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Sea Org members & social media

guRl

Patron with Honors
Hi guys, long time no ask ;)

There's something a bit confusing that I've been wondering about, and I'd love your input on this:
So, as a Scientology watcher for years now, I've been noticing some inconsistencies with how Sea Org members handle social media- Facebook, Instagram, and the like, in the sense of having and maintaining social accounts.

A while ago I asked Chris Shelton on his Q&A show, whether SO members are allowed to have Facebook profiles and such. He was very adamant that it's completely forbidden. I did get to witness how people join the SO and shut down their accounts, but the thing it- not in all cases..

Some of them (whom I know for sure to still be in the SO) kept their profiles up and running, others reopened personal pages (yes, they're still in the SO), and some became active on other social platforms, maybe less popular. And as much as I know, none of the few particular people I got to watch over the years, are in a particularly high ranking post with special privileges or something.

Could that mean that the grip on Sea Orgers became less tight in recent years due to all the PR pressure? Could that mean that Sea Orgers feel less afraid to play around with this stuff?
Would love to hear your thoughts, theories and knowledge on the subject :)
 

TheOriginalBigBlue

Gold Meritorious Patron
I would like to see some current skinny on this subject also but I can't answer your question. However, I think I know the SO mindset so I'll comment on that.

The reasons the SO would be against social media:

It is difficult to censor.
It exposes members to entheta (criticism, ie. truth) and SPs and people who are PTS (connected to SPs).
It is out-security revealing details about the SO.
It can be out-PR.
It can be out-ethics such as being used for moonlighting or romantic relationships.
It can be used to coordinate blows (escapes).
It can be archived. Scientology likes to be able to erase and revise history.
It's "other fish", as in "other fish to fry" - a distraction and taking time from post and production.

Now reverse all of the above for reasons the SO would allow it:

It can be used to track and censor communication.
It can be used to identify SPs and people who are connected to them.
Managing it becomes integrated to security and OSA operations.
It can be used to push their PR and acceptable truths.
It can be used to proselytize.
It can be used to recover escapees in blow drills.
It can be archived for use against people in comm-evs.
It can be integrated into some posts such as Registrar, Recruiter, Div 6 public outreach, etc.

The Sea Org is a very neurotic or for lack of a better word - bipolar organization. It shifts between extremes. They send hundreds of people to the RPF at a time, realize they screwed up royally, blame someone else and back off, then do it again even worse, then say they don't do it any more. That's an extreme example but it exemplifies the culture. They may ban social media harshly and then someone figures out how to use it to their benefit and they change their position. Don't be surprised if the RPF is brought back just for the hundreds of people who then used social media. TVs are all banned in crew quarters because LRH said it is restimulative and cuts into production but now ScioTV is the one thing that will save them, etc.

The other thing is Scientology thinks they own you. Flag Bureau once flew me hundreds of miles to go to public Scientologist's homes to interrogate them to find out if they were SPs. The local org was a typical mess barely able to keep the lights on and had been for a long time yet their solution is to totally alienate the few active Scientologists in the field with an intrusive witch hunt by an outside SO member in full dress lying about why they were there.

Social media is an aspect of a crew member's life that threatens this sense of ownership but if they can find a way to manipulate it to serve their interests then they will make some allowances.

My last thought is that it just may be unrealistic to completely ban social media with new recruits now. They are going the way of Luddites, only highly conflicted over the use of technology. While laying proud claim to trillions of years heritage of highly advanced technological space opera whole track recall they ban crew's personal phones, TV, the internet, computers and social media while telling recruits that the organization's use of sophisticated computer technology, microwave dish networking, internet, spoofing phone call-in centers with digitized centralized records and SMP and Scio TV will help Clear and save the planet and utterly destroy all the SPs. All the while Miscavige hasn't done an unscripted TV interview since 1992 leaving the world with the public face of a non-Scientologist attorney to dissemble and deflect:

https://scientologymoneyproject.com/2017/01/17/the-most-incredible-lie-scientology-attorney-monique-yingling-told-abc-2020′/
 

