Last Thursday night, a post went up on the ICC Facebook page. In the end, it was a misunderstanding between a member and a candidate. But the initial implication was that the candidate had done something that the member felt was based on his skin color.
It created a number of dilemmas for us. On the one hand, we are committed to the First Amendment and free speech. In addition, we are very sensitive to people feeling excluded because of their race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation or disability status. We reached out to the people whose individual comments were reported for being in violation of our posting guidelines, they were issued warnings, and will be banned if they continue ad hominem attacks, because some of the comments did cross a line.
What we found out about 24 hours after the post went up, and had been completely unaware of, was that such posts are used by the Republicans to ruin Democratic candidates. We were provided examples out of Bucks and Montgomery Counties wherein people took the gist and gave it to the press (most notably the Philadelphia Inquirer). One of these almost completely sunk a local Congressional campaign. We hadn’t known that our “closed” group was home to people who would do such things, but it is. Social media isn’t just about sitting behind a computer talking into cyberspace anymore. As we’ve learned the hard way, it has real life consequences and can be very very dangerous. Please remember when you post something in any “closed” group, you should thoughtfully consider whether what you’re saying is something you would want to say to the press because that is essentially what you’re doing. Closed groups are still public and the GOP leaps at the chance to twist our words to hurt our candidates. It’s already happening.
We were left with several options. The one we chose was to add the following to our Posting Guidelines:
When a post is added that either of itself, or through comments,
presents information that can be grabbed as screen shots
and utilized by the opposition against our members or a candidate,
it will stay up for 24 hours and then it will be deleted.
Our other options were:
- Restrict all posts to those put up by the Admins.
- Restrict all comments to only those approved by the Admins.
- Make the Facebook Group page one of Events only.
- Shut down the Facebook group and move everything to our website.
For now, this seems like the best option, although we are looking at ways to move off of Facebook not only in light not of this incident, but because of Cambridge Analytics and the related problems with the security of Facebook, but we are not doing that at this time.
No one in Leadership wants to muzzle voices, and a general discussion of racial slights and microaggressions is something very valid. However, in this case, we didn’t want to risk damaging a good candidate nor seeing the name of our member in the Philadelphia Inquirer accusing that candidate of something untrue.
We recommend going forward that if anyone has a problem with a candidate, he/she reaches out directly to that candidate. We certainly have every candidate’s email and phone numbers, and can either provide them, or pass along a message if the member wants to remain anonymous.
If you have comments on our actions in this matter, or suggestions for other options, please put them on this website and not on the Facebook group. This website is firewalled for non-public information, and all members are vetted so it is a safe a harbour as we can make it.