Fighting in the Comments at the Church Newsroom

Before I read all the contentious comments on the Church Newsroom group post that congratulated Biden and Harris for winning the US Presidential election, I was only vaguely aware of the Church Newsroom Facebook presence. Sure, as a Mormon with lots of Mormon Facebook friends, I’ve seen people link to it now and again, but I don’t know that I had ever clicked through to it more than once or twice. And I certainly had no idea that it was the site of such epic comment wars. If you had asked me, I would have guessed that all the comments would be blandly supportive, kind of like letters to the editor in the Ensign. Now that I’ve noticed it, though, it seems like the comment wars keep coming back. A bunch of fighting broke out again on January 15th when the Q15 (finally) condemned the attempted coup by Trump supporters the previous Wednesday. Comments were quickly closed, as they also had been eventually on the Biden/Harris post. But then just a few days later, a bunch of GAs had the gall to get vaccinated against COVID, and the fighting broke out all over again. (You can see my satire of some of the positions commenters took in my most recent post.)

Seeing all these fights in such a short period of time made me wonder a few things about the Church Newsroom group. Has it always been this full of conflict? Was there ever a time when it was full of nothing but people praising the Church’s news releases? If so, what changed? Was it the rise of Trump that got people in a more argumentative mood? Was it the COVID pandemic? Or maybe was it a change in the Newsroom staff’s moderation strategy, where they were once more hands-on and then moved to being more hands-off?

To make an attempt at answering these questions, I read back through all the old Church Newsroom Facebook group posts I could find. Unfortunately, I discovered that they only go back to August of 2019. Prior to that, it looks like the Newsroom’s Facebook presence was a page rather than a group, and it was at the URL www.facebook.com/MormonNewsroom (redirects from www.facebook.com/LDSNewsroom, the redirect still works even though the page is gone). You can still see it mentioned, for example, in this 2011 Newsroom article on the Church’s social media presence. I’ve looked at some snapshots of the old page using the WayBack Machine, and it’s clear that there were comments on the posts, but the snapshots aren’t anything like frequent or complete enough for me to reconstruct anything.

So without being able to go back before 2016, my question about Trump being a trigger for the fighting was off the table, but at least I could still look at the beginning of COVID. From August 2019 to January 2021, I found 453 Newsroom posts. (It’s possible that I missed a few; I fought with Facebook’s determined desire to show me what it thought I’d find most interesting rather than just listing posts chronologically.) I didn’t want to take the time to read all the comments on all the posts, so for each post, I just noted the following:

• Date
• Topic of the post
• Total number of comments
• Number of top-level comments (i.e., that are not replies to a comment)
• Number of subthreads (strings of comments following a top-level comment) that featured fighting
• When there was fighting, brief notes about what it was about

Counting subthreads with fighting rather than individual comments with fighting was a big time saver, because when I found a big subthread that went on for 50 or 100 comments, I typically only had to read a few to discover fighting, and most subthreads of this length do feature fighting.

I did have to make some judgment calls about what constituted fighting. Usually it’s pretty straightforward, with people contradicting each other and calling each other misinformed, and the like. I also counted any top-level comment as being a subthread with fighting if it appeared to be an attempt to start a fight with the Newsroom post, even if there were no responses to it. For example, if the post was about a new temple, and a top-level comment said the Church is wasting its money building temples instead of feeding the poor, I counted that as fighting. On the other side, when people questioned the Newsroom post over something, but seemed interested in information rather than making a point, I didn’t count it as fighting. An easy example of this is that often when the Newsroom posted artists’ renderings of planned temples, someone would ask why the temple wasn’t going to have an Angel Moroni.

I thought it might be interesting to see data from all the posts at once, so the graph below shows, for each of the 453 posts, the number of top-level comments (the blue bars), the number of response comments (the orange bars), and the percentage of subthreads that had fighting (the red bars on the right side of the graph). You can see that I flipped the graph from a more typical horizontal orientation to a vertical one to make it easier to fit in a blog post. To make posts with smaller numbers of comments easier to see, I set the scale for total comments to only go to 1000. For the two posts that had more than 1000 comments (the Biden/Harris congratulations post, and the GAs getting the COVID vaccine post), I recalculated the bar lengths so they show the proportion of the comments that are top-level versus replies. Also, for each post that drew 200 or more comments, I’ve noted the topic of the post in the graph.

