostly the same year to year — meetings, closures, events, weather. But underneath the routine, the subjects local governments post about are shifting, and a few are climbing fast. We compared what 4,705 U.S. city and county governments posted in the first eight months of 2026 against the same window in 2025 — more than a million posts — and measured which topics are gaining the most ground. Four stand out, they have something in common, and two of them are the kind of post residents react to hardest.

In this report: What’s climbing · What the risers have in common · The ones that fill your comments · What isn’t rising · What to do with this · How we measured it

What’s climbing — and how we know it’s real

The number of governments we track more than tripled between these two windows — from 1,511 posting in early 2025 to 4,705 in early 2026 — so raw post counts are up almost everywhere, which tells you nothing. To find what’s genuinely rising, we measure each topic’s share of the conversation: how many posts, out of every 10,000, are about it. Then we run the honest check — we recompute the same shares using only the 1,480 governments we tracked in both years, so a growing topic has to grow among the same accounts, not just because we added more of them.

Four topics clear that bar comfortably.

Posts and governments count deduplicated 2026 posts (Jan–Aug). “Growth” is the 2026 share of all posts divided by the 2025 share; the panel column repeats that calculation on the 1,480 governments active in both years. Cameras went from a single matched post in the 2025 window, so we report the arrival rather than a multiplier off a base of one.

Data centers are the clearest case. Their share of the conversation roughly doubled, and — unusually — the growth is larger, not smaller, when we hold the panel of governments fixed (2.75×). That’s the signature of a topic spreading within established government pages, not just riding the arrival of new ones. E‑bikes and e‑scooters are the widest-reaching, showing up on nearly a thousand government feeds. License‑plate cameras are the newest: a topic that barely existed on local-government pages a year ago and is now a standing item for hundreds of them. And AI — chatbots, permitting assistants, “we’re piloting” announcements — nearly doubled.

What these posts look like

The pattern is consistent — a concrete local decision or a resident question, not a celebration. A few real examples from the top of each topic:

• Data centers — the City of Cleveland, Ohio announcing it had rejected a data-center permit; Skagit County, Washington adopting a moratorium on new ones; and the City of Abilene, Texas posting plainly about “data center water usage.” Water, power, and land use — not ribbon-cuttings.
• License‑plate cameras — the City of Texarkana, Texas opening with “we’ve heard some questions — and honestly, some misunderstandings — about our Flock cameras,” and the City of Salem, Massachusetts announcing it would not renew its Flock Safety contract. Both are among the highest-engagement posts we measured on the topic.
• E‑bikes & scooters — Holly Springs, North Carolina with “Attention e‑bike and e‑moto riders,” and St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana responding to “numerous reports of irresponsible e‑bike riders.” The angle that lands is clarifying the rules, by device and location.

What the four have in common

These aren’t random. Read them together and the same theme runs through all four: they are the topics where technology and land use arrive in a resident’s own neighborhood and someone has questions. A data center means water, power, and truck traffic near a subdivision. E‑bikes and scooters mean new rules about who rides what, and where. License‑plate cameras mean surveillance and a records question. AI means “is a machine handling my request now?”

Two of the four — data centers and cameras — are also genuinely contested, and that is exactly why they show up in the growth data before they show up in a comms plan. Residents raise them first; the government account responds. If a topic on this list hasn’t reached your feed yet, the pattern in the data says it is a question of when, not whether — and the governments already posting about it are the ones worth reading before you have to.

The contested ones don’t just spread — they fill your comments

Rising volume is one thing; rising volume on posts people actually engage with is another. So we measured engagement — reactions, comments, and shares — on each topic, reporting the median post, because a handful of viral posts distort any average. The typical local-government post earns a median of 11 engagements. Here is where the risers land against that line.

License‑plate cameras and data centers earn about four times the engagement of a typical post — medians near 47 and 44. That is the fingerprint of contested content: people don’t just like it, they argue about it, and they share it to bring neighbors in. (Our separate read on Flock cameras found a third of those posts draw more comments than likes — the most contested content we’ve measured.) E‑bikes sit a little above the line, and AI right on it — for AI, it’s the volume that’s climbing, not the reaction. Worth knowing before you build a post around it: an AI announcement is unlikely to be your engagement moment, but a data-center or camera post almost certainly will draw a crowd, whether or not you’re ready for it.

And some topics you’d expect aren’t rising

The counter-examples are just as useful, because they keep you from chasing a trend that has already peaked.

• Food trucks and pickleball are big but flat. Food trucks are the single most-posted topic we tracked here — 11,532 posts from more than 2,000 governments — and pickleball is on more than a thousand feeds. But neither is gaining share; they’re already mainstream. They’re reliable community content, not a rising wave.
• Broadband and opioid/overdose messaging receded as a share of the conversation — each fell by more than half. Governments didn’t stop posting about them, but the rest of the feed grew faster around them, which usually means a funding cycle or a public-health push has moved past its peak.
• Homelessness holds steady and engages hard — a median of 22, twice the typical post — without gaining much share. A durable, high-stakes topic rather than an emerging one.

What to do with this

1. Treat the four risers as your early-warning list. Data centers, e‑bikes, cameras, and AI are arriving on peer feeds ahead of the average calendar. If yours is coming, the useful move is to see how peers framed the first post before the questions start — not after.
2. Prepare the contested two before you need them. Because data-center and camera posts draw roughly 4× the engagement, the comment thread is the real work. Have your answers to the obvious questions — what it captures, who sees the data, how long it’s kept; water, power, traffic — ready before you publish. We’ve written starting points for posting about a data center, license‑plate cameras, and e‑bikes and scooters.
3. Don’t over-invest in what’s already peaked. Food trucks and pickleball are dependable, but they’re not where attention is moving. Use them; don’t build a strategy around them.
4. Check your own community against its real peers. These are national patterns. What’s rising in a fast-growing exurb is not what’s rising in a built-out inner-ring suburb. The useful question is what’s climbing for governments like yours — same size, same region — which is what GovFeeds is built to show.

How we measured this

Nothing here relies on private analytics — every number comes from posts any resident could see.

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