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

Thu May 25 23:29:30 EDT 2017

My preference would be for members of our governing board have supervision responsibility rather than just employees.  The most recent dust up was not on lp social media.

Sam

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-------- Original message --------From: Alicia Mattson <agmattson at gmail.com> Date: 5/25/17  8:34 PM  (GMT-05:00) To: lnc-business at hq.lp.org Subject: Re: [Lnc-business] cosponsors requested to have staff manage social	media 
Sam, do you think that's a good idea in light of the policy requiring fairness for candidates for internal party office?  Our most recent uproar came from a post by an LNC member.

-Alicia

On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 6:00 AM, Sam Goldstein <goldsteinatlarge at gmail.com> wrote:
Alicia,
Would you consider adding "members and alternates"  to your motion following "LNC"?  If so I will co-sponsor.

Sam GoldsteinLibertarian National CommitteeMember at Large8925 N Meridian St, Ste 101Indianapolis IN 46260317-850-0726 Phone317-582-1773 Fax

On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 8:38 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 memberNot 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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