How many Hoosier public officials in the past week watched Gov. Mike Pence and his staff step into a hot, social media mess and asked: Do I really want an official Facebook page?
If the governor’s chapter on how to manage a social media site is any example, maybe it’s time to make good on that threat and get out of the game until skin is thick enough to play.
This episode in missing-the-concept started Wednesday with Pence’s statement after the U.S. Supreme Court all but killed the Defense of Marriage Act. Pence expressed his displeasure, but rallied around the bit of rope the court left for states — each could determine its own path. In this case, Pence said that meant time to press ahead on finding a place in the Indiana Constitution for a state law that bans same-sex marriages.
As if that would be the end of the conversation on Facebook.
From the first, “Hey, where did my comment go?” on Pence’s official Facebook site, questions about hundreds of deleted responses and assorted blocked accounts spiraled from the merely miffed to serious contentions that the governor’s office might have breached First Amendment rights of speech and petition.
Pence told The Indianapolis Star that thinning the comments was a matter of keeping things civil. But even in a fuzzy world of social media, others saw a legal matter of a public forum being wiped as clean as possible. (“If uncivil is defined as taking a position contrary to the government, that is really a prime example of discrimination,” Ken Falk, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, told The Star’s Jon Murray and Chris Sikich.)
By Friday morning, Pence issued an apology and a promise to come up with a better way to manage his Facebook page.
If Pence’s crew thought last week’s comments were something — and plenty of the cracks about the governor being “an idiot” wound up sounding tame — wait until he and the legislature launch a referendum on a gay marriage ban.
But strip gay marriage from this debate. Is a Facebook page in the hands of a public official worth much if it’s a place treated as nothing more than a campaign stop, at a time when there are few allowances for rookie mistakes in a maturing medium?
“I don’t know, really, is it still such a new thing?” asked Mihaela Vorvoreanu, a Purdue University assistant professor who studies social media. “I mean, I was thinking if this was back in 2007, 2008, if you did this back then, yeah, you could say this is a new thing and we don’t know what to do with it and how to deal with it, so we made a mistake. … Since 2007 or 2008, that’s been what, five, six years? You could have a college degree and maybe a master’s since then. It’s not so new.”
Vorvoreanu said to build good relationships, the premium in any social media outlet — whether for a company, an individual or a public official — should be dialog. That means in both directions. It also means taking some time to learn the social media culture — just as you’d brush up on local customs before traveling to a new place — before diving in.
“The premise is, if you’re going to choose to connect with your constituents and your public on Facebook, you’re going to engage in that dialog. And that means listening to things that might not always be pleasant and not always make you look good,” Vorvoreanu said. “The expectations are very high for social media. Social media is really about authenticity — engaging in truly personal, truthful, authentic dialog. So, on all levels, doing something like (deleting comments) really violates some of the basic premises of social media.”
More than that, Pence’s staff played a hand that certainly dragged in more hostile customers. (Consider that Pence’s official Facebook had only 3,600 “likes” during all of this. That feeds a minuscule audience, when compared to Indiana’s 6.5 million residents.) Letting every comment stand as it was written would have solved the situation as a matter of overload, anyway. Was anyone going to scroll through a few thousand comments, let alone read whether they were civil in tone and delivery? The drift was clear about five comments in.
“Removing critical comments just because you don’t like them or don’t happen to agree with them can focus more negative attention on an issue,” said Leslie Hobbs of ReputationDefender, a company that advises clients on managing their online profile.
“For a business, it could raise eyebrows on responsiveness and call into question that company’s commitment to being straightforward and helpful to customers. When politicians sanitize comments that are strongly oppositional, it sometimes can feel like a troubling form of censorship — especially because elected leaders represent all the people of a district or state, not just the ones who agree with them. It’s often — though not always — better to identify some other strategies for engagement.”
To be fair, Pence isn’t alone in monitoring a social media site for the out-of-control.
Josh Britton, a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Todd Rokita, said comments will be taken down “in very rare situations” if they are profane, abusive or “engage in personal attacks against other commenters.” “But even when that occurs, it is done to ensure that the debate remains civil and constructive for all participants, regardless of their opinions,” Britton said.
Indiana Democrats, quick to try to capitalize on Pence’s predicament, “only remove comments that contain expletives, and we don’t block users unless they post offensive comments repeatedly,” said Jennifer Wagner, communications director for the state party. “Same goes for Twitter.”
So, the definition of “out of control” is the question. And even the governor now seems to realize he’s going to have a difficult time arguing that his office didn’t mess up on this one.
If other Hoosier politicians and public officials aren’t taking notes, they should do themselves a favor and not pretend to be social media experts. Otherwise, they might be tempted to apply rules that will have them stepping in it, too.
Bangert is a columnist with the Journal & Courier. Contact him at dbangert@jconline.com or on Twitter @davebangert.
Original article: http://www.jconline.com/srv/www.reputationdefender.com/publics/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013306280021
Photo credit: The Indianapolis Star