A few notes on the graph:

• You can see that not many posts get to even 50% of subthreads featuring fighting. But even 10% or 20% is a lot, because the subthreads with fighting typically draw far more comments than those that don’t (often a non-combative top-level comment draws no replies at all). I should have noted the proportion of comments on a post that appeared in the fighting subthreads, but it just didn’t occur to me to do this.
• Note also, though, that the majority of posts do not feature any fighting at all. They’re typically about things that aren’t politically charged (e.g., the Church releases the exact location of a previously-announced temple), and they draw only supportive comments with very few replies or discussion.
• The size of the red bars is an obvious measure of fighting, but another less direct measure is the ratio of the orange bar length to the blue bar length. When most comment are top-level (blue bar is longer), commenters are mostly just responding to the Newsroom and then getting no comments in response. Such comments are typically of the type I had expected to see before I became aware of all the fighting on Newsroom posts. For example, if a new temple is announced, people will mention how they live nearby, or used to, or know someone who does, or that they served a mission there. Or they’ll use a comment to tag family or friends. When most comments are orange, though, this almost always indicates fighting, as long subthreads are usually people going back and forth about something. For example, if you look at June 2020, there was a post about Elder Bednar’s talk about religious freedom wherein he lamented, for example, that liquor stores were considered essential during the pandemic while churches were not. It was immediately followed by a post announcing that Elder Holland had been hospitalized. The bar for the Bednar post is mostly orange: relatively few top-level comments were followed by many response comments as people argued about his talk. The bar for the Holland post is almost entirely blue, as nearly all comments were replies to the post where people expressed concern for Elder Holland and wished him well and promised prayers and thoughts.

Here are some common fighting themes. Most of these probably won’t surprise you, but a few might.

• On any post mentioning COVID (e.g., temples changing their re-opening status, or Church policies for holding meeting during COVID): is the threat of COVID overblown; is the Church ceding too much authority to governments; should returning missionaries quarantine more or less; is the sacrament safe to take or not under various circumstances; should faithful members fear COVID (“faith over fear” is repeated a lot); do masks help; do masks hurt; why are people not wearing masks in Newsroom post photos; does quarantining help; does quarantining hurt; alternative medicine strategies for reducing your risk of COVID; is living the Word of Wisdom enough to stop COVID; is it only weak people who are dying of COVID; are dead people mad that COVID is delaying getting their temple work done; is COVID a plot by Democrats or communists to control people more; will lockdowns and quarantines ever end.
• On any post mentioning voting or politics: can a good Mormon vote against Trump; can a good Mormon vote for Trump; was there election fraud; will Biden or Trump be sworn in in January; can Trump still contest the results (for a more complete list, see my earlier post on the Biden/Harris thread).
• On any post mentioning vaccines (mostly the recent one on GAs getting the vaccine, but also occasionally on earlier posts that just mentioned COVID): do vaccines work; is the COVID vaccine really a fake vaccine; are vaccines made from aborted babies; can a good Church member get vaccines; are vaccines poison (“The scriptures I read don’t mention injecting poison into the bloodstream for healing.”); will governments require vaccines; will the Church require vaccines; has the COVID vaccine been adequately tested; does the COVID vaccine change your DNA; if GAs get the vaccine, are they really wanting us to get it too or is it just that they’re old.
• On any mention of the UN or being a “global citizen” (Sharon Eubank gave a talk that the Newsroom posted about that used this term, and the post about GAs getting the vaccine did too): is the UN run by communists; can you be a global citizen and a patriotic American; should the Church donate to UNICEF; is the new world order coming (Ezra Taft Benson would surely be proud of all the people picking these fights!).
• On posts about new temples (only sometimes): should the Church be building temples when there are poor people to be helped; does Utah (or another location) need another temple when another location doesn’t have one; is the Church needlessly hoarding money.
• On posts about refugees: are refugees illegally entering the US; should we help refugees who we think are gaming the system; are refugees coming for our jobs; are refugees coming for our social services; are refugees coming to attack us; has Europe been ruined by refugees; is the Church too pro-refugee; should refugees be admitted to the US when there are already poor people here.
• On posts about tithing and Church finances (mostly a couple of December 2019 posts after the $100 billion Ensign Peak story broke): should the Church have this much money; does the Church give enough to charity; should members care what the Church does with its money; should the Church publish its finances; is the City Creek Mall good; should members have to clean buildings when the Church has lots of money.
• On posts mentioning LGBT people (e.g., FamilySearch update to allow listing same-sex marriages, Church supporting a bill called Fairness for All in the US Congress, Handbook updates tweaking policies around LGBT people): is the Church getting too soft on gay people (the Church is “taken over by LGBT activists” who “censored” Boyd K. Packer’s 2010 talk); is the Church changing its doctrine on gay or trans people; will the Church have to marry gay people in the temple; is it hypocritical of the Church to donate to suicide prevention.