Enthetan

Master of Disaster
Now reverse all of the above for reasons the SO would allow it:
It can be used to track and censor communication.
It can be used to identify SPs and people who are connected to them.
Managing it becomes integrated to security and OSA operations.
It can be used to push their PR and acceptable truths.
It can be used to proselytize.
It can be used to recover escapees in blow drills.
It can be archived for use against people in comm-evs.
It can be integrated into some posts such as Registrar, Recruiter, Div 6 public outreach, etc.
My personal knowledge of SO is very out of date (mid-1980's), but your rationale seems spot on.

Based on past history, an SO member being allowed to POST anything on social media would be heavily monitored and restricted. Are most current SO members even allowed phones or unmonitored access to the Internet?

But having SO members retaining their Facebook accounts would be something OSA would like, if OSA is given the password to the account. It would, as you note, allow OSA to keep track of people among the "friends" of the account holder. I would suspect that many of the SO members with supposedly-active social media accounts no longer have access to them, with ownership being transferred to OSA.
 

TheOriginalBigBlue

Gold Meritorious Patron
My personal knowledge of SO is very out of date (mid-1980's), but your rationale seems spot on.

Based on past history, an SO member being allowed to POST anything on social media would be heavily monitored and restricted. Are most current SO members even allowed phones or unmonitored access to the Internet?

But having SO members retaining their Facebook accounts would be something OSA would like, if OSA is given the password to the account. It would, as you note, allow OSA to keep track of people among the "friends" of the account holder. I would suspect that many of the SO members with supposedly-active social media accounts no longer have access to them, with ownership being transferred to OSA.
I could easily see where providing Ethics Officer or OSA access to accounts would become a routine part of lower ethics conditions assignments. Some of the posts we see look very much like step 2 or 3 of the Liability Formula and since social media is such a large part of many people's lives it would only be natural to use it that way.

Sea Org members must fill out a detailed and highly intrusive Life History Questionnaire which includes friends, family, sexual relationships and associates complete with contact information and nature of the relationship. They are meter checked on this and it is digitized for central access and used to track them down in a blow drill if they escape. This Stasi style information collection nature of Scientology would be very adaptable to social media where they could archive links and info from "Friend's" pages into a dossier.

The formula of liability is:

I. Decide who are one's friends.

2. Deliver an effective blow to the enemies of the group
one has been pretending to be part of despite personal danger.
3 Make up the damage one has done by personal contribution far beyond the ordinary demands of a group member.
4. Apply for re-entry to the group by asking the permission of each member of it to rejoin and rejoining only by majority permission, and if refused, repeating (2) and (]) and (4) until one is allowed to be a group member again.
 
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guRl

Patron with Honors
I apologize for the delayed response, but boy did you guys provide me with some food for thought!
Thank you so much for your input!

Would love to hear more of course, especially from the more recent Exes :D
 

Karakorum

supressively reasonable
I could easily see where providing Ethics Officer or OSA access to accounts would become a routine part of lower ethics conditions assignments. Some of the posts we see look very much like step 2 or 3 of the Liability Formula and since social media is such a large part of many people's lives it would only be natural to use it that way.
Not ethics. OSA maybe. I never recall a situation where someone would hand over their password and ownership of the profile to ethics. Ethics could demand to see what is going on. In that case the guy would log in to the account, the EO would sit with him and go through stuff on that platform it if needed.
Ethics had no dedicated team to patrol social networking accounts. More likely OSA would have it, if anyone. Of course there were situations where OSA and inv had overlapping responsibilities (which is part of the reason why they disliked us so much). But in general, the rule of thumb was: "We handle the interior stuff, OSA the exterior stuff". Public profiles available online would be considered exterior facing. At least I would consider them that.

Then again, I am trying to approach it from a logical viewpoint. Many people inside were anything but logical. I could imagine they introduced some social network ethics process after I left.
 
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