Posted by:
traveller
(
)
Date: June 26, 2013 07:57AM
It's going to be interesting to see what the church does when non-missionaries make accounts on FB impersonating missionaries. They obviously have no control over it...
Even before this announcement, in some of the missions where they have had to have a mission FB account AND mission blog to use and basically "give a talk." For at least the last 18 months there have been quite a number of those sorts of accounts, most of which seem to be real, but I'm not convinced they all are.
And now, I'm sure they're going to have people trying to "appear" as missionaries - whether to get people to NOT convert or to leave the church, or just to stir up trouble. Yet TPTB has no jurisdiction to pull fake missionary FB accounts/blogs assuming they're not being made by their actual missionaries.
What will be almost more interesting is to see how things get handled when ill-intentioned people start impersonating missionaries to hook up with someone.
Set up a FB account under some other identity, contact the missionaries on FB or whatever, feign interest in the church, and meet them someone and do something bad to them...a bit like just happened recently to a teen who thought she was chatting with one person and it was really another (she went to meet him and was killed) -
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/showthread.php?t=209129 In some ways, the "Catfish" ploy.
Or how they'll handle it when it's more a twisted version of
"To Catch a Predator" with religious undertones. Some ill-intentioned person setting up an account and posing as a missionary and grooming them and forming a relationship under the guise of faith, and then doing attempting to do something horrible to them at some point or even "just" turning it into a sexual thing. That turns into a HUGE image/PR issue for the church as until something was proven, they'd have no way of proving that the perp wasn't really a missionary.
In either case, the church wouldn't be able to shut down those accounts, only LE. Even reporting it to FB how would they disprove that person wasn't really a missionary, nor would FB give out the real id of someone else if they were trying to catfish and woo missionaries out (in that case, even if all communication was monitored, b/c it could easily be too late before the missionaries were to meet a fake investigator since they'd just have to make it look like they were searching).
There are SO many ways this whole FB thing is going to be a nightmare. But hey, that's not a bad thing! (Not that I want anything happening to these young missionaries...but it not being successful and/or giving the church negative PR wouldn't be bad IMO)