The citizen-centric smart city is the latest and most comprehensive approach to use information technology to make local government operations more efficient and, ideally, more responsive to community needs. Citizen-centricity rests on the premise that residents are not passive consumers of digital data and services, but instead can choose how they use smart city services to participate more fully in society and to deal with the tangible urban problems they are confronted with. In this context, participation includes citizens’ co-authoring of data and studies have shown how local governments can engage citizens to create spatiotemporal data about their surroundings, activities, and interactions with urban infrastructures. While dedicated apps can formalize how citizens collect data and communicate with local government, research shows that they can both limit the number of citizens who participate and can also accentuate existing inequities in participation. To date, the impacts of citizens having agency over tool choice remain unexplored from the perspective of local governments. We examine one aspect of this issue through the example of citizens using social media to report routine complaints and maintenance needs. Interviews were conducted with municipal government staff from 12 Canadian cities to document current challenges and practices of social media-based reporting. Results show that social media reporting shares many of the challenges other studies have noted for government use of participatory technologies; however, the quality of co-authored data and governments’ limited capacity for technological change are seen as particularly important obstacles. Recommendations for developing internal workflows and strategies are provided for municipal governments to use social media as a channel for non-emergency reporting. More broadly, the results point to a need for clear assessments of how citizen centricity may be realized in evolving, and often patchy, smart city landscapes.