There’s obviously some overlap, for example between COVID and vaccine posts. There are also a couple of major themes that show up on many posts where there’s any discussion. One is following the prophet–once the prophet has done something like getting vaccinated, is the decision then made for the rest of us, or can he err, or is he not really trying to tell the rest of us to do it (and similarly for something like congratulating Biden)? Or another manifestation of this is people scolding each other for questioning any aspect of Church policy or procedure. Whether the scolders say the words “follow the prophet” or not, the message is clear. The other kind of argument common across many threads is a meta-argument that boils down to “you’re being judgmental!” “no, you’re being judgmental!”

I was also kind of amazed at what kinds of idiosyncratic arguments showed up just once or twice. For example, one person commented on a few threads about Handbook updates and wanted the Church to condemn circumcision, and got into fights with people who disagreed. Or on a post about GAs meeting with leaders of an Islamic group, there was fighting over whether the Church should associate with a religion that some commenters were sure is full of terrorists.

Anyway, getting back to my original questions about what event might have started the fighting, it clearly wasn’t COVID, as there was plenty of fighting in 2019 and early 2020 before COVID hit. Also, although the data don’t go back far enough to say one way or another, I suspect it wasn’t the rise of Trump either, as people seem to be fighting about all kinds of non-Trump-related topics.

My last guess was that maybe the Newsroom staff’s moderation strategy might be affecting the amount of fighting. I do think there’s some evidence of this. Not that they’ve changed strategy, but that they’re inconsistent in how they intervene and overall seem too hands off to me. In reading through older posts, prior to the Biden/Harris thread in which I found no comments from the Newsroom, I was pleasantly surprised to find actually lots of comments from the Newsroom. When commenters ask questions that have straightforward answers, the Newsroom often steps in to answer them. I even found quite a bit of evidence of Newsroom moderation, including a fair amount of complaining by commenters that the Newsroom had deleted their comments, and an occasional comment from the Newsroom about why they had deleted a particular subthread. I even saw one commenter mention that he had been banned from commenting for months, I think, but he was back at it, so I guess his ban was over.

But like I said, I still think it’s too hands off, particularly on these recent threads that have blown up so dramatically. It’s bizarre to me that the Newsroom would allow comment threads to be dominated by people who are hardly better than straight up trolls, hammering on their favorite gospel hobbies and conspiracy theories over and over. Having looked back at threads prior to the Biden/Harris thread, I was interested to see that a few of the participants had long histories of commenting on Newsroom posts. In these cases, the positions they took on that thread were unsurprising given their comment history. A few vociferous Trump supporters had commented on many earlier threads, for example, lamenting the Church’s turn toward too much mercy, too little fundamentalism, and not enough shaming of gay people. I think it wouldn’t be difficult to identify and ban such commenters, either temporarily or permanently, when they consistently show that they’re detracting from the discussion rather than adding to it. It’s not just Trumpists, either, although it is mostly them. There are also commenters who come from an ex- or anti-Mormon perspective, who do things like wander onto random threads to complain about the Church’s $100 billion investment portfolio, or the temples being too ostentatious. I would totally have them banned too, even if I sympathize more with the points they’re raising.

I really hope the Newsroom staff has been this hands off because of either a lack of guidance from their bosses or a lack of staff, where they don’t have enough people to monitor ongoing threads. I hope it’s not that there are Newsroom staff (or GAs!) who are sympathetic to the conspiracy theories and fundamentalism that the Trumpist commenters repeat. If they did have the resources and the will to make Newsroom comment threads less dominated by ridiculous arguments and tangents, I think they could look to someone like BCC, for example, where I think the bloggers have done a lot of work to cultivate reasonable discussion, and they don’t hesitate to ban commenters from a thread or even more permanently if they’re detracting from rather than contributing to the discussion.

One last thought: When I see some commenters raise conspiracy theories over and over and lament that the Church isn’t fundamentalist enough for their liking, like I said in my previous post, for fairness, I’d like to see some of them excommunicated like members who’ve complained about the Church being not progressive enough have been. But it sounds to me like they might be leaving on their own. Do you remember Bruce R. McConkie’s Conference talk “The Caravan Moves On”? His point was that the Church will move on with or without members who might dissent. Naturally, given McConkie’s leanings, I’ve always read this as a warning directed at progressive heretics like me. But I think that it applies equally well to fundamentalist heretics. The 21st century Church is never going to satisfy them. It’s far too mainstream, too establishment. They yearn for a church that will openly refuse to recognize a government run by Democrats or that will call for its members to defy rules made by government agencies like the CDC. The Church of the 19th century might have been open to doing things like that. The Church of today most certainly isn’t. It will continue on its conventional way, and from the way they talk about the Church going astray, I have to think that many of the fundamentalists will leave. Certainly some of them sound unhappy enough that they maybe already have.

So I’ve gone on for a while. What stands out to you in the patterns of fighting in the Church Newsroom Facebook group? And how do you think the Newsroom staff should handle the fighting?