[Lnc-business] cosponsors requested to have staff manage social media

Arvin Vohra votevohra at gmail.com
Tue May 30 18:48:51 EDT 2017


On a related note, I've added Ms. Mattson as an Analyst on the page, as
discussed in Pittsburgh

On May 25, 2017 8:39 AM, "Alicia Mattson" <agmattson at gmail.com> wrote:

I'm asking for co-sponsors for a motion to insert a new Policy Manual
Section 2.06.5 Social Media to read as follows:

Only LNC employees and contractors shall serve as administrators of, serve
as moderators of, or post content to, the Party’s social media accounts.
Volunteer content creators may submit content for approval.

At the LNC meeting there was majority support for the motion to both do the
above and also to create a committee to review our social media processes.
I could have supported it, but if we know what we need to do to fix the
problem, why spend the time to have a committee study it first?  Just fix
it.  I thought there was majority support for the other motion to simply
turn control of our social media back over to staff.  Turns out that I was
mistaken, and one person was not willing to turn control back over to staff
without the creation of the committee, so then the other motion failed.
Because I misread the room, an option that actually had majority support
didn't pass.

Now that we have separately created the committee, I want to go back and
re-visit turning control back over to our staff.

Please note that the motion welcomes volunteers to submit material.  It
does not eliminate their opportunity to contribute.

I want to add some details to the discussion we had in Pittsburgh, with two
Facebook PR blow-ups on our minds at the time.

Since Pittsburgh, we have had yet another PR disaster.  Granted it was not
on our official FB page, but on the personal page it was posted to, the
person's party position was touted right there in the sidebar, and we took
a lot of damage from it.  The Convention Oversight Committee lost two very
valuable volunteers over this latest disaster -- volunteers who did a lot
of work for us in Orlando and were again helping for New Orleans.  Gone.

There are no group votes before volunteers post on the party's FB.  One
person puts it into the schedule, and unless someone else sees it and
objects, it goes public.  We publish so much material that the APRC doesn't
always have time to review everything in advance.  Though the group has an
informal rule against people posting their own material, people sometimes
do it anyway.  The comments about the military could easily have been
posted on our page.

There was a very recent incident in which a new volunteer was driven to
quit on the same day she joined for the crime of suggesting that we post
more positive material and less negative material.  I don't want to hear
that the LNC giving final control to staff is somehow disrespecting the
work of the volunteers, when that new volunteer's desire to contribute was
so summarily disrespected.

We have some important policies that I don't believe the volunteers have
even been informed about, and volunteers are not really accountable for
following policies in the same way that our staff is.

Policy Manual Section 2.09.6:

Party resources shall not be used to provide information or services for
any candidate for party office unless:

   - such information or services are available and announced on an equal
      basis to all Libertarians who have declared they are seeking that office,
      or
      - such information or services are generally available and announced
      to all party member

Not all party members have access to post on our Facebook page.  Not all
candidates for internal party office are offered the chance to post on our
Facebook page.

I think some of our Facebook posts cross the line into personal promotion
of people who intend to run for internal party office at the next
convention.

There was a time in the past when staff established criteria to try to
manage application of this policy, with criteria for what constituted
"news" or "earned media" that involved a candidate, etc.  I don't believe
there is any such attention to his policy right now for our social media.
Some candidates have already declared.  The closer we get to a national
convention, the more these posts will be perceived as self-promotion that
unfairly isn't available to their opponents.

So I'm asking for co-sponsors for this motion, to return final decision
power to our staff, who are expected to know and follow our policies, and
who are accountable to the LNC.  The volunteer groups can continue to
generate material just like they do now, but staff would schedule the
actual posts.

If the Social Media Process Review Committee comes back to us with
suggestions for reasonable ways to manage this later, we can amend this
policy.

-Alicia



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