Posted by:
azsteve
(
)
Date: July 08, 2018 01:23PM
Hi Eric, hopefully my post here will add some value to this discussion on trolls.
First of all, thanks to you and to the volunteers here who keep this board going. It doesn't look like an easy job. This board has been a big, helpful resource for me, more-so early-on, but still now too. One aspect of healing from mormonism is a person's ability to think for themselves, as opposed to going with whatever direction the group is going in, right or wrong, because the group-think feels right when you're a part of a cult and some people don't even know when they're doing it, even after leaving the cult. It is at these critical points that at least one person should speak-up (picture a few people at general conference being the only ones with hands-up as 'opposed' during sustaining of church leaders).
When the board admins opened up to allow discussions about politics here, I don't they understood fully what they were taking-on. Most of us here have political opinions and it can be offensive to see anyone here, drumming-up group-think support for ideas which are off-topic and which at the same time are offensive to our own world-view. The problem compounds when people who are known to be board administrators take part in those activities which violate the board rules. Often the topic has nothing to do with mormonism. Sometimes, a very weak link to mormonism is made as an excuse for the off-topic discussion. I have seen Administrators and past Administrators take part in these threads. What happens in a household when the parents only enforce the rules sometimes, or worse yet, encourage the kids to break rules sometimes and then show disapproval later when the kids take it too far. In it's worst form, the Admins delete the political posts that offend their own personal world-view, while allowing those posts to stay that support their own personal world-view. At times, the personal attacks against the discentor are also left in-tact while their own defending posts are deleted. In such a situation, even the most sincere person can decide to troll. The church's worst enemies don't come from outside the church, they come from within. Please remember this at times when the above actions seem justified by Admins who spot clear violations of board rules, hours or days or weeks after the troll finally decides they've seen enough, or that they speak their opinions only to be judged as [put whatever label you want here], and therefore their opinions are wrong and should be deleted.
As long as politics are allowed, free and relatively unmoderated political discussions need to be allowed. As long as the Admins have opinions that they themselves post, then they should subject themselves to equal standards that the rest of us have to go by, especially if they want to be respected for more than their ability to delete the posts of others. For example, there is a major difference between hate-speech, and what some people here call hate-speech. Even the United States congress called Mark Zucherman on pulling that crap of labeling certain posts as hate-speech, and therewith justified those posts being unfairly deleted. I vote that we go back to a rule of non-politics here, mostly because even the Admins here don't know how to moderate those discussions properly, and that the resulting animosity detracts from the mission of this board's most important goals.
My biggest question now is whether or not there will be discussion here about what I have said here, or whether this post will simply disappear.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/08/2018 01:33PM by azsteve.