Disclaimer: Forwarding does not necessarily mean I endorse every single point of this video, or even any of them.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y6lYzB-rdOg

Watched this 3 hour video. Bill Reel and RFM interviewed someone who worked for the LDS Church: "Global Service Center - Local Unit Support" and at times did work for the SCMC (Strengthening Church Members Committee).

"In this bombshell episode, a former Mormon Church employee who worked with confidential records and the Strengthening Church Members Committee (SCMC) comes forward to expose the behind-the-scenes machinations of the LDS Church. From secret surveillance of members to how the Church tracks and manages dissent, to how the Church handles those who ask their names to be removed, this insider reveals shocking details that the Church doesn’t want you to know."

I guess if you're going to be telling people that you speak for God and that they need to give you 10% of their income to receive God's blessings, you're already orchestrating a hostage situation that is reliant upon Stockholm syndrome for sustainability. When the people figure it out, one by one, they go off like a hot popcorn kernel and need to be removed from the remaining hostages, lest contagion occurs. Secret police and plants are all part of the business model.

There have been rumours for some time of the Gospel Library app having keylogging components, running in the background. Big Tech has normalized this kind of snooping so it would be no surprise if the LDS did it. Supposedly the app can allow access to see which notes you made in it etc.

Here are some highlights from the video:

Bishops would sometimes call requesting patriarchal blessings for excommunicated members that were working on coming back to the Church. Church HQ had a rule that they couldn't provide it to excommunicated members. Instead of telling the Bishops that they couldn't get the Patriarchal blessing, Local Unit Support workers were told to instruct them to go through some steps to request it, knowing that the Bishop's request would be rejected, and that the Bishop would simply be wasting their time.

The employees couldn't always be completely honest when answering Bishop questions. For example, there are some notations in records that have been removed, but the Church still has a history of what was in the annotation, but they can't admit it when a Bishop asks about it. They can only say "there are no annotations on the record", Bishop asked "but were there?" and they are instructed not to reveal that info. They seemed to imply that annotations were primarily for severe sins (criminal activity?) committed by the member, but they didn't really get too specific on exactly what type of info might have been in the notations.

Confirms that there were people working for the Church asked to create fake profiles online to interact with others, such as on social media (perhaps forums like this?).

Couldn't tell co-workers that the SCMC existed (Strengthening Church Members Committee).

Mentioned Denver Snuffer, John Dehlin, Mark Naugle, Sam Young, Bill Reel as being on a list of people to watch out for. The list even included a lady who claimed she could communicate with the dead, communicate with Ward members dead relatives.. it wasn't only more prominent well-known names on the list. Some well-known people, that she didn't mention by name, are on the list and are still active in the Church.

There were cases of excommunication that were directed from the top down.. The Church HQ can't initiate it but they would sometimes recommend it, via the Area Presidency, when they become aware of a problematic member. The Church would keep tabs on local Utah news.

They showed a Church job listing for the "social listening team" and implied it is part of the SCMC.

They said we would be surprised at how much money the Church spends on SEO (search engine optimization). I'm not. I know already that Google isn't a good resource. So many members want to think that the top echelons of the church leadership are somehow ignorant of what is going on in the world and are simply in a utopian bubble. The evidence would suggest otherwise. The behind-the-scenes efforts and data collection are astounding. These guys are not stupid, they are not incompetent, and they are not utterly ignorant. They are intentionally deceiving the people and use a myriad of tactics to influence and con the members... among other heinous acts.

Note that RFM here is Radio Free Mormon, not Recovery from Mormonism (this site).

I opened the link to check who RFM was. I only watched a few seconds. Three hours is beyond my interest in what they were talking about.

The church will go to great lengths to protect their product, that's for sure.

That's okay. Three hours is long, so I thought people should be warned. I listen at 1.75x speed.

I'm not going to spend 3 hours plowing through this either. I will point out that SCMC is a well-known entity dating back to at least the time of the September Six (1993).

That SCMC has expanded beyond being a newspaper clipping service to monitoring social media and monitoring members' use of church apps surprises me not at all.

As for "removed" annotations still being available in-house, it is now routine for document processing systems to keep a revision history so that you can go back to earlier versions and see what was removed or added to various revisions of the documents.

Based on the summary (and thanks for that, BTW) this looks like much hyperventilating over not much. I must admit that the "creating fake profiles" thing is pretty sleazy, even for them.

I watched the entire video. It is indeed long, however I was interested in learning about how she worked for membership recordation. She was on a team of ten people or less who had to verify all the members being accused of horrible things (from adultery to sexual abuse, child abuse. Having to verify and read through the details of wrecked lives took a toll on her mental state and well-being.

Yet one more reason I glad I'm out. And one more reason for everyone to know that the GA's know for sure they are keeping the lie alive.

Lying for the Lord is their main job.

I thought it was funny when she said Elder Bender oversaw the whole surveillance operation and RFM goes oh, I bet he totally loved it and she goes no. He acted like the whole thing was a dumb waste of resources. Ha! Ha! Well Bender is an organizational behavior professor so he's trained to think of things in terms of efficiency. No wonder he thought the whole thing was dumb.

I thought the church was dumb my whole life. Even as a very young child I thought it was dumb.

about showing the temple clothing and ceremony. She thought she was over-reacting. I thought she was right on.

Maybe some SLC bureaucrat wouldn't think about retaliation, but the news shows us there are many unhinged believers capable of unthinkable acts.