Menlo Park, CA—Facebook announced this morning that during
the last week Mormons created a record 8,387,928 Facebook status updates that
were deleted within 24 hours.
“What we saw last week was remarkable by any standards,”
said David Dengate, spokesperson for Facebook. “To see over 8 million Facebook
statuses posted and then so quickly deleted initially baffled everyone here,”
elaborated Dengate. He went on to say that “when we looked at the analytics, we
saw that it was Mormons who were posting a status, often followed by a number
of comments, only to then delete that status.”
Facebook’s extensive analytical tools allowed them to group
those statuses by content. What emerged from this examination was that the lion’s
share were about Friday’s Supreme Court ruling, with others centered around whether
or not Mormons could support that ruling, with other deleted statuses about the
confederate flag controversy.
What Facebook researchers found was that some deleted
statuses supported while others opposed the Supreme Court’s decision. A typical
status of support read something like this: “Love God First and don’t fear men
by allowing worldly standards to destroy the family as outlined in the
Proclamation. And delete friends with that wicked rainbow picture.” A standard support
status went something like this: “Love God First and don’t fear men, even if those
men are respected, wise church leaders. You can believe that they are prophets AND
that God is pleased with gay marriage, just like you could believe in 1977 that
all worthy men should hold the priesthood. If you don’t have a rainbow profile
picture, then you would have opposed Blacks getting the priesthood in the 70s.”
Researchers also found that a typical inflammatory status that
might quickly get deleted could be “Set your clocks for 14 years; by then the church
will accept gay marriage” or “Set your clocks for 14 months; by then we will
see the calamities warned about in the Proclamation.”
One status that was very common on the east coast was this
one: “All of us Mormons here in North Carolina would like to invite the Supreme
Court justices who forced gay marriage on us to come down to our state and take
a nice long swim at one of our beaches.”
When asked to elaborate on so many Facebook statuses created
and deleted, one researcher wondered if Mormons had really grasped how to have a
respectful, public debate about controversial issues without being offensive or
being offended, or how to do it in such a way that Mormons could have genuine
difference and diversity while being of one heart and one mind.